Manchin wasn’t only one to kill climate action

The planet is burning, and we’re running out of time to douse the fire. Unfortunately, American efforts to intervene look pretty dead. Who’s responsible for this failure?

Much of the left is keen to blame Sen. Joe Manchin III, D-W. Va. Which is understandable. Manchin has rejected every iteration of Democrats’ safety-netand-climate bill, even though the most recent, slimmed-down proposal met his deficit-cutting demands and might have even modestly reduced pricing pressures. Some of Manchin’s Democratic colleagues suggest he deliberately “sabotaged” the party’s climate agenda because of his longtime ties to the fossil-fuel industry.

Aggravating and inscrutable though Manchin’s behavior may be, he didn’t kill America’s chance at curbing climate change. At least, he didn’t do it alone. The answer to this whodunit is yet another “Murder on the Orient Express”-type solution: We Americans all did it. Together.

Let’s run down the list of co-conspirators.

There is an entire political party — the GOP — that has shown roughly zero interest in addressing climate change, assuming its leaders even recognize that the planet is warming. Manchin’s vote wouldn’t be so crucial if even one Republican senator were willing to break ranks and work with Democrats on a compromise.

But for some reason, Republican politicians have mostly received a pass as the media by and large framed legislative sclerosis as a Manchin-centric phenomenon. Perhaps this is just the bigotry of low expectations: Republicans haven’t produced an agenda for any other significant policy challenge, so why pressure them on the biggest challenge of all?

When only one political party apparently cares about keeping the planet habitable, that party had better deliver a solution. Unfortunately, the Democrats have failed spectacularly. Once again, that’s not solely because of Manchin.

Democrats more broadly have squabbled over their policy agenda. Even when they do agree, sometimes their choices would hurt climate objectives, by making the transition to renewable energy sources slower and more expensive.

Last week, for instance, the Democratic-majority House passed legislation that could devastate investments in wind energy. In a measure tucked into the must-pass defense authorization bill, lawmakers voted for new nationality requirements for crew members working on offshore energy projects. This protectionist measure is designed to reserve more of these jobs for Americans, but because there are not enough trained American mariners to perform all of this specialized work, the legislation would delay critical investments in wind energy and make them more expensive.

Likewise, President Biden back in February opted to make solar energy more expensive, too.

He did this by extending solar tariffs imposed by Donald Trump that had been slated to lapse. Biden administration officials later decided to preempt even more prospective duties that were on the table, but even so: Modules used in U.S. solar projects remain about 55% more expensive than those used in Europe because of multiple existing layers of tariffs, according to the research firm Wood Mackenzie. These protectionist measures, too, are ostensibly about preserving American jobs.

To be fair, politicians often must balance multiple competing objectives. Jobs, inflation, geopolitical concerns, climate: Sometimes these aims are at odds, and political leaders must choose which to prioritize.

But it has been hard to make sense of some recent choices. There are about five times as many U.S. jobs in solar installation as there are in solar manufacturing. That doesn’t count the other jobs in solar sales, distribution, maintenance and operations. Making solar imports more expensive therefore threatens many more jobs than it is likely to preserve or create. Additionally, accelerating adoption of renewable technology will, over the long run, lower Americans’ energy expenses and our reliance on authoritarian petro-states.

The best thing for job growth, inflation, geopolitics and climate, then, would be to reduce the costs of renewable-energy inputs. Instead, Democrats repeatedly choose to do the opposite.

If Biden otherwise decides to act more aggressively on climate in the wake of last week’s Manchin news, as the president has promised to do, he’ll face other obstacles. The Supreme Court, for instance, recently made it harder for the executive branch to regulate carbon emissions. After this ruling, the policies the administration can pursue are likely to be less efficient, and therefore more costly, to implement.

This setback, however, is nothing compared to the biggest, most reliable killer of climate action: voters.

However much we say we care about climate, it always takes a back seat to other, more immediate concerns. To aesthetics, to “neighborhood character,” to short-term fluctuations in gas prices. We voters have made our preferences loud and clear, and elected officials — at the local, state and federal levels — have listened. Or at least they think they have, even if they sometimes pursue policies that unintentionally make things worse.

A pox on all our houses. Given rising temperatures, sea levels and natural disasters, that curse already appears to have arrived.