If I had to guess as I write this, I'd say no. But the trendlines for the Fed chairman aren't moving in the right direction. Today's Wall Street Journal had a piece noting that the Fed chairman was headed toward a closer than expected vote in the Senate next week, with Dems Byron Dorgan and Jeff Merkley joining Bernie Sanders, the Senate's chief Bernanke-hater on the left, as opponents of a second term.

When Vince Flynn recently finished writing his eleventh novel, Pursuit of Honor, he sent an advance copy to Rush Limbaugh, along with some special reading instructions. Upon arriving at Chapter 50, he told the radio host in a note inscribed on the chapter’s first page, “open one of your bottles of Lafite and grab a cigar and savor these words.” Flynn self-published his first political thriller twelve years ago but, today, has a seven-figure contract with an imprint of Simon & Schuster. He is to the war on terrorism what Tom Clancy was to the cold war, and his books tend to be popular with the type of reader who, like Limbaugh, watches the TV show “24” not just for entertainment value but also for political lessons. Indeed, the protagonist of Flynn’s novels, CIA counterterrorism operative Mitch Rapp, exhibits such a talent for maiming, torturing, and killing Muslim bad guys that he makes Jack Bauer look like a simpering ACLU attorney.

WASHINGTON--It is 2009's quiet story--quiet because it's about what didn't happen, which can be as important as what did.

In this highly partisan year, we did not see a sharpening of the battles over religion and culture.

Yes, we continued to fight over gay marriage, and arguments about abortion were a feature of the health care debate. But what's more striking is that other issues--notably economics and the role of government--trumped culture and religion in the public square. The culture wars wentinto recession along with the economy.

Well, that was anti-climactic. The Environment and Public Works Committee just voted 11-1 to approve a cap-and-trade bill and report it out to the Senate floor. Since Republicans were still boycotting the mark-up, creating a stalemate, EPW Democrats just decided to get around them by skipping the usual amendment process—instead, they'll offer their changes later, on the floor.

Much is in question today as Senate Environment and Public Works Committee chairman Barbara Boxer tries to push ahead with work on climate-change legislation, with Republicans threatening a boycott of the markup. What is certain, however, is that cost issues—costs to the overall economy, costs to certain sectors, and costs to families—will loom huge in the coming weeks.

On the overall impact, the most recent analysis by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates a cap-and-trade bill will depress GDP growth 0.2 percent to 0.7 percent by 2020, though some contend legislation will actually boost growth, while others like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce foresee massive layoffs. Across sectors, several studies show varied impacts, with energy-intensive industries losing more jobs than will be created in clean energy. But we’ll leave those aside for now.

Today, we are interested in the cost impact of legislation on households, and here we are generally reassured that the newest EPA analysis, which concludes that a climate package like the one being considered by the Senate would cost the average household only around $80 to $111 per year. That seems supportable. And yet, that’s a national figure, and so it remains unsatisfying. Of course, many, many national averages obscure significant variation across America’s diverse array of metropolitan areas. Also, our 2008 research that ranked the carbon emissions of the 100 largest metropolitan areas, located significant variation  between the energy use and emissions of the “cleanest” and the “dirtiest” metros.

So we decided to drill down a little on the household costs for metros, somewhat as Nate Silver did at the state level, using the CBO’s household cap-trade cost-impact figures for different income groups and the Brookings carbon footprint data for metropolitan areas. (Look here to check out what we did).

Okay, here's the latest on the ongoing mini-drama over the Senate climate bill. Earlier this morning, the Environment and Public Works committee met to begin marking up and amending the bill, and Republicans carried out their early threat to boycott the session—only George Voinovich showed up, to lodge a complaint. Voinovich asked committee chair Barbara Boxer to postpone the markup until the EPA had done a full analysis of the initial Senate draft. (This would delay the mark-up by about five weeks, since it takes time for the agency to run its different models.)

Nukes, nukes, and … nukes. These days, when it comes to energy and climate change, that seems to be all Republicans want to talk about. Throughout last week's hearings on the Senate climate bill, Lamar Alexander kept interjecting that a massive ramp-up of nuclear power was the only real solution to global warming, bringing up the subject at every turn. For many of his colleagues, it's one of the few energy ideas that piques any interest at all.

There are all sorts of lingering questions about the timing of the Senate climate bill. It's not just a matter of whether something will pass. What are the odds something will pass before the Copenhagen talks? Earlier this week, John Kerry told a group of activists that he was "confident" his bill could win a floor vote before international negotiations pick up again in mid-December, but that seems awfully ambitious.

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is holding hearings this week on the new chairman’s “mark” of the draft Senate climate and energy legislation released Friday night by committee chairman Barbara Boxer and Sen. John Kerry. This document will be the starting point for the next round of debate, and with this draft, we get to see for the first time how the bill proposes to allocate the revenue it would raise through the sale of pollution allowances.

So how does it look? Well, as an earlier, less detailed draft released late last month forecasted, the new draft very much resembles the Waxman-Markey bill that passed the House, which means it’s a mixed bag (and quite disturbing on at least one key point). 

On the regulatory side, the outlines are almost identical, with one exception. Like the House, Boxer and Kerry call for a cap-and-trade emissions reduction system, very much like the one the House enacted. Like the House, the senators propose a specific emissions reduction goal--one that would cut emissions by 20 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and so is slightly stricter than the target in Waxman-Markey. The Kerry-Boxer outline would allow Environmental Protection Agency to set its own emissions regulations for major point sources under the New Source Review provisions of the Clean Air Act while Waxman-Markey would not. But other than that, the bill largely tracks with the House approach on the regulatory side, and even the emissions goal isn’t all that much tighter than that in Waxman-Markey, as a weekend post by Dave Roberts over at Grist makes clear.

The new Kerry-Boxer climate bill in the Senate shows a lot of love for the natural-gas industry, as Brad noted yesterday.

As expected, John Kerry and Barbara Boxer introduced their Senate version of the climate bill today. (Though the name is a mouthful: The Clean Energy Jobs And American Power Act. CEJAPA?

All told, the draft Senate climate bill that John Kerry and Barbara Boxer unveiled today looks awfully similar to the Waxman-Markey bill that passed the House back in June. Everything you've read about that earlier bill, griping and cheering alike, basically still applies. Plus, lots will change as this bill shimmies its way through at least five different Senate committees, so there's no use pretending this is a final product or anything. Still, there are a few differences between this Kerry-Boxer draft and the House bill that are maybe of interest and worth highlighting:

Alright, here we go on the climate front. After nearly a year of secretive discussions, Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and John Kerry (D-MA) will release global warming legislation Wednesday intended as a “starting point” for Senate negotiations that they hope will lead to an eventual conference with the House. That’s good. Congress needs to get back to work on climate. But more than that, it needs a good serious public deliberation that gets straight on what really matters in a bill.

So let’s go over this again, then, and repeat our frequent watchwords: To produce a useful and valuable climate bill, the Senate needs, yes, to set a price on carbon through a cap-and-trade system but also to greatly increase the flow of revenue to research on low-carbon technologies.

Price signals (sent through a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system) are necessary to get industry and consumers to invest in the deployment of existing carbon-neutral or low-carbon technologies in the near term. This is the so-called “low-hanging fruit” that Energy Secretary Steven Chu talks about. As detailed in a new National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report, such near-term clean-up runs from replacing incandescent lights and improved building efficiency to improved fuels and motors in the transportation sector to improved energy distribution systems and wider use of solar and wind energy. Accelerated deployment of such technologies could reduce energy use by 15 percent by 2020 relative to a “business-as-usual” reference projection, according to the NAS. And the way to get those gains is through carbon pricing. Such pricing, whether delivered by direct taxes or through a cap-and-trade system such as the Senate will now contemplate, will boost the demand for clean energy and products and place a premium on such solutions all across the private sector.

It looks like Barbara Boxer and John Kerry will introduce their climate bill into the Senate on Wednesday. Dave Roberts has a great preview of what to expect.

The chances of global-warming legislation passing through the Senate before the end of the year are looking increasingly bleak. Onlookers had been expecting Barbara Boxer and John Kerry to introduce a comprehensive climate and energy bill on September 8, shortly after Congress returned from recess. But on Monday, the two pushed the deadline back indefinitely, saying that they expected to unveil the bill "in later September" and chalking up the delay, in part, to Kerry's hip surgery and preoccupation with health reform.

Sources on the Hill say they're now certain the Senate won't take up climate change until after the health care debate is resolved—which, realistically, won't happen until around Thanksgiving. And even if Kerry and Boxer can get their bill out by late September, the other committees that want a piece of the bill won't be able to work on it right away. For instance, Max Baucus, who chairs the Finance Committee, has said he wants to oversee the formula for allocating carbon permits under the cap-and-trade program—but he's currently busy with health reform. To date, his committee has only held one hearing on cap-and-trade, which Baucus couldn't attend because he was working on health care.

So, although Harry Reid's office still insists that the Senate will "have ample time to consider this comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation before the end of the year," there's a good chance a bill won't get finished in the Senate before the Copenhagen climate talks start on December 7. If that's the case, is there anything Congress or the White House could do to make sure the Obama administration doesn't show up at the talks empty-handed? (True, Obama could point to fact that the House has passed a climate bill, but it's unlikely that other world leaders will accept that as a down payment on Senate action.)

Some people keep talismans in their wallets to remind them of those they love: a romantic letter, a set of dog tags, a family picture. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has such a token--but it's to remind him of the people he hates.

Fred Smith isn't exactly known for his timidity on the subject of climate change. The president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a free-market think tank based in Washington, D.C., he has derided concern over global warming and has gone ontelevision to rail against Al Gore's "evil consumptive ways." But, in February, when Smith was called to testify before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, he sounded like a cornered man.

"I just saw him! And I think he's loaded for bear," a reporter whispered breathlessly, as the crowd scrambled to their seats at the Senate hearing yesterday afternoon. Most of the audience had come to see Al Gore testify before the Environment and Public Works Committee on the dangers of global warming. Over 100 people had been camped outside for hours, like ardent Star Wars fans, to make sure they would get inside. At least one RUN AL, RUN sign bobbed above the heads in line. But the reporter wasn't talking about Gore.

"Time is running out, and we need to move forward on this," Senator Barbara Boxer declared in a conference call with reporters last week, referring to global warming. The California Democrat will take over as chair of the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee in January, and she has already vowed to make climate change a top priority, reversing a decade of inaction by congressional Republicans.