Washington - Sen. Barbara Boxer on Tuesday announced that the Environment and Public Works Committee would draft a new climate bill that would help consumers avoid higher prices and create new jobs in clean energy, but also suggested it's unlikely Congress will pass climate legislation this year.

    Boxer outlined principles for the new bill, including provisions to set emissions reduction targets at levels scientists say will be needed to avoid dangerous climate disruption and to set up a "transparent and accountable" market for tradable emissions permits.

    The California Democrat said the bill could be drafted and made public in weeks or months, but gave herself a deadline of December for getting it passed by the committee and sent to the full Senate for debate.

    Boxer said the committee, which she leads, would pass the bill in time for an international meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark , in December to negotiate the final form of a new treaty with binding limits on all countries' emissions.

    That still would leave the bill far from reaching President Barack Obama's desk, however. The full Senate would have to debate and pass it, and then differences would have to be worked out with a separate climate change bill that Rep. Henry Waxman , D- Calif. , is drafting in the House of Representatives .

    Boxer's December deadline for her own committee's action suggested that she thinks the bill can't get enough support to pass this year, but that she wants to give other nations a clear idea of what the U.S. will at least be debating on how to impose its own mandatory limits.

    Boxer urged the environmentalists and business leaders who support her bill - and who packed a hearing room for her press conference about her basic principles for it _to rally support for it even before it takes shape.

    "The message has to be, don't allow talk of an economic recession to stop our work because in fact the surest way to create good jobs in this country is to mobilize for clean energy independence," she said. "If you want to fight this recession, do it by mobilizing to become energy independent with clean energy and really save this planet."

    The basic approach is to set a limit on greenhouse gas emissions that would decline each year and require companies to buy tradable permits for the pollution they generate. The system would create incentives for companies to produce non-polluting energy such as wind and solar.

    Boxer's principles, endorsed by the other Democrats on her committee but by none of its Republicans, called for reducing emissions to levels guided by scientific research to avoid global climate disruption. She didn't announce specific reduction figures.

    She also called for giving an unspecified percentage of funds from the sale of pollution permits to consumers so that they wouldn't suffer economic losses while the nation makes a transition to nonpolluting energy.

    Some of the money also would go to investments in clean energy technology and energy efficiency, help for workers and manufacturers in the transition period, support for wildlife and plants threatened by global warming, and aid for developing countries hard hit by climate change.

    Boxer said the bill also should create a level playing field by providing incentives and deterrents so that other countries also would reduce emissions.

    Melissa Lavinson of California's PG&E Corp., the parent company of Pacific Gas & Electric , said at the briefing that her company was encouraged that the principles included steps to protect consumers, promote advanced technology and "engage the international community." Businesses needed to know these things in order to have certainty about making investments for future energy supplies, she said.