Manchin: Why a pipeline is in the debt deal

Sen. Joe Manchin sure knows how to get his way, said Heather Souvaine Horn in The New Republic. With President Biden desperate to pass a deal to avert default on the national debt, the West Virginia Democrat was able to use his “crucial swing vote” to advance his pet project: a 304mile natural-gas pipeline through his state into Virginia. Never mind that the Mountain Valley Pipeline is “a bad project” that has incurred more than 500 regulatory violations over the six years of its construction. Never mind that it has nothing to do with the debt ceiling. Manchin insisted on it, so it’s now on a fast track for approval. The many lawsuits filed against this pipeline aren’t “nuisance challenges,” said the Charleston, W.Va., Gazette-Mail in an editorial, but “red flags willfully ignored.” Its route is vulnerable to landslides, and landowners in its path have legitimate fears about its harm to the environment, particularly to their water quality. The government is sweeping aside all those concerns.

Manchin owes Republicans “a big thank-you” for “liberating the pipeline from green purgatory,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. He had struck a bargain with Democrats last year to support Biden’s big climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, in exchange for a bill to fast-track the pipeline. The Democrats never delivered. Instead, it is the Republicans who allowed him to fold his project into the debt-ceiling deal. It’s not the worst trade-off, said Robinson Meyer in Heatmap. The pipeline will increase U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by perhaps 16 million metric tons a year, with the highest estimate coming in at 89 million tons. The climate package, by contrast, will save the country some 660 million tons a year by 2030. Though it would be better “not to have to make such a choice,” Manchin’s deal still produces a net climate benefit.

Yet it “sets a dangerous precedent,” said Jonathan Mingle in The New York Times. The Manchin carve-out compels federal agencies to approve the pipeline’s permits and then shields those permits from judicial review, so the West Virginia and Virginia residents harmed won’t get their day in court. Expect more such side deals for the fossilfuel industry and its backers—after all, there will always be a political crisis that seems more pressing than the someday apocalypse of global warming. “This is what it looks like to shuffle along toward climate chaos, one misguided compromise at a time.”