Mr. Manchin, a vital voice in an evenly divided United States Senate, has always been skeptical of any serious federal effort to combat global warming. Last month he said no and again no to Biden’s $2.2 trillion social policy bill known as Build Back Better, which included torpedoing $555 billion in clean energy programs that were central to Biden’s Glasgow promise to reduce US emissions in Europe. half by 2030.
Hands were wrung and fingers pointed, not only at Mr. Manchin, but also at Democratic leaders such as Nancy Pelosi and the president himself, who were blamed by members of the party’s left for not linking the climate action measure to the bipartisan infrastructure bill. — a link that could have overused the climate change measure, given Republican support for infrastructure. It was also rumored that Democrats had masked the bill’s total cost, a point the Congressional Budget Office agreed to.
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But these complaints soon sounded tired and irrelevant. And the point couldn’t be more urgent: where does Mr. Biden — and America — go from here? Failed climate legislation is not just a tactical political issue; it’s a loss for everyone, for Americans and for everyone who lives with us. Hawaii Democrat Senator Brian Schatz put it well when he noted that “the planet will not pause its warming process while we put our politics in order.” Or as Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton professor and long-time fighter on the climate front, noted, “the fundamental physics of the problem” hasn’t changed.
What physics and science have said time and again is relentlessly clear: To prevent the average planetary temperature from rising above the 1.5 degree tipping point, nations must radically transform their energy supply systems, not on some kind of relaxed glide path, but by sharply reducing greenhouse gases, halving them by 2030 and, by the middle of the century, freeing the world from its dependence on the fossil fuels that are the main cause of global warming.
That’s what Mr. Biden promised to do, or something close to that, through the power supplies in Build Back Better. These include about $320 billion in tax incentives for producers and buyers of wind, solar and nuclear power, and billions more to encourage the production and use of electric cars, make buildings more energy efficient, replace gas-fired furnaces and appliances with electrical versions and modernization of the electricity grid. One of the complaints from Mr. Manchin argued that an energy transition was already underway and that a too quick push would prematurely weaken the oil, gas and coal industries and leave the country vulnerable to all kinds of disruptions, including blackouts. Better, he said, to let market forces and improved technology do the work.
The cost of wind and solar energy has fallen dramatically over the past decade, and renewable energy in America has nearly quadrupled in the past decade, meeting about one-fifth of America’s needs. Yet market forces alone cannot meet Mr Biden’s emissions reduction targets; policy support from federal and state governments is essential. As Anand Gopal, executive director of Energy Innovation, a think tank, has noted, “It’s impossible to get to 50 percent by slowly but surely taking these technologies over the market. It’s not going fast enough.”