Senator John Kerry vowed the United States would overcome the odds and approve action on climate change, as the United Nations set talks for April to help break a diplomatic logjam.
Without offering a timetable, Kerry on Tuesday rejected assertions that it had become politically impossible for the Senate to finalize the first US nationwide plan to curb carbon emissions blamed for global warming.
"I'm excited. I know that's completely contrary to any conventional wisdom," said Kerry, a close ally of President Barack Obama and chief architect of the legislation.
Kerry said he was working on a Senate compromise that could recraft a landmark climate bill that squeaked last year through the House of Representatives.
"I don't care how we do it. I just think we have to price carbon because we have to send that signal to the marketplace," the Massachusetts Democrat added.
"We're on a short track here in terms of piecing together legislation," he told a forum sponsored by The New Republic magazine. "We're moving rapidly."
Democratic Representative Ed Markey, an author of the House bill, said a US decision to cut back on fossil fuels would boost international negotiations.
"We cannot preach temperance from a bar stool," he said.
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which is overseeing the effort to draft a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, meanwhile scheduled an April 9-11 meeting in Bonn among senior officials.
The talks would follow up on December's climate summit in Copenhagen, which reached a controversial last-minute compromise.
The summit set a goal of limiting warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and pledged a total of nearly 30 billion dollars in aid to poor countries by 2012.
But it did not spell out the means for achieving the warming limits, and the emissions pledges were only voluntary. The UNFCCC's executive secretary, Yvo de Boer, abruptly announced his resignation last week.
A small number of nations, including Cuba, Sudan and Venezuela, loudly opposed the Copenhagen accord in an all-night final session, preventing it from formal approval due to rules requiring consensus.
Todd Stern, the main US climate negotiator, said major nations would inevitably turn to smaller fora to negotiate unless the atmosphere changed.
"We are fully supportive of the UN process, but it's going to be important that it function," he said.
The House bill approved last year would impose the first US restrictions on carbon emissions. As in Europe, it would establish a "cap-and-trade" system -- offering an economic incentive through a market in carbon credits.
Kerry denied the Senate would focus only on the less controversial area of clean energy and not carbon. He quoted Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican who has joined forces with him, as saying such an approach would be "half-assed."
"An energy-only bill sends no price signal," Kerry said, arguing that curbs on carbon emissions would help transform the troubled economy by creating green jobs.
The senior Democrat also recommended Michael Nash's documentary "Climate Refugees," which was screened out of competition at last month's Sundance Film Festival. The movie looks at humans displaced by disasters arising from ecological changes.
"There's a movie out called 'Climate Refugees,' which you need to see, because they're going to be millions of them -- tens of millions of them -- as we go forward," said Kerry.
In a long-term strategy document released on February 1, the Pentagon identified climate change for the first time as a trigger of instability that could worsen conflicts.
Copyright 2010  AFP Global Edition
