How one senator doomed the Democrats’ climate plan
WASHINGTON — First, he killed a plan that would have forced power plants to clean up their climate-warming pollution. Then, he shattered an effort to help consumers pay for electric vehicles. And, finally, he said he could not support government incentives for solar and wind companies or any of the other provisions that the rest of his party and his president say are vital to ensure a livable planet.
Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who took more campaign cash from the oil and gas industry than any other senator, and who became a millionaire from his family coal business, independently blew up the Democratic Party’s legislative plans to fight climate change. The swing Democratic vote in an evenly divided Senate, Manchin led his party through months of tortured negotiations that collapsed Thursday night, a yearlong wild goose chase that produced nothing as the Earth warms to dangerous levels.
“It seems odd that Manchin would choose as his legacy to be the one man who single-handedly doomed humanity,” said John Podesta, a former senior counselor to President Barack Obama and founder of the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank.
Privately, Senate Democratic staff members seethed and sobbed Thursday night, after more than a year of working nights and weekends to scale back, water down, trim and tailor the climate legislation to Manchin’s exact specifications, only to have it rejected inches from the finish line.
“Rage keeps me from tears,” Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., a longtime advocate for climate legislation, wrote on Twitter late Thursday.
Manchin’s refusal to support the climate legislation, along with steadfast Republican opposition, effectively dooms the chances that Congress will pass any new law to tackle global warming for the foreseeable future — at a moment when scientists say the planet is nearly out of time to prevent average global temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.
That is the threshold beyond which the likelihood of catastrophic droughts, floods, fires and heat waves increases significantly. The planet has already warmed an average of about 1.1 degrees Celsius.
A poll conducted in early May by the Pew Research Center found a majority of Americans, 58%, think the federal government is doing too little to reduce the effects of global warming while 22% said it is doing the right amount, and 18% said it is doing too much. In the same survey, 71% said their community had been hit by extreme weather in the past year, and a majority linked it to climate change.
President Joe Biden has pledged to the rest of the world that the United States, the country that has historically pumped the most greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, would cut its emissions in half by 2030. Without legislation, it will be impossible to meet Biden’s climate goals.
“We are not going to meet our targets, period,” said Leah Stokes, a professor of environmental policy at the University of Santa Barbara, California, who has advised congressional Democrats on climate legislation.
“I honestly don’t know how he is going to look his own grandchildren in the eyes,” she said of Manchin.
At the start of this week, Manchin said his top concern was the price at the pump and the need for more fossil fuels. “How do we bring down the price of gasoline?” he said. “From the energy thing, but you can’t do it unless you produce more. If there’s people that don’t want to produce more fossil, then you got a problem. That’s just reality. You got to do it.”
On Wednesday, after data was released showing the nation’s inflation rate at 9.1%, the highest in a year, Manchin said in a statement, “No matter what spending aspirations some in Congress may have, it is clear to anyone who visits a grocery store or a gas station that we cannot add any more fuel to this inflation fire.”
Sam Runyon, a spokeswoman for Manchin, declined to discuss his position Thursday night, adding that the senator “has not walked away from the table.” But people involved in the talks said they believed they had reached the end of the line.
The president flew Friday from Israel to Saudi Arabia, with the aim of getting the Saudis to ramp up oil production and help to drive down gasoline prices. Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, declined to discuss Manchin. “We’re just not going to negotiate in public,” she said.
For a year and half, climate activists have described themselves as Charlie Brown to Manchin’s Lucy. Several times they neared what many Democrats believed could be a deal, only to see Manchin yank away his support at the final moment.
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