The Senate's leading skeptic on climate change will send a video message of doubt to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico, this year and will not attend the event.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said today he decided not to go down to Cancun because of an upcoming vote on an extension of income tax cuts and because "nobody's down there."

"I mean, what do they do down there other than go swimming?" Inhofe said on WMAL AM630 this morning. "If you look at their website you will see the biggest party probably in history down there."

SNEAK PEEK #1 - It looks like Jim Inhofe won't be dropping by this year's UN climate talks, but the EPW ranking member will be there in spirit (or at least in video). Inhofe recorded a speech that will be played this evening at an Americans for Prosperity rally in Cancun.

"We have come a long way since the last UN Climate meeting last year when President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Lisa Jackson, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry and dozens of lawmakers made their way to Copenhagen to tell the world that cap-and-trade was going to pass the United States Senate. Yet the truth was it had no chance of passing. To deliver that message, I traveled to Copenhagen as a one-man truth squad," the Oklahoma Republican says in the video, according to a transcript provided to ME. "The reporters and diplomats didn't like it. They hated me for telling the truth. But here we are: I was right and they were wrong.

"Inhofe goes on to say that "nothing is going to happen in Cancun this year and everyone knows it. I couldn't be happier and poor Al Gore couldn't be more upset." Watch the event live at 8 p.m. EST:

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.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), ranking member on the Environment & Public Works Committee (EPW), says at least 11 "endangered" Democrats up for re-election in 2012 could try to bolster their reelection bids by voting with Republicans in the 112th Congress to help resist a rush of Obama EPA rules expected in the next two years. In an exclusive and wide-ranging interview with Inside EPA Nov. 19, the senator outlined his agenda as the top Republican on the environment panel next year, including passing bipartisan legislation on infrastructure funding and other issues, as well as "reasonable regulations." Inhofe says he has room to work with several committee Democrats with whom he has a good relationship, including Committee Chair Barbara Boxer (CA), along with Sens. Benjamin Cardin (MD) Tom Carper (DE), Frank Lautenberg (NJ) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT)...

He also praised EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, calling her "courageous" and "honest," and expressed surprise that the President "still has her there." But Inhofe repeatedly said he fears an aggressive push for strict new EPA rules in the next two years, and vowed to continue to ask Boxer to probe the role that White House climate adviser Carol Browner plays in crafting those rules.

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.