Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, who took more cash from the oil and gas industry than any other senator and became a millionaire from his family’s coal business, has independently blasted GOP legislative plans to fight climate change . Swinging the Democratic vote in an evenly divided Senate, Mr. Manchin led his party through months of tortured negotiations that collapsed on Thursday night. “It seems strange that Manchin would choose as his legacy to be the one man who single-handedly condemned 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. Tank. Privately, Democratic Senate staff members boiled and cried Thursday night, after more than a year of working nights and weekends to scale back, water down, cut and tailor climate legislation to the exact specifications of Mr. .Manchin, only to be rejected. the finish line. “Rage is keeping me from tears,” Sen. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., a longtime supporter of climate legislation, tweeted late Thursday. Mr Manchin’s refusal to support climate legislation, along with staunch Republican opposition, effectively dooms the chances of Congress passing any new legislation to tackle global warming in the foreseeable future – at a time when scientists say that the planet is almost finished. prevent the average global temperature from rising by 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. This is the threshold beyond which the likelihood of catastrophic droughts, floods, fires and heat waves increases significantly. The planet has already warmed by an average of about 1.1 degrees Celsius. 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 said it is doing the right amount and 18 percent said so. 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 linked it to climate change. President 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, will cut its emissions in half by 2030. Without legislation, it will be impossible for Mr. Biden to meet his goals. for the climate.
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“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 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 are we going to lower the price of gasoline?” he said. “On the energy issue, but you can’t do that 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 showed the nation’s inflation rate at 9.1 percent, the highest 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 fire of inflation.” Sam Runyon, a spokeswoman for Mr. Manchin, declined to discuss his position Thursday night, adding that the senator was “not off the table.” But people involved in the talks said they believed they had reached the end of the line. The president was flying from Israel to Saudi Arabia on Friday, aiming to get the Saudis to increase oil production and help lower gasoline prices. Karine Jean-Pierre, a White House press secretary, declined to discuss Mr. Manchin. “We’re just not going to negotiate publicly,” he said. For a year and a half, climate activists have been describing themselves as Charlie Brown to Mr Manchin’s 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 coming. Mr. Manchin once ran a campaign ad in which he poked a bullet hole in 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 approached Mr. Manchin from the beginning. Last spring, as the White House began writing a $2 trillion spending and social policy bill that included health care and climate action, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, contacted his colleague in West Virginia. Mr. Wyden was tasked with writing the core of the climate legislation — about $300 billion in tax credits for producers and consumers of wind and solar energy and buyers of electric vehicles. It would be the single largest expenditure by the United States to fight climate change. Mr. Wyden sought Mr. Manchin’s input to shape the tax package in a way that West Virginians would support it. Mr. Manchin obliged: He told Mr. Wyden to rewrite the package to his specifications so that tax credits could also be used for nuclear power and for carbon capture and sequestration, a new technology that so far has not has proven commercially viable, but which could theoretically allow power plants burning coal, oil or natural gas to continue operating without climate-warming emissions. The changes were less climate-friendly, but Mr. Wyden agreed to 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 pay utilities to replace coal- and gas-fired power plants and penalize those who didn’t. . In a private memo signed last summer with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, Majority Leader Mr. Manchin, the chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, secured control over the program’s design. But by October, Mr. Manchin had backed away from the clean energy standard, saying he could not support either version. Democrats scrapped the entire proposal. Then in December, Mr. Manchin walked out of the negotiations altogether, saying he could not vote on the overall spending package. Talks had been dead for months. Mr. Manchin and other Democrats 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 insisted on cutting spending and including fossil fuels — coal, natural gas and oil. Those demands grew louder as winter turned to spring and Russia’s war against Ukraine rattled energy markets and sent gas prices soaring. “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has given Manchin enormous new negotiating power, as has record inflation,” said Paul Bledsoe, a strategic adviser at the Progressive Policy Institute. That, he said, “changed the dynamic.” In recent weeks, Democrats believed 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 rework the clean-energy tax package he had crafted with Mr. Wyden, scrapping a plan to give clean-energy developers direct payments up front instead of tax credits they could recoup after they invest. Mr. Schumer accepted every request and more, officials said. By Thursday night, the majority leader believed 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. This month, the Interior Department floated the possibility of 11 new offshore oil and gas lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska — despite Mr. Biden’s campaign promise to end new drilling in federal waters — which two administration officials described as an attempt to appease Mr. Manchin. The White House was also considering whether to allow a path for other fossil fuel projects, such as a natural gas pipeline in West Virginia, in order to win Mr. Manchin’s vote. The administration delayed federal rules to deal with methane, mercury and other pollutants from oil and gas facilities so as not to anger Mr. Manchin during the negotiations, according to several administration officials. That’s two years of wasted time in a regulatory process that can be lengthy. Several Republican lawmakers who have been critical of climate legislation did not respond to requests for comment, including Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming and Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican minority leader. Amanda Eversole, executive vice president of the American Petroleum Institute, which represents oil and gas companies, said her group “continues to work with members on both sides of the aisle to advance smart policies that advance U.S. energy leadership and provide affordable energy.” On Friday, Mr. Manchin told a…
