Kerry: Climate bill failure among biggest Senate regrets

Outgoing Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) is still smarting over the 2010 collapse of his sweeping climate-change bill as he prepares to take over as secretary of State on Friday afternoon.

Kerry told the Boston Globe that the failure to push his bill through the Senate is among the biggest regrets of his nearly three decades in Congress.

“Probably the finest piece of legislation I did didn’t get enacted into law yet,” he said in an interview published Friday.

Kerry, along with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and now-retired Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), labored in 2009 and 2010 to craft a sweeping emissions-capping and energy bill.

But the effort suffered a mortal blow when Graham abandoned the talks, and the bill that Kerry and Lieberman later rolled out in 2010, lacking votes, never made it to the Senate floor.

Kerry, a longtime advocate of curbing greenhouse gas emissions, has vowed to make climate change and green energy a focus at Foggy Bottom, and the State Department’s work on the topics should give him plenty of chances.

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