Boxer outlines plans for Senate environmental committee

By David Whitney

McClatchy Newspapers

December 5, 2006

WASHINGTON - Sen. Barbara Boxer, the liberal California Democrat who'll head the leading Senate committee on the environment next year, declared Tuesday that "the days of rollbacks" on environmental protection are over.

"The way you stop these rollbacks is to shine a light on them," said Boxer, the incoming chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, who pledged that oversight hearings on controversial topics will be the staple of her tenure as committee head.

Boxer said her first act would be to convene a series of hearings on global warming and climate change, as early as January.

That's an issue that's been forbidden by the current chairman of the panel, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., who discounts science suggesting that gases from fossil fuel consumption are warming the Earth like a greenhouse and changing its climate.

"There is going to be a sea change on the committee," Boxer said of the polar shift in committee leadership.

As a prelude to the coming battle on the committee over global warming, Inhofe has scheduled a hearing Wednesday on the role of the news media in promoting the notion of global warming. Inhofe contends that false concerns about global warming have risen to the level of worldwide "hysteria."

Boxer called the hearing a "waste of time," declaring that the U.S. record on reducing greenhouse gases is "worse than dismal."

"It's disastrous," she said.

Boxer said that of 56 countries that were working to reduce such emissions, the United States ranked fourth from the bottom.

"If America is going to be a leader, we must act," she said.

Boxer promised a series of hearings that will examine all aspects of and all views about global warming, including those of senators, scientists, environmentalists and businesses.

"My plan for global warming is to listen, listen, listen," she said.

She said legislation would follow the listening, and she anticipates that her bill will look much like the global warming initiative that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law in California in September.

That law caps emissions from utilities and industry and stops large utilities from buying power from suppliers whose generating plants don't meet the state's strict limits on greenhouse-gas emissions.

Boxer criticized the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate for not looking into the Bush administration's environmental policies, citing one recent case in particular.

"The Environmental Protection Agency adopts a regulation in the dead of night and suddenly it's all right to spray pesticides over water," she said, referring to a ruling last month by the agency that Clean Water Act permits aren't required to spray over and near lakes and rivers to control weeds or pests such as mosquitoes.

"We are definitely going to look at rollbacks," she said. "Nothing is off the table."

Boxer also said she'd hold hearings in Louisiana on the effects of Hurricane Katrina, especially on wetlands.

"We'll be going to Louisiana as soon as we get all our ducks in a row," she said.

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