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CBS News has confirmed that President Obama will attend the United Nations climate change summit next month in Copenhagen, according to senior administration officials.

Mr. Obama will be in Denmark on December 9 for the summit, which is expected to have at least 65 world leaders, according to the Associated Press. It was unknown until now whether Mr. Obama would attend the meeting, which is designed to create a new global treaty on climate change.

The president's visit to Copenhagen comes just before he heads to Oslo, Norway, to accept the Nobel Peace Prize the following day.

To hear world leaders and others addressing the United Nations Summit on Climate Change, the threat could not be more real and the need more urgent to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

But in stark contrast to the earnest statements is the carbon footprint associated with their gathering.

It happens every autumn: midtown Manhattan becomes the motorcade capital of the world. Each foreign leader in town has a convoy of vehicles. Some of them, like President Obama's motorcade, are 20-to-30 vehicles in length. It's so long - it seems that when the front of it reaches the U.N., the back end is still back at his hotel.

Exacerbating the annual exercise in diplomatic gridlock are police actions, blocking intersections and closing streets for security to facilitate motorcade movements. It renders countless other vehicles immobile while waiting for motorcades to pass, their engines idling but still blowing exhaust into the midtown air

Does it undermine the goal of the climate change summit and cause the pledges of environmental concern to ring hollow?

Asked about it, White House climate change negotiator Todd Sterns had a suggestion.

"I think the U.N. should make a pledge to electric vehicle motorcades within five years," he said.

Right. As soon as all U.N. diplomats pay their parking tickets.

Obama: It's "New Era" on Climate Change Policy
Obama's U.N. Debut: A Dizzying Agenda

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Mark Knoller is a CBS News White House correspondent. You can read more of his posts in Hotsheet here. You can also follow him on Twitter here: http://twitter.com/markknoller.

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President Obama devoted his debut at the United Nations with an address on climate change, calling it a "new era" and touting his administration's record since he took office in January.

"It is true that for too many years, mankind has been slow to respond to or even recognize the magnitude of the climate threat. It is true of my own country as well," Mr. Obama said at a climate change forum hosted by United Nation Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. "But this is a new day. It is a new era. And I am proud to say that the United States has done more to promote clean energy and reduce carbon pollution in the last eight months than at any other time in our history."

In an effort to combat some international criticism of U.S. efforts, Mr. Obama pointed to what he called the U.S.'s "largest ever investment in renewable energy" as well as actions taken to increase fuel economy in automobiles and the energy bill that passed the House in June, but has yet to be discussed in the Senate.

"These steps represent an historic recognition on behalf of the American people and their government. We understand the gravity of the climate threat. We are determined to act. And we will meet our responsibility to future generations," he added.

Before Mr. Obama spoke, Ban Ki-moon called on the 100 world leaders assembled "to accelerate the pace of negotations" to get a new global agreement at an upcoming summit on climate change in Copenhagen, Denmark, later this year.

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This story was filed by CBS News foreign affairs analyst Pamela Falk from the United Nations.

President Barack Obama makes his debut at the United Nations this week, giving his first address to the U.N. General Assembly and, presiding over a Security Council meeting – the first time a U.S. president will have done so.

Left: The U.N. Security Council

He is expected to be received with open arms by a diplomatic corps, which sees him as an agent of change in U.S. policy from confrontation to negotiation. It sounds like he may even receive a standing ovation from the 120 heads of state and government.

U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice gave a hint of his four priorities: nonproliferation (read: Iran and North Korea), peacekeeping, development, and climate change. Also on his agenda are international criminal networks, cyber attacks, terrorism and genocide.

President Obama is likely to emphasize the pressing need for global disarmament and nonproliferation and the interest of the U.S. in strengthening the role of U.N. peacekeepers – or blue helmets – rather than being the world’s policemen.

But he certainly won’t be doing all that and more in his 15-minute speech to world leaders. Rather, he has a dizzying set of meetings set up, all with varying agendas. Just a week ago, the White House announced that the president would address the U.N. Climate Change Summit, meet with Sub-Saharan African leaders, hold a U.S. meeting for U.N. peacekeepers, and have bilateral meetings with the leaders of Japan, China and Russia.

Then, to add another “first” to the list, President Obama will be the first U.S. president to chair a U.N. Security Council special session (because the U.S. happens to hold the rotating Presidency for the month of September) with heads of state (including Colonel Moammar Gaddafi, since Libya is on the Security Council now) on nonproliferation and disarmament and will introduce a resolution (which presumably has been negotiated to pass) calling on all countries with nuclear arms to abandon their weapons.

That was not enough. President Obama added a U.S.-led, three-way meeting on the Middle East with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, in order to revive stalled peace talks – a meeting that echoes Jimmy Carter's bringing together of Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin 30 years ago.

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The Environmental Protection Agency is moving closer toward regulating greenhouse gas emissions, but the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is questioning the science behind its decisions.

The business group wants the EPA to hold a public hearing -- with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge -- to decide whether the agency is using sound science to declare that humans are primarily causing global warming, the Los Angeles Times reports.

In April, the EPA proposed a ruling to declare greenhouse gases a cause of global warming and a threat to public welfare. After opening up the ruling to public comment for 60 days, the agency is now set to formally declare its ruling, which was based on peer-reviewed scientific analysis.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson proposed the ruling after completing the scientific review ordered by the Supreme Court in 2007, when it ruled that the agency has the authority to regulate emissions from vehicles.

The EPA's ruling said "elevated greenhouse gas concentrations are the primary result of human activities," and it called the U.S. transportation sector is a "significant contributor" to U.S. and global carbon emissions.

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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is relaxing the timeline for climate change and energy legislation, a reflection of the challenge Congress will have meeting its own deadlines.

Reid, a Nevada Democrat, pushed back the deadline for the measure to Sept. 28, giving 10 extra days to the six different committees working on climate change and energy policy, ClimateWire reported.

With health care legislation still in development and Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings about to begin next week, the Senate will likely have little time for energy policy this summer.

The House of Representatives last month passed a comprehensive bill that creates a cap and trade system for polluting emissions, but the Senate is very unlikely to accept the legislation as the House prepared it. The Senate is likely to change a provision that imposes a tariff on certain goods from countries that are not also limiting their own global warming emissions. President Obama has said he opposes the tariff as well.

Furthermore, even though the House made a number of concessions to polluting industries -- agreeing to give away as much as 85 percent of the cap and trade permits to companies, rather than putting them up for auction -- moderate Senate Democrats like Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) say the price on carbon is still too extreme.

"I’m going to make people, my friends on the left, very unhappy and I’m going to make those who don’t think global warming is real very unhappy because I’m probably going to be working with a group of moderates in the middle to try to come up with a bill that doesn’t punish coal-dependent states like Missouri," McCaskill said Wednesday on a radio show. "We need to be a leader in the world, but we don’t want to be a sucker. And if we go too far with this, all we’re going to do is chase more jobs to China and India, where they’ve been putting up coal-fired plants every ten minutes."

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President Obama will give discuss energy policy this afternoon, just days after the House of Representatives passed landmark climate change and energy legislation.

The president strongly advocated for the passage of the American Clean Energy and Security Act, but in an interview with reporters over the weekend, his review of the bill was mixed.

Mr. Obama called the bill an "extraordinary first step," according to the Washington Post, that would make renewable energy "a driver of economic growth."

He said the flexibility built into the bill enabled moderates to support the measure -- the first ever to impose a federal price on carbon.

"Finding the right balance between providing new incentives to businesses but not giving away the store is always an art, it's not a science," he said, the Post reported. "But, on balance, I think what we have with this legislation is a bill that business can embrace but is tough enough that by 2020 we will have seen significant reductions in carbon emissions."

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The Environmental Protection Agency may have suppressed an internal report that was skeptical of claims about global warming, including whether carbon dioxide must be strictly regulated by the federal government, according to a series of newly disclosed e-mail messages.

Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty "decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data."

The EPA official, Al McGartland, said in an e-mail message to a staff researcher on March 17: "The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward... and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision."

The e-mail correspondence raises questions about political interference in what was supposed to be a independent review process inside a federal agency -- and echoes criticisms of the EPA under the Bush administration, which was accused of suppressing a pro-climate change document.

Alan Carlin, the primary author of the 98-page EPA report, told CBSNews.com in a telephone interview on Friday that his boss, McGartland, was being pressured himself. "It was his view that he either lost his job or he got me working on something else," Carlin said. "That was obviously coming from higher levels."

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Politics Today is CBSNews.com's inside look at the key stories driving the day in Politics, written by CBS News Political Director Steve Chaggaris:

**President Obama to talk health care during a meeting with governors today and a nationally-televised town meeting tonight…

**Tougher talk to Iran…

**Climate bill to be voted on this week…

**Gov. Mark Sanford, R-S.C., returns to work today after a brief "disappearance"; turns out he was in South America, not the Appalachian Mountains…

PRESIDENT OBAMA TODAY: On the day after he focused part of his news conference on attempting to get health care reform back on track, Mr. Obama spends most of the day pushing the same topic.

This afternoon, at 2 p.m., he'll meet with Govs. Jennifer Granholm, D-Mich.; Jim Douglas, R-Vermont; Jim Doyle, D-Wisc.; Mike Rounds, R-S.D.; and Christine Gregoire, D-Wash., to talk about what they heard during the regional health care forums they hosted earlier this year.

Then tonight, the president tapes a town meeting-style event at the White House organized by ABC. The event will be taped at 8 p.m. ET for air tonight during a 10 p.m. special.

The Republican National Committee is running a TV ad today criticizing ABC and the president for teaming up on this event.

"Today a national TV network turns its airwaves over to President Obama's pitch for government-run health care," the announcer says in the ad that will run on national cable. "Shouldn't this be a bipartisan discussion?"

Meantime, "In an interview with ABC News that aired Wednesday, Obama declined to say whether he was open to taxing health benefits. But he indicated there was a breaking point in the balance sheets where he would say that the cost of reforming the system is too great for the federal government to handle," report the Associated Press' Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and David Espo.

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Politics Today is CBSNews.com's inside look at the key stories driving the day in Politics, written by CBS News Political Director Steve Chaggaris:

**President Obama to focus on Iran, health care, the economy, and climate legislation during first Rose Garden news conference at 12:30 p.m. ET...

**Where in the world is Gov. Mark Sanford, R-S.C.?

**Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., returns to the Capitol...

PRESIDENT OBAMA TODAY: The president will hold a press conference in the White House Rose Garden today, his first newser at that location since he became president (it's his fourth solo press conference and 24th overall, reports CBS News' Mark Knoller).

According to spokesman Robert Gibbs, expect Mr. Obama to address four issues that have caused him a bit of consternation - and garnered him some criticism - in recent days: health care, the economy, Iran, and a climate bill.

Watch the news conference on CBS and CBSNews.com. Also, catch a special edition of "Washington Unplugged" after the news conference on CBSNews.com.

The latest on those issues:

On HEALTH CARE, as Congress deals with the potentially huge costs ($1 trillion-plus), expect Mr. Obama to continue to urge Congress to move ahead.

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