Some of the more moderate Democratic senators are asking the White House to shelve  the cap-and-trade legislation, according to a report in the Politico.
Mary Landrieu (D-La.) told the Politico that she and several Senate Democrats told the Obama Administration that the cap-and-trade bill should be put off.
It seems that the contentious battle over health care has taken its toll. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), and Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) have all indicated that passage of cap and trade next year is unlikely.

According to the White House, President Obama is still planning to leave for the Copenhagen climate change summit tonight. . The President’s plans remain unchanged even though the climate talks are reportedly in disarray and his heath care legislation is “on the precipice”.
To help spur the climate talks along, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday proposed that the world’s major economies fund $100 billion a year over the next decade for developing nations to fight climate change.
But, as the Washington Post reports, there will be no major treaty and …

The Obama Administration’s message on how it plans to stimulate the economy and create jobs became a bit confused this week.
First, the Environmental Protection Agency  formally announced its CO2 and greenhouse gas (GHG) endangerment finding on Monday.

The astonishing news from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) continues.
The Sunday Times reports that the scientists at the CRU at the University of East Anglia admitted that they threw away “much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.”
The CRU made this admission in response a Freedom of Information request. Scientists who have sought access to this data for years now learn that the raw data was purportedly dumped in the 1980’s.

The Ogiek people, East Africa’s honey-hunting forest dwellers, are about to lose their home, according to Minority Rights International (MRG). The news comes as the Kenyan government has approved plans to forcibly remove thousands of settlers from the Mau Forest, the Ogiek’s ancestral lands.

With the Kerry-Boxer cap & trade legislation on an indefinite hold in the Senate because of concerns over high unemployment and the likelihood of contentious 2010 elections, two other senators, Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Jim Webb (D-VA), are trying their hand at a bipartisan approach to clean energy.

Laurie WIlliams and Allan Zabel, a married couple and veteran EPA lawyers wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post and posted a YouTube video critical of the current cap and trade legislation.
The authors favor CO2 reduction. They argue, however, that the recently passed House bill with its cap and trade provisions and offsets will not bring about the desired CO2 reduction. They prefer a plan for increasing fossil fuels prices through carbon fees with rebates to help smooth the transition to clean energy.

It looks likes there is more trouble for the Copenhagen summit.
President Obama is scheduled to be in Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10. Mr. Obama, however, will most likely not stop off in Copenhagen for the climate summit being held December 6 - 18, unnamed White House sources told The Times.
Without congressional approval of a cap and trade bill, administration insiders see no advantage to the president attending the Copenhagen meeting.

On his blog, Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration, predicts that any attempt by the EPA to regulate CO2 and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) will result in a flood of litigation by the fossil-fuel industries that will continue for years.
Reich notes that the Obama administration has attempted to use the specter of EPA regulation as a threat to move cap & trade legislation through the Congress before the Copenhagen meeting. Since that is now highly unlikely, Mr. Reich advises the administration to put the …

It is looking more and more unlikely that the U.S. will agree to cut greenhouse gases in Copenhagen according to the chief U.S. negotiator to the climate change talks, Jonathan Pershing.  Pershing is quoted in Bloomberg as saying “It will be extraordinarily difficult for the U.S. to commit to a specific number in the absence of action from Congress.”