Washington Post, page A1, “Climate bill faces hurdles in Senate“:

The climate-change bill that has been moving slowly through the Senate will face a stark political reality when it emerges for committee debate on Tuesday: With Democrats deeply divided on the issue, unless some Republican lawmakers risk the backlash for signing on to the legislation, there is almost no hope for passage.

Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) has scheduled a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee mark-up of S. 1733, for Tuesday morning. Republicans plan to boycott the session, demanding more substantive cost estimates before proceeding. As the committee’s GOP members said Friday:

The taxpayers expect us to know what this 1,000-page bill costs before we start voting on it. They will only know this if we have a full economic analysis of how Kerry-Boxer affects them. This bill threatens Americans with trillions of dollars in higher energy taxes and millions of lost jobs. Yet as EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson admitted this week, EPA has”‘not run the full economic modeling.” We cannot move forward in the legislative process if we don’t have a complete understanding of this bill.

The chairman’s mark of the 959-page Kerry-Boxer bill is available here.

Our favorite provision assigns great power but diffused accountability to the newly created Offsets Integrity Advisory Board, page 558:

‘‘PART D—OFFSETS
‘‘SEC. 731. OFFSETS INTEGRITY ADVISORY BOARD.
‘‘(a) ESTABLISHMENT.—Not later than 30 days after the date of enactment of this title, the President shall establish an independent Offsets Integrity Advisory Board. The Advisory Board shall make recommendations to the President for use in promulgating and revising regulations under this part, and for ensuring the overall environmental integrity of the programs established pursuant to those regulations.