Opposition to the President’s climate goals is assured. But support from this one senator is more crucial.
It was 2010 and, as he ran to be a senator from coal country, the Democrat reminded West Virginia that “I sued the EPA and will take dead aim at the Cap-and-Trade bill,” before raising his rifle and blasting a copy of the proposed legislation pinned to plywood.
“We come back, I want you to know, with humility for the absence of the last four years, and we’ll do everything in our power to make up for it,” Kerry told a United Nations conference on climate change adaptation this week. “I’m so happy to hear John say this,” replied Mark Rutte, Prime Minister of the Netherlands. “Because we need the US at the center of the action.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, is urging Biden to declare a climate emergency and use the enhanced powers the way Trump used them on his border wall. But the President can only do so much with the stroke of a pen.
And if there is no Republican support for the change that can only come from legislation, Biden really needs Joe Manchin.
“It’s hard to substantiate which one is more or less of a threat,” said Varshini Prakash, co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, when I asked if she is more worried about Ted Cruz or Joe Manchin.
“We will need to put pressure on Republicans who are up for reelection in the Senate in 2022. We will need to put pressure on Democrats who are in more conservative states right now. We will need to also pressure leadership like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi to fight like hell to pass climate policy, not just cater to those who are holding us back from Congress,” she said.
And as part of a coalition that successfully pushed Biden to be much more ambitious, she hopes Democrats will blow up the filibuster and pass automatic voter registration.
“I think the key here is that Joe Biden cannot litigate these issues behind closed doors with obstructionist Republicans,” she added. “He cannot immediately moderate or temper his vision. There’s this false sense that just taking a policy and moderating it or making it milquetoast will make it apply to a broader swath of people. But that’s simply not true.”
“We are miles past what I thought was impossible at the beginning of the primary campaign,” says David Wallace Wells, author of “The Uninhabitable Earth,” a best-selling roundup of the latest climate science and real-time evidence of the cost of willful ignorance.
Author David Wallace Wells believes disasters, like 2020’s wildfires in California, are changing minds on climate change.
“We’re seeing movement even among people on the right,” he told me. “Again, they are not moving nearly fast enough. But I think it’s a sign that the conceptual terms under which we are conducting our political arguments have really shifted. I think we’re seeing this because we’re seeing climate change.”
But will Manchin see it through his rifle scope or a lens of approval? Both his father and grandfather were mayors of a small mining town and every one of his political calculations begins with the welfare of the 20,000 West Virginians who depend on the fossil fuel industry to survive.
But his score from the League of Conservation Voters went from 20 to 86 in recent years as he joined Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski to push through the biggest public lands bill in a decade, and helped champion that $35 billion green spending spree with his hope that carbon-capture innovation can save West Virginia’s core industry.
There is one more thing to complicate matters for Manchin, Biden, and every form of life on Earth: This test is timed.
