Bill McKibben, one of the founders of 350.org and one of the most perceptive climate journalists we have, will be speaking Thursday at 4:00 pm at a Schatz Energy-sponsored webinar.
His talk is on “What can we still do.”
350 Humboldt hopes you will be able to attend.
Details and registration are HERE
First, let’s be clear about one thing: Joe Manchin does not care about West Virginia’s coal miners. He obviously possesses sufficient leverage in the ongoing Capitol Hill negotiations that, if he wanted to, he could insure that the state’s remaining 15,000 coal miners all got yachts like his. He could make sure that every coal community in the state had health clinics, libraries, swimming pools, vocational high schools, community college branches. Hell, at this point Joe Biden would happily consent to plumbing the Monangahela River so that it ran as whiskey three hours a day and Coca-Cola on weekends.
But Joe Manchin is actually doing the work of the fossil fuel industry, which has given him more money than any other person in Washington (no easy feat, considering the scale of their largesse). That became indisputably clear yesterday when Politico obtained the memo he’d given Majority Leader Schumer over the summer, stipulating his Scrooge-ish conditions for doing anything about the climate crisis and all the other crises besetting America.
With regard to energy, he made one basic demand, which follow the industry’s line to a T. And it only took five words: “Spending on innovation, not elimination.” In other words: it is permissible to spend money on solar panels, windmills and so on, as long as none of it is aimed at actually reducing the amount of oil and gas we pump. As he put it, all policy had to be “fuel neutral.” He said, explicitly, if you’re going to give tax credits for clean and energy, you have to continue the tax subsidies for fossil fuels. Any credits for electric cars must also go to hydrogen-powered cars—because using natural gas to create hydrogen is one of the industry’s Rube Goldberg schemes for holding on to its business model.
This is nothing more than the “all of the above” energy strategy of the Obama years, and given how much more we now know both about the economics of clean energy (incredibly cheap) and the dangers of rapid climate change (incredibly existential), it’s disgusting. The Biden administration was trying to break with that model and move toward the clean energy world that both physics and finance demand—but the fossil fuel industry won’t let it, and Manchin is their hostage-taker.
Whatever deal emerges today will be judged on one thing (and the judging will be done not just here, but in every other capitol around the world): whether or not it allows us to meet Biden’s target of cutting emissions in half by 2030. If Manchin gets his way, that won’t happen. Manchin came to power with an ad showing him shooting climate regulations—now he’s holding a gun to the planet’s head.