WASHINGTON — Senator Joe Manchin III’s statement that he cannot support his party’s $2.2 trillion Build Back Better bill opens up prospects for the climate action scientists say the United States must take to mitigate the most catastrophic effects of the war. averting global warming has been significantly dimmed.
Mr Manchin, who first voiced his opposition in an interview on Fox News Sunday, released a follow-up statement targeting the climate and clean energy provisions in the bill, saying they “endanger the reliability of our electric grid.” and our dependence on foreign supply chains.”
As the Democratic vote fluctuates in an evenly split Senate where all Republicans oppose the legislation, Mr. Manchin is in a unique position to decide whether the bill can pass.
The news of his opposition alarmed environmentalists. “I don’t think we can tackle the climate crisis on the necessary scale without passing this law,” said Leah Stokes, a professor of environmental policy at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who advises Senate Democrats.
While the government can use executive measures and regulations without legislation, experts say it will be virtually impossible to achieve President Biden’s goal of reducing pollution caused by the United States, the country that has historically produced the most planet-warming gases in the world. United States has pumped, reach. atmosphere. That would have major implications for the planet, environmentalists said.
Oregon Democrat Jeff Merkley said on Twitter that not passing the legislation “would be a climate disaster.”
Mr. Biden and other world leaders have pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions enough to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, compared to temperatures before the industrial revolution. That’s the threshold above which scientists have warned the planet will tip over into an irreversible future of frequent deadly heatwaves, droughts, wildfires and storms, rising sea levels, food shortages and mass migration. The planet has already warmed about 1.1 degrees Celsius.
As important as the social programs in the Build Back Better Act are, the climate crisis is an existential threat that requires immediate action, said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University. “We can’t change the fundamental physics of the problem,” he said. “So there’s a special urgency — we can’t miss it.”
The bill rejected by Mr. Manchin would have been the largest expenditure in the country’s history to tackle the warming planet. About $555 billion of the $2.2 trillion bill would aim to move the US economy away from its 150-year-old reliance on fossil fuels and toward clean energy sources.
Rather than fines to punish polluters, the bill relies largely on incentives for industries, utilities and consumers to move from burning oil, gas and coal for energy and transportation to tapping into wind, solar and other forms of energy that does not emit carbon dioxide. the most abundant of the global warming greenhouse gases.
According to the Rhodium Group, an impartial analytics firm, the Build Back Better bill would bring the United States about halfway through Biden’s goal of roughly halving its emissions from 2005 levels by the end of this decade.
It would bring about $320 billion in tax incentives to producers and buyers of wind, solar and nuclear power. Electric vehicle buyers would receive up to $12,500 in tax credits. It included $6 billion to make buildings more energy efficient and another about $6 billion to replace gas-fired furnaces and appliances with electric versions. And it brought in billions of dollars for research and development of new technologies to capture carbon dioxide from the air.
The version of the bill passed by the House would expand existing tax credits to reduce the cost to homeowners of installing solar panels, geothermal pumps and small wind turbines to 30 percent of the cost.
For months, Mr. Manchin, who personally benefits from investments in a coal family business he founded, is opposing several provisions of the bill that proponents say are vital to reducing the burning of coal, oil and gas.
Mr Manchin rejected part of the bill that would have been the most effective tool to reduce greenhouse gases, a clean electricity program that would have rewarded power plants that switched from burning fossil fuels to solar, wind and other clean sources and would punish those who did not. He objected to a provision that would have imposed a fee for emissions of methane, a powerful pollutant that heats the planet and leaks from oil and gas wells. And he opposed the provision that would have given tax credits to consumers buying electric vehicles produced by union workers.
He also rejected a provision that would have banned future oil and gas drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, as well as the Gulf of Mexico.
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Oregon Democrat Senator Ron Wyden, who heads the Senate Finance Committee and who wrote most of the clean energy tax stimulus package, noted that it was backed by major electric companies. “This is our last chance to avert the most catastrophic effects of the climate crisis, and failure is not an option,” Mr. Wyden said on Sunday.
Climate activists, particularly from the youth-led groups that had campaigned for Mr Biden in his presidential election, said Sunday they were outraged and blamed the president and the Democratic leadership as much as Mr Manchin.
“Biden and Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have let us down,” said Paul Campion, 24, who joined a hunger strike outside the White House in November to push for approval of the spending package.
“They allowed Senator Manchin to set the terms of the bill and eventually derail it,” Mr Campion said. He added that failing to enact climate legislation “would have massive consequences for Democrats next year when they have nothing to show for their trifecta government.”
Varshini Prakash, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, a climate advocacy group, accused Mr Biden of not fighting harder for the climate regulations he campaigned for. “It’s frustrating to see the ways he hasn’t gone out and fought for his agenda in the ways he could have,” Ms Prakash said.
With the possibility of Democrats losing control of the House in midterm elections next year, the prospects for climate action are fading fast, she said. “From now on, the political map just looks more competitive and less promising,” she said. “This is our moment and they’re ruining it.”
Christy Goldfuss, senior vice president of energy and environmental policy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, said it could be possible to salvage key elements of the climate package. While the $2.2 trillion version the House has passed is unlikely to move forward, she said aspects or a different version of the bill could still be passed.
“Build Back Better is not dead. We’ve been on the Manchin roller coaster for a long time and we see him sharing his emotions in public,” she said. “What’s incredibly important now is that Biden and Manchin are starting to discuss what’s acceptable.”
Others were less sure that there was extra room for compromise. “The climate changes are both historic and urgent and necessary and already a compromise,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president for government affairs at the League of Conservation Voters. “There’s really nothing left to give.”