A Senate Agriculture subcommittee enters the brewing debate over allowing industry to use offsets as a low-cost compliance option for new U.S. greenhouse gas regulations with a hearing Wednesday.

House lawmakers will get the chance this week to grill a key Interior Department official on whether there was any political manipulation in the decision to list the polar bear as a threatened species.

This week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will present an award to a group of six leaders who helped representatives from 191 nations adjust the Montreal Protocol to accelerate the removal of powerful greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano (D) last week vetoed a bill that would have prevented the state Department of Environmental Quality from enforcing rules intended to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

U.S. EPA is battling a Sierra Club effort to force the agency to complete within 60 days a Supreme Court-mandated review of motor vehicles' greenhouse gas emissions.

Senate Republicans failed yesterday to block a new U.S. global warming policy unless China and India take similar steps to confront climate change. South Carolina Republican Jim DeMint offered a floor amendment to the fiscal 2009 budget resolution aimed at undercutting a prominent measure that would set up a first-ever cap-and-trade program to control U.S. emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

A key House Democrat holding the pen on global warming legislation will need to decide over the next eight months whether he wants to keep his leadership position on the issue.