WASHINGTON — First, he killed a plan that would have forced power plants to clean up climate-warming pollution. He then blasted efforts to help consumers pay for electric vehicles. Finally, he said he could not support government incentives for solar and wind companies or other regulations that the rest of his party and his president say are vital to ensuring a livable planet.
Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, who took more campaign money from the oil and gas industry than any other senator and who became a millionaire from his family’s coal business, has independently blasted Democratic legislative plans to fight climate change. The swing vote of Democrats in an evenly divided Senate, Mr. Manchin led his party through months of grueling negotiations that broke down on Thursday night, a year-long wild goose chase that came to nothing as the Earth warms to dangerous levels.
“It seems strange that Manchin would choose as his legacy to be the one person who single-handedly doomed humanity,” said John Podesta, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama and founder of the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank.
Privately, Senate Democratic officials seethed and sobbed Thursday night, after more than a year of working through nights and weekends to scale back, water down, cut and tailor climate legislation to Mr. Manchin’s exact specifications , only to be rejected inches from the finish line.
“Anger keeps me from tears,” Sen. Edward J. tweeted late Thursday. Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts and a longtime advocate of climate legislation.
Mr. Manchin’s refusal to support climate legislation, along with staunch Republican opposition, effectively dooms the chances of Congress passing new legislation to tackle global warming for the foreseeable future — at a time when scientists say the planet is nearly ran out of time to prevent average global temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
This is the threshold beyond which the probability of catastrophic droughts, floods, fires and heat waves increases significantly. The planet has already warmed by about 1.1 degrees Celsius on average.
A poll conducted in early May by the Pew Research Center found that a majority of Americans, 58 percent, believe the federal government is doing too little to reduce the effects of global warming, while 22 percent say it is doing the right amount, and 18 percent say it does too much. In the same survey, 71 percent said their community had been affected by extreme weather in the past year, and the majority attributed it to climate change.
President Biden has promised the rest of the world that the United States, the country that has historically pumped the most greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, will cut its emissions in half by 2030. Without legislation, it will be impossible to meet Mr. Biden’s climate goals .
A critical year for electric vehicles
As the overall automotive market stagnates, battery-powered cars are growing in popularity worldwide.
“We’re not going to meet our goals, period,” said Leah Stokes, a professor of environmental policy at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has advised congressional Democrats on climate legislation.
“I honestly don’t know how he’s going to look his own grandchildren in the eye,” she said of Mr. Manchin.
Earlier this week, Mr. Manchin said his main concern was the price at the pump and the need for more fossil fuels. “How do we lower the price of gas?” he said. “Of the energy stuff, but you can’t do it unless you produce more. If there are people who don’t want to produce more fossils, then you have a problem. That’s just the reality. You have to do it.”
On Wednesday, after data was released showing the nation’s inflation rate at 9.1 percent, the highest level in a year, Mr. Manchin said in a statement: “No matter what spending ambitions some in Congress may have , it is clear to anyone who visits a grocery store or gas station that we cannot add more fuel to this inflationary fire.
Sam Runyon, a spokesman for Mr. 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.
White House officials did not return several calls Thursday evening.
For a year and a half, climate activists have described themselves as Mr. Manchin’s Charlie Brown and Lucy. Several times they came close to what many Democrats believed could be a deal, only to see Mr. Manchin withdraw his support at the last minute.
But maybe they should have seen it.
Mr. Manchin once ran a campaign ad blasting Mr. Obama’s climate plan. So when Mr. Biden took office promising to implement the most ambitious climate change plan in the nation’s history, he knew that Mr. Manchin would be his biggest obstacle.
Mr. Biden and Senate Democrats reached out to Mr. Manchin at the outset. Last spring, as the White House began writing a massive $2 trillion spending and social policy bill that included health care and climate action, Sen. Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, turned to his counterpart from West Virginia.
Mr. Wyden was tasked with writing the heart of the climate legislation — about $300 billion in tax credits for producers and users of wind and solar energy and buyers of electric vehicles. It will be the United States’ largest expenditure to combat climate change.
Mr. Wyden sought Mr. Manchin’s input to shape the tax package in such a way that West Virginia would support it. Mr. Manchin obliged: He told Mr. Wyden to rewrite the package to his specifications so that the tax credits could also be used for nuclear power and for carbon dioxide capture and capture, a new technology that has not yet has proven commercially viable, but which could theoretically allow power plants that burn coal, oil or gas to continue operating without climate-warming emissions.
The changes were not as climate-friendly, but Mr. Wyden went along with them, saying he believed they would help secure Mr. Manchin’s support.
At the same time, other Democrats were crafting an even more ambitious climate provision for the bill, known as the Clean Power Standard, which would have paid electric companies to replace coal- and gas-fired power plants and penalized those that didn’t. In a private memo signed last summer with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, Mr. Manchin, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, provided control over the program’s design.
Then in December, Mr. Manchin pulled out of the talks altogether, saying he could not vote on the overall spending package. Negotiations had been dead for months.
Mr. Manchin and other Democrats have left open the possibility of a future deal based on $300 billion in tax credits for renewable energy and electric vehicles. But Mr. Manchin also pushed for spending to be cut and fossil fuels — coal, gas and oil — to be included. Those demands grew louder as winter turned to spring and Russia’s war against Ukraine rattled energy markets and gas prices soared.
“The Russian invasion of Ukraine gave Manchin enormous new bargaining power, as did record inflation,” said Paul Bledsoe, strategic adviser at the Progressive Policy Institute. That, he said, “changed the dynamic.”
In recent weeks, Democrats thought they were finally closing in on a deal on the climate package with Mr. Manchin. But he still had demands: He wanted to eliminate billions of dollars in tax credits for electric vehicles. He wanted to overhaul the clean-energy tax package he had crafted with Mr. Wyden, gutting a plan to give clean-energy developers direct payments up front instead of tax credits that they could recoup after their investment.
Mr. Schumer agreed to every request and more, officials said. By Thursday night, the majority leader thought a deal was possible, according to climate activists who spoke with Mr. Schumer later that evening.
The White House also made concessions to Mr. Manchin.
The Interior Department this month floated the possibility of 11 new oil and gas lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska — despite Mr. Biden’s campaign pledge to end new drilling in federal waters — in what two administration officials described as an attempt to appease D Manchin. The White House has also been weighing whether to allow passage for other fossil fuel projects, such as a West Virginia pipeline, to win Mr. Manchin’s vote.
The administration has delayed federal rules to deal with methane, mercury and other pollutants from oil and gas facilities to avoid angering Mr. Manchin during delicate negotiations, according to several administration officials. That’s two years of wasted time in what can be a lengthy regulatory process.
Activists said they felt ripped off.
“He pretended to be a fair arbiter,” Jamal Raad, executive director of the climate advocacy group Evergreen Action, said of Mr. Manchin. “He was talking about his grandchildren. It turns out that this is all nonsense. He cares about his coal company profits and his own political future over the future of our planet.
Ms. Runyon did not respond to Mr. Raad’s comments.
The failure of talks with Mr. Manchin comes two weeks after a conservative majority on the US Supreme Court limited the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon emissions from power plants. The decision left intact the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, but blocked any attempt by the agency to write regulations so broad that they would force the closing of coal-fired plants that generate the most carbon dioxide or force utilities to switch to wind power, solar and more…
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