Manchin foils Biden’s climate goals
$150B clean energy program in measure likely to be dropped
WASHINGTON — The most powerful part of President Joe Biden’s climate agenda — a program to rapidly replace the nation’s coal- and gas-fired power plants with wind, solar and nuclear energy — will likely be dropped from the massive budget bill pending in Congress, according to congressional staffers and lobbyists familiar with the matter.
Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat from coal-rich West Virginia whose vote is crucial to passage of the bill, has told the White House that he opposes the clean electricity program, according to three of those people. As a result, White House staffers are now rewriting the legislation without that climate provision and are trying to cobble together a mix of other policies that could also cut emissions.
A White House spokesperson, Vedant Patel, declined to comment on the specifics of the bill, saying, “The White House is laser focused on advancing the president’s climate goals and positioning the United States to meet its emission targets in a way that grows domestic industries and good jobs.”
A spokesperson for Manchin, Sam Runyon, wrote in an email, “Sen. Manchin has clearly expressed his concerns about using taxpayer dollars to pay private companies to do things they’re already doing. He continues to support efforts to combat climate change while protecting American energy independence and ensuring our energy reliability.”
West Virginia’s other senator, Republican Shelley Moore Capito, said she was “vehemently opposed” to the clean electricity program because it is “designed to ultimately eliminate coal and natural gas from our electricity mix, and would be absolutely devastating for my state.”
The $150 billion clean electricity program was the muscle behind Biden’s ambitious climate agenda. It would reward utilities that switched from burning fossil fuels to renewable energy sources and penalize those that did not.
Experts have said that over the next decade the policy would dramatically reduce the greenhouse gases that are heating the planet and that it would be the strongest climate change policy ever enacted by the United States.
“This is absolutely the most important climate policy in the package,” said Leah Stokes, an expert on climate policy, who has been advising Senate Democrats on how to craft the program. “We fundamentally need it to meet our climate goals. That’s just the reality. And now we can’t. So this is pretty sad.”
The setback also means President Joe Biden will have a weakened hand when he travels to Glasgow, Scotland, in two weeks for a major United Nations climate change summit. He had hoped to point to the clean electricity program as evidence that the United States, which is historically the largest emitter of planet-warming pollution, was serious about changing course and leading a global effort to fight climate change.
The rest of the world remains deeply wary of the United States’ commitment to tackling global warming after four years in which former President Donald Trump openly mocked the science of climate change and enacted policies that encouraged more drilling and burning of fossil fuels.
“This will create a huge problem for the White House in Glasgow,” said David G. Victor, co-director of the Deep Decarbonization Initiative at the University of California, San Diego.
Democrats had hoped to include the clean electricity program in their sweeping budget bill that would also expand the social safety net, which they plan to muscle through using a fast-track process known as reconciliation that would allow them to pass it without any Republican votes.
The party is still trying to figure out how to pass the budget bill along with a bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure bill.
For weeks, Democratic leaders have vowed that the clean electricity program was a nonnegotiable part of the legislation. Progressive Democrats held rallies chanting “No climate, no deal!”
A major scientific report released in August concluded that countries must immediately shift away from burning fossil fuels in order to avoid a future of severe drought, intense heat waves, water shortages, devastating storms, rising seas and ecosystem collapse. To avert catastrophe, scientists say nations must keep the average global temperature from increasing 1.5 Celsius above preindustrial levels.
But as countries continue to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the average global temperature has already risen by about 1.1 degrees Celsius.
Even as Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi vowed Friday in San Francisco to protect those climate provisions, at least four people in Washington close to the negotiations called the clean electricity program “dead.”
Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., the chief author of the program, said that while dropping it might win Manchin’s vote on the budget bill, it could cost hers — and those of other Democrats focused on the environment.
“I’m open to all approaches,” she said, but “I will not support a budget deal that does not get us where we need to go on climate action.”