With the international climate community focused on Italy, a key US senator casually announced plans to delay the first round of votes on a climate bill until September. The news from Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat who chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee, came just two days after her committee kicked off the legislative process.

To what extent this counts as a setback remains unclear. For her part, Boxer downplayed the announcement by saying the committee would get its work done quickly after the August recess, leaving plenty of time to push the bill through the Senate during the fall session. In doing so, she issued her first warning to colleagues who might think they have better things to do in December: “We’ll be in until Christmas, so I’m not worried about it.”

There are two easy explanations for the delay. The first is that energy is competing for attention with another big-ticket issue: health care reform. The second is that Democrats are worried about cobbling together votes. Undoubtedly both are true to some extent, but it might also be that her staff needs time to organize hearings and write legislation, likely modelled after that passed by the House on June 26. After all, Boxer shouldn’t have a problem getting a bill out of her committee, which consists of 12 Democrats and seven Republicans.

The difficulty will come when the bill hits the Senate floor, where it will surely need 60 out of 100 votes to pass. Boxer’s committee is the most important of several that will take up the issue and then report legislative language to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada. Congressional Quarterly reports that Reid has pushed back his deadline for committee work by 10 days, to 28 September. That’s certainly not enough to derail the whole process, but every day counts.