Pipeline’s approval sets dangerous precedent, environmentalists fear
In the land of partisan blinders, the one named Manchin is still king, it seems.
Political Washington’s second most powerful Joe, not far these days behind the one in the White House, took a victory lap Friday to celebrate that rarest of modern-day policy triumphs — getting a pipeline project approved.
Late Thursday, the moderate swing-vote senator cheered passage in the Senate of a bill to avert a U.S. debt default — legislation that, thanks to Manchin, also fast-tracks the 500-kilometre Mountain Valley pipeline.
The project “opens up markets for our natural resources, giving us untold new revenue sources and developing industries that our grandchildren and future generations will benefit from,” Manchin said in a Twitter video after the vote.
“West Virginia is America’s energy MVP — not only because we power the nation, but also because we show the nation that when you work together, you can accomplish great things for our country.”
It’s the kind of procedural magic trick that demands the horse-trading antics that are Capitol Hill’s stock-in-trade, a bit of legislative sleight of hand that fossil-fuel champions in Canada can only dream of.
So suddenly did Mountain Valley’s fortunes change this week that Virginia Democrats such as Sen. Tim Kaine and Sen. Jennifer McClellan — through whose state the pipeline will run — didn’t even get a heads-up from the White House.
Kaine filed an amendment to the bill Thursday before the final vote in a last-ditch effort to get the pipeline approvals excised, but it went down to defeat along with a host of other last-minute efforts.
“We shouldn’t let an unhappy corporation go to Congress to bypass the process everybody else goes through,” he said, describing himself as “deeply disappointed” that his amendment didn’t survive.
“Everyday people don’t get that deal.”
Progressives and environmental groups were no less apoplectic. “In manufacturing this crisis, our government has said the quiet part out loud: America is still open for business when it comes to the fossil fuel industry,” said Sierra Club executive director Ben Jealous.
“It did not have to be this way. The American people deserve better from their government.”
By fast-tracking Mountain Valley as well as streamlining the environmental assessment and permitting process, Congress and the White House have created a “dangerous precedent” for other projects, the group said.
Top of their list is Line 5, the Enbridge-owned, crossborder liquids pipeline built in 1953 that, like its West Virginia cousin, is the subject of several U.S. legal challenges, most notably in Wisconsin and Michigan.