When President Biden travels to storm-ravaged Louisiana on Friday, he will continue amplifying the case for getting much more serious about tackling the climate change that is fueling such extreme weather events. That’s a message directed not just at the nation, but also at the world.
The West Virginia Democrat is threatening to withdraw support for Biden’s $3.5 trillion “human infrastructure” package. In a Wall Street Journal piece, Manchin urges a “pause” on the bill and calls for “significantly reducing” its size “to only what America can afford and needs to spend.”
Most obviously, this could upend the “two track” strategy, under which progressives support the $1 trillion bipartisan “hard” infrastructure bill on the understanding that centrists such as Manchin will back the reconciliation measure. That could implode Biden’s whole agenda.
But this is deeply dangerous in another, less obvious way, one that turns on the reconciliation bill’s provisions to combat climate change. Those are not just critical to Biden’s global warming agenda — which is central to the long-term success of his presidency — but would also propel us into this fall’s global climate conference while showing that the United States is leading by example. Manchin’s threat puts this in peril.
A galling omission
It’s galling that the word “climate” appears nowhere in Manchin’s piece, even as he piously suggests he has a divinely inspired reading of what America truly “needs to spend.” This is doubly absurd, given that he sternly lectures us about how this spending will imperil our ability to meet “future crises.”
Newsflash, senator: The climate crisis is already upon us. As an alarming New York Times piece details, it isn’t just that these extreme weather events are revealing how unprepared we are to handle the short-term consequences (storms, floods, heat waves, wrecked infrastructure, deaths) of global warming.
Worse, the longer we delay, the harder it will become to get a handle on global warming itself:
There are limits to how much the country, and the world, can adapt. And if nations don’t do more to cut greenhouse gas emissions that are driving climate change, they may soon run up against the outer edges of resilience.
So the stakes for the reconciliation bill are extremely high. The two main pillars of its climate agenda are its Clean Energy Standard, which would phase down production of greenhouse gas emissions in electricity generation, and its massive subsidies for renewable energy sources.
These two reinforce each other, as David Roberts explains: The first boosts demand for renewable energy sources to produce electricity, and the second increases supply of renewable sources. Paul Krugman frames the need for this starkly:
The bad news is that if these proposals aren’t enacted, it will probably be a very long time — quite possibly a decade or more — before we get another chance at significant climate policy.
That’s terrible enough. But let’s also note that failure could spill over into the U.N. climate conference in Glasgow this fall.
“This is pivotal,” Alice Hill, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. If the United States gets knocked off the track to passing that climate agenda, we will have “little to show” in terms of real “ambition to reduce harmful carbon pollution.”
That would send “a signal to the world” that the United States “isn’t taking this seriously,” Hill said, which would “embolden other nations to choose not to engage.”
This fall’s conference represents an opportunity for countries “to change the course of history” by showing “great ambition on climate change,” Hill said. “Without the reconciliation bill, the opportunity presented is likely missed.”
There’s more. Manchin justifies his demand for a “pause” on spending by citing fears of inflation. But that’s a terrible theoretical pitfall. As economist J.W. Mason told Eric Levitz, a big threat posed by inflated inflation fears is that they could become a justification for efforts to “scale back our plans for decarbonization.”
The irony, as Mason noted, is that volatile fossil fuel prices are themselves introducing “instability into the economic system,” so inflation actually tells us that “we need to transition faster away from fossil fuels.” Manchin is learning exactly the wrong message, threatening awful consequences.
A broader opportunity squandered?
Need still more? After the Afghanistan pullout, Biden is under great pressure to demonstrate that he’s executing a broader pivot to a new, more constructive international posture.
As senior White House advisers told David Rothkopf, the exit from the costly, failed “war on terror” is part of a broader reorientation, one that abandons fantasies of American exceptionalism and substitutes a more constructive understanding of what U.S. international engagement can accomplish in the face of new global challenges.
Showing international leadership on climate, arguably our biggest such challenge, is central to getting that reorientation right. So the stakes riding on that are formidable.
We don’t know how long a “pause” Manchin envisions. It could merely be a prelude to extracting a pound of flesh, in the form of downsizing the reconciliation bill’s spending but not by too much, an outcome we all expect anyway.
But let’s not be under any illusions about how dire the consequences would truly be if Manchin really means what he says.
