Pelosi plans to keep global warming panel

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) plans to keep the special
global warming subcommittee she created two years ago, even though one of the
key reasons for creating it is gone.

Pelosi created the Select Committee on Energy Independence and
Global Warming as an end-run around Energy and Commerce panel Chairman John
Dingell (D-Mich.), the champion of the auto industry. Pelosi calls reducing
climate change her “flagship issue,” and Dingell was not considered
sufficiently supportive of her priority.

{mosads}But House Democrats on Thursday ousted Dingell in favor of
Pelosi’s fellow Californian, Rep. Henry Waxman, a more aggressive advocate of
climate change regulation. Though her aides denied it, many saw Pelosi’s hand
in Dingell’s ouster.

Still, Pelosi wants to keep the global warming committee, and she
wants Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) to keep running it.

“We do have a need for one more term, because our work is not
done,” Pelosi said at her weekly press conference with reporters. “We do not
have the climate change legislation that I had hoped we might be closer to, at
least at this point.”

The committee has no authority to send bills to the floor, and
Pelosi said she does not want to change that. She said she views the committee
as a “scientific resource.”

The
committee’s authority to hold hearings and issue reports expired at the end of
October, and its funding runs out at the end of the year. The committee would
be renewed by including it in the rules package for the next Congress.

Critics of the Markey committee said its hearings and other work
were repetitive of the work done by Dingell’s Energy and Commerce Committee.