The Clean Energy Jobs & American Power Act (CEJAPA) is the Senate’s version of ACES, which passed the house last summer. The Senate, however, not wanting to do anything too quickly unless it involves tax breaks for the rich, has decided to slow the process down. There is now 0% chance that anything substantial will be done by Copenhagen next month.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has decided that work on CEJAPA should follow financial reform and a jobs bill, now planned for early next year. Senator John Kerry, who has been leading the effort for clean energy legislation in the Senate, points out here that the Clean Energy JOBS bill might actually create some jobs:

the climate bill would create millions of new green jobs by providing incentives for businesses to invest in green technologies.

"If you want to do a jobs bill this is the bill to do," he said. "I would argue that with the president very very forcefully."

But with Democratic Senators like Webb and Casey indicating that they likely would not support CEJAPA in its current form, Kerry, Lieberman, and Graham are in the process of re-writing it, as the NY Times explains here. From the article:

CBO and EPA are likely to take up to five weeks to study the legislation, which is why Kerry and company want to get the outside review process started as soon as possible in order to be ready for a floor debate by the early to mid-spring. "We don’t want it to slip into the summer," Graham said last week.

So it will probably… slip into the summer.

If anyone thinks having Lieberman and Graham involved in this process will make the bill better from an environmental perspective, you’re more optimistic than me.

Meanwhile, environmentalists, while still supportive of President Obama, are lamenting the ever-decreasing expectations for the Copenhagen summit next month. As Bill McKibben (founder of 350.org, which organzied the International Day of Climate Action last month) writes today in Mother Jones:

For a year now it’s been clear that the president is not particularly focused on applying the political pressure that would have been necessary to reach any kind of pact, much less one that approaches what the science demands. Despite the deadline of the Copenhagen conference, Obama placed energy second on his priority list, guaranteeing that health care would occupy most of the year. He talked very little about climate, tending instead to talk about green jobs and energy security, and in the process left the door open for climate deniers to have a field day. And then—as with health care—he left it pretty much entirely up to Congress to write the necessary legislation.

It’s time to increase the pressure on the Senate to pass a clean energy bill – stronger than the House version. If it doesn’t happen next year, when is it going to get done? If the Republicans pick up any seats in either house next year is legislation more or less likely to happen in 2011? Then, before we know it, we’ll be back in an election year – 2012. And the best case scenario there is that the public recoils from whoever the Republican candidate is and re-elects Obama. But by then it will be 2013, and it may be too late to stop many effects of runaway climate change.