Joe Manchin has again played Lucy from Peanuts telling Charlie Biden he’ll hold the climate football so you can run up and kick it. And once again Manchin pulls the ball away as Biden rushes up and falls flat on his back.
Manchin is a Democrat in the same sense that Trump is an evangelical Christian. So not at all. Manchin wants association with Dems and Trump wants association with Christians without either politician acting true to those values.
At least Trump delivered the Supreme Court for the extreme Christians even if he is a full-time dedicated demon. Manchin is more deceptive, pretending repeatedly that he’d settle for compromises on climate legislation, and then withholding his vote in the 50-50 U.S. Senate.
The Washington Post reported July 13 that President Biden was weighing breaking his climate pledges to get Manchin onboard with the climate bill. One big tool in Biden’s grasp to get Manchin’s vote is to threaten cancellation of the Mountain Valley pipeline, a project that Manchin needs to run thru West Virginia.
Cable News Network reported July 15 that Manchin made over half a million dollars in 2021 from Enersystems, the coal brokerage company he founded many years ago. CNN quoted Open Secrets, a nonprofit watch group that tracks money in politics, that Manchin made about $5 million from coal-related enterprises since 2010. With that kind of cash, coal calls the shots.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said, “The problem was that we continued to talk to Joe Manchin like he was serious; he was not. He has sabotaged the President’s agenda.”
Since no Republican senators will budge from their virulent anti-environmental stance, climate legislation seems doomed for this session of Congress. But after Manchin singlehandedly sank a good climate bill, President Biden said that he could take emergency executive actions to move the country toward compliance with the climate accords he pledged to other signatory countries that the United States would strive for.
Yet despite the Senate setback, President Biden’s climate speech outside a defunct coal plant in Massachusetts July 20 stopped well short of declaring a climate emergency. He deferred using his power that could halt new drilling and ramp up renewable projects. Instead Biden announced minor upticks like a program that helps disadvantaged areas to withstand storms.
Unfortunately, a major organ of the executive branch, the Environmental Protection Agency, has been demoted from its founding mission by the Supreme Court, which diminished the EPA’s authority to curb power plant emissions, a major cause of global warming.
An Associated Press article by Matthew Daly July 17 quoted Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D- R.I), “Free at last. Let’s roll. Do it all and start now. With legislative climate options now closed, it’s now time for executive Beast Mode.”
Sen. Whitehouse suggested “a robust social cost of carbon rule” that would force energy producers to account for greenhouse gas emissions as a cost of doing business. He also urged Biden to require major polluters to capture carbon dioxide emissions, and to impose stronger pollution controls on vehicles.
Other advocates are urging Biden to reject all drilling on federal lands and waters, which he promised in the 2020 campaign but hasn’t done yet.
The AP also quoted Ann Clancy of the progressive group Indivisible that it was time for Biden to “deliver real wins for the American people on climate. We don’t have any more time to waste.”
That urgency has been asserted by climate scientists for years – through the terrible Trump years and the ineffectual Barack Obama administration which was handcuffed for 6 of its 8 years by a Republican-controlled Congress. Before that there was George W. Bush’s two terms of ecological debacles. Thus for most of the current century, the United States government has done little to limit the humongous harms our country has caused to the Earth.
Sure, Biden faces polling pressure from high gasoline prices and inflation in general. Neither are really under his control but voters might mistakenly punish the Democrats at the polls in the mid-terms this November. That would compound the conundrum because conservative control of Congress would cancel Biden’s agenda from advancing on climate, health care, gun control and voting rights.
All these reasons necessitate a strong immediate response by Biden to the climate crisis. He must get it done, even if it’s only for the remainder of his term, and then Democrats must make their messaging to the public state the plain truth that Republicans prevent the permanent progress which the American people elected him to enact.
Effective messaging by Democrats has been in dismal dysfunction for decades. They need to get better at public persuasion pronto if we’re to protect the planet, as well as preserve the constitution from cultists who would gleefully commit another coup.
Otherwise we risk a climate catastrophe.
Frank Lingo, based in Lawrence, Kansas, is a former columnist for the Kansas City Star and author of the novel “Earth Vote.” Email: lingofrank@gmail.com. Visit Greenbeat.world.
From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2022
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