WASHINGTON -- A bill that would set tough emissions limits on U.S. industries cleared a Senate panel yesterday, after two days of a bill-writing session boycotted by Republicans.

By a vote of 10-1, Democrats on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee approved a bill that aims to slash greenhouse-gas emissions and boost investment in alternative-energy technologies. Sen. Max Baucus, the Montana lawmaker who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, was the only Democrat to vote against the measure.

Republicans sat out the vote. Members of the GOP were all but absent this week as Sen. Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat who chairs the panel, conducted the committee's "markup," or bill-writing session. Republicans said they didn't have enough analysis of the bill or time to consider it.

The measure faces scrutiny by five other committees before reaching the Senate floor.

Work on the bill is taking place as nations prepare to meet in Copenhagen next month to forge a plan to slow climate change.

With Congress struggling to agree on sharp cuts in greenhouse gases or how to fund them, European officials said yesterday that they are striving for a political agreement instead of a new treaty. Doing so would allow the United States and other rich nations to make commitments that are not legally binding.

The revised thinking was an implicit admission of defeat: The two-year timetable for crafting a landmark treaty will miss its deadline, and that failure threatens to deepen the distrust between rich countries and poor nations reeling from drought and failing crops caused by warmer weather.

The treaty had been

due to be completed at the 192-nation conference in Copenhagen.

The delay is significant. The only instrument for controlling carbon emissions, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, expires in 2012.

The Senate legislation would set up a "cap and trade" system, which sets limits on pollutants and allows utilities and other emitters to trade pollution permits among themselves.

The bill targets a reduction in pollution of 20 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050 from 2005 levels. Proponents such as Boxer and co-sponsor Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., say the bill will clean the environment and create jobs, but Republicans say the bill amounts to a huge tax on U.S. industries and families.

The House has passed a similar measure.

Information from the Associated Press was included in this story.

GOP panel members were all but absent during work on the "cap and trade" bill.