Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe vowed to block a catch-all Senate package of waterways, public lands and wildlife bills that Democrats want to push through in the final days of this Congress.

"I stand in firm opposition to this package, the contents of which are still uncertain," said Inhofe, the Environment and Public Works Committee's ranking member. Inhofe cited concerns over costs and the potential expansion of U.S. EPA authority in the most controversial of the waterways bills, aimed at cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay.

CANCUN, Mexico - U.S. negotiators came into the U.N. global warming summit with a weak hand but a bold move: a pledge that Congress and the president will enact climate change legislation well before the decade is through.

It's a promise that the rest of the world has seen the United States make-and break-time and again. At the 1997 Kyoto summit, then-Vice President Al Gore made the same pledge-even as the Senate passed a resolution refusing to ratify the Kyoto treaty. At last year's summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, President Obama declared that the United States would lead the way in forging a treaty to replace Kyoto, starting with action at home. But even with a Democratic Congress, the climate bill went down in flames. And now, with a new Republican House, action on climate-and, very likely, on major clean energy initiatives-seems doomed for at least two years.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told Senate colleagues this week he will move forward with an eleventh-hour effort to pass a massive package of waterways, public lands and wildlife bills during the lame-duck session, sources say, in what could be a rare environmental victory for a Congress marked by major defeats on climate change and oil spill legislation.

The Nevada Democrat offered his assurances Monday night after a group of about 10 Senate Democrats, including key committee leaders Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), met with him in a room off the Senate floor to ask him to intensify his efforts to push a bill through the heavily divided Senate, which already faces a packed agenda for the waning days of this Congress, the sources said.

If you've ever wondered why the international community convenes climate meetings in far-flung locales (Cancun, or perhaps Bali), then look no further than Otto Edenhofer, a German economist and an official with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Such grand confabs are not, as one would suppose, about climate change, its causes, or actions to avert and adapt to it.

In fact, as Edenhofer, an IPCC official, sees it, such things are irrelevant, as the climate conference is "not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War." Indeed.

Sponsors of legislation (S. 3973) that would reauthorize grants to state, local, and tribal governments for programs to reduce emissions from existing diesel engines are looking to get the bill passed by the House and Senate before Congress adjourns this year.

The bill, sponsored by outgoing Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) with 29 co-sponsors, would authorize $200 million each year for the grants for fiscal years 2012 through 2016.

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee plans to mark up the bill Nov. 30, according to a committee agenda for the lame-duck session.

"We're working to get the bill through committee as quickly as possible," Matt Dempsey, spokesman for Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and a bill cosponsor, told BNA Nov. 23.

For eight years, the world waited for a U.S. president to help stop global warming and save the planet.

So far, Barack Obama hasn't lived up to the expectations.

Cap-and-trade legislation Obama promised two years ago on the campaign trail is dead and buried, and his administration is attempting to regulate carbon dioxide emissions and cover billions of dollars in pledges without majority support in Congress.

Internationally, heading into the United Nations-led climate talks in Cancun, Mexico, next week, prospects for a multitrillion-dollar transoceanic carbon market are in tatters and a new binding treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol remains years away.

After more than 20 years, millions of pages of studies, and a reported cost of more than $10 billion, the fate of the nation's first nuclear waste repository is about to be decided.

Or is it?

For months, the normally sleepy Nuclear Regulatory Commission has kept the energy industry and state utility regulators in suspense as it weighs the Obama administration's request to kill the proposed repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada -- a project that's been in the works since the Reagan administration.

Roll Call: Inhofe Is Happy to Stand Apart - "He's not seen as a rebel around here by any means ... but he's an independent thinker," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said of the Oklahoma Republican. Inhofe, 76, is comfortable being a contrarian. In an interview last week, he recalled a time when one of his grandchildren "came up to me and said, ‘Pop-I, Why do you always do things that nobody else does?' ... and I said, ‘because nobody else does.'" ..."This earmark debate is a great example" of Inhofe's indifference to public opinion or peer pressure, Graham added. ... Inhofe's colleagues said he is motivated by principles, not politics: "He's very passionate and he can be as partisan as the best of them. But deep down, he wants to help people," a second Republican Senator said ...While most Members look to avoid intraparty confrontation, Inhofe appears to welcome it, taking pride in often being the most hated man in the room.

President Obama famously declared in 2009 that under his Administration the "days of science taking a backseat to ideology are over." Except, apparently, when the Administration wanted to justify its Gulf of Mexico drilling ban this summer.

The White House dropped its deep water drilling ban last month, ending months of government-imposed pain on a Gulf region hit by the BP oil spill. But only last week did the Department of Interior's acting inspector general, Mary Kendall, issue her findings on the moratorium's controversial beginnings. Lackluster though her investigation was, the report confirms that the moratorium never had any basis in science or safety. It was pure politics.

President Obama is now retrenching after his midterm rebuke, and one of the main ways he'll try to press his agenda is through the alphabet soup of the federal regulators. So a special oversight priority for the new Congress ought to be the Environmental Protection Agency, which has turned a regulatory firehose on U.S. business and the power industry in particular.

The scale of the EPA's current assault is unprecedented, yet it has received almost no public scrutiny. Since Mr. Obama took office, the agency has proposed or finalized 29 major regulations and 172 major policy rules. This surge already outpaces the Clinton Administration's entire first term-when the EPA had just been handed broad new powers under the 1990 revamp of air pollution laws.