KEY TO CLIMATE AGENDA MAY BE CUT
Democrat Manchin opposes clean electricity program
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, the Democrat from coal-rich West Virginia whose vote is crucial to passage of the bill, has told the White House that he strongly 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 spokesperson for the Biden administration declined to comment, and a spokesperson for Manchin did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
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, the world’s largest emitter of
planet-warming pollution, was serious about changing course and leading a global effort to fight climate change. Biden has vowed that the United States will cut its emissions 50 percent from 2005 levels by 2030.
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. “If you see the president coming in and saying all the right things with all the right aspirations and then one of the earliest tests of whether he can deliver falls apart, it creates the question of whether you can believe him.”
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!”
Biden had hoped enactment of the legislation would clean up the energy sector, which produces about onequarter of the country’s greenhouse gases. He wanted a program with impacts that would last well after he leaves office, regardless of who occupies the White House.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said at an event in San Francisco on Friday morning that she was still pushing for the strongest possible climate change provisions in the bill.
“What we’re here today about is specifically about the climate piece,” Pelosi said. “This is our moment. We cannot — we don’t have any more time to wait.”
Democratic presidents have tried but failed to enact climate change legislation since the Clinton administration. During a year of record and deadly droughts, wildfires, storms and floods that scientists say are worsened by climate change, Democrats had hoped to finally garner enough political support to enact a strong climate law, even as scientific reports say that the window is rapidly closing to avoid the most devastating impacts of a warming planet.
Even as Pelosi vowed 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, DMinn., 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 environmentally minded Democrats.
“We must have strong climate action in the Build Back Better budget. I’m open to all approaches, but as I’ve said, I will not support a budget deal that does not get us where we need to go on climate action,” she said.