Mr. Manchin, an essential vote 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 no again to Mr. Biden’s $2.2 trillion social policy legislation known as Build Back Better — torpedoing, among other things, $555 billion in clean energy programs at the heart of Mr. Biden’s Glasgow promise to cut American emissions in half by 2030.
Hands were wrung and fingers pointed, not just at Mr. Manchin but at Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi and the president himself, who were blamed by the members of the party’s left wing for not yoking the climate measure to the bipartisan infrastructure bill — a pairing that might have leveraged the climate measure over the top given Republican support for infrastructure. There was also grumbling that the Democrats had masked the overall costs of the bill, a point on which the Congressional Budget Office agreed.
The climate, and the world, are changing. What challenges will the future bring, and how should we respond to them?
But these complaints soon sounded tired and beside the point. And the point could not be more urgent: Where does Mr. Biden — and America — go from here? Failed climate legislation isn’t a just a tactical political matter; it is a loss for everyone, for Americans and all those who live with us. Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, put the matter well when he observed that “the planet is not going to pause its warming process while we sort our politics out.” Or as Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton professor and longtime warrior on the climate front, noted, “the basic physics of the problem” have not changed.
What the physics and the science have said, over and again, is ruthlessly clear: To keep average planetary temperatures from rising above the 1.5 degrees tipping point, nations must radically transform their energy delivery systems, and not on any sort of leisurely glide path but by wrenching greenhouse gases sharply downward, cutting them in half by 2030 and, by midcentury, freeing the world from its dependence on the fossil fuels that are the main driver of global warming.
That is what Mr. Biden promised to do, or something close to it, through the energy provisions in Build Back Better. These included 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 electric versions and modernize the electric grid. Among Mr. Manchin’s complaints was that an energy transition was already underway and that pushing it too fast would prematurely weaken the oil, gas and coal industries and leave the country vulnerable to all manner of upsets, including blackouts. Better, he said, to let market forces and improved technology do the job.
The costs of wind and solar power have dropped dramatically in the last decade, and renewable energy in America has nearly quadrupled in the last decade, providing about one-fifth of America’s needs. Yet market forces alone cannot meet Mr. Biden’s emissions reduction goals; policy support from federal and state governments is essential. As Anand Gopal, executive director of Energy Innovation, a think tank, has observed: “There’s no way we’re going to get to 50 percent by letting these technologies slowly take over the market. It’s not going to happen fast enough.”
