While we are waiting on the Senate Agriculture Committee to lay down a marker on climate legislation, Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., is taking a lead on possible agriculture provisions that could go into the bill.

Right now, the Senate bill doesn't have the same language as the House bill on some key issues:

The House bill exempts agriculture from emission caps, the Senate bill doesn't have that language.

The House version keeps USDA in charge of a carbon offsets program for agriculture instead of the EPA.

The House bill deals with the controversial language of indirect land use change as the EPA interprets the carbon lifecycle analysis of biofuels.

Stabenow's draft language addresses some of these issues for agriculture, notably calling on the EPA and USDA to establish a program to govern credits for carbon offsets. So under that proposal, EPA and USDA would have to work together to create a verifiable program.

When it comes to lifecycle analysis of biofuels, Stabenow's bill would just give a definitive statement that greenhouse gas emissions are significantly lower than fossil fuels. That language doesn't necessarily take away the indirect land-use language from the 2007 energy bill.

Though Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee are expected to participate in the marathon hearings starting today on the climate bill, there is talk that they may boycott the actual markup. Under the committee rules, they need GOP members to participate or no bill can move out of the committee. Democrats boycotted the mark up of an environmental bill under the Bush administration so it wouldn't be surprising to see Republicans turn the tables this year.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., a member of the Environment and Public Works committee, also made some harsh comments Monday, saying the climate bill would kill jobs. Alexander said that the cap-and-trade approach "is fundamentally flawed" and would raise energy prices and cost jobs. Instead Alexander called for 100 new nuclear power reactors to be built, incentives to make half the country's cars run on electricity and expanded natural gas development, Associated Press reported.

But Alexander doesn't address the cost of his own proposal. One of the reasons nuclear proposals aren't growing are exactly the costs. A single nuclear plant cost somewhere in the range of $14 billion to $17 billion to build, assuming everything runs smoothly. The problem for power companies is that nobody wants to commit to financing such a costly and long-term project for just one plant, let alone 100.

DTN has a webinar at 3 p.m. CDT today on the climate legislation. I'll update you on some of the discussion from today's hearings on the bill in the Senate. http://bit.ly/…

I can be found on Twitter at chrisclaytonDTN.