Reid: House climate bill to hit Senate cold front

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said this week the climate change bill that passed the House of Representatives could not get enough votes to pass the Senate.

Instead, Reid said in an interview, the Senate will craft its own legislation, with a target of getting it to the floor in the fall.

The House last week narrowly passed a controversial bill to tackle climate change.

"We'll do our own bill because we have some different issues than they have," Reid said Tuesday. "We have a block of states -- Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana -- that are very dependent on coal. For example, Indiana is 95 percent dependent on coal. So we have to take all that into consideration. The House didn't have to do that."

He was referring to industrial-state Democrats' resistance to limits on carbon emissions.

The Senate's bill, Reid said, should have more provisions for new transmission lines and possibly a different structure for the cap-and-trade system that is the bill's centerpiece.

"We're going to cover the same areas that they (the House) are covering, but it won't be an identical bill," he said.

Contact reporter Molly Ball at mball@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2919.