A senior U.S. senator said Monday the committee she chairs should approve legislation to address global warming before a December U.N. climate summit in Denmark. “I believe we will get this bill out of my committee soon,” Senator Barbara Boxer (Democrat from California), who chairs the Environment Committee, told reporters after a meeting with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in New York City. “Certainly before Copenhagen, and we're hoping maybe to even have it on the floor [of the U.S. Senate],” said Boxer, who co-authored the Senate Democrats' 800-page draft bill on climate change with Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry. Boxer said the U.N. chief, who has been lobbying U.N. members to agree on an agreement to combat global warming in Copenhagen, had asked Boxer about the timeline of the U.S. legislation. The Boxer-Kerry bill would reduce U.S. industry emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by 20 percent by 2020, a smaller reduction than European Union countries have pledged. The Senate draft embraces central elements of a climate-change bill passed in June by the Democratic-led House of Representatives in June.
