Joe Manchin Didn’t Kill the Democrats’ Climate Agenda

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, July 17, 2022

 

President Joe Manchin has handed down a climate-bill veto — or so you would think from reading the newspapers.

 

Contrary to what his fellow Democrats insist, Senator Manchin has not single-handedly derailed climate-change legislation or anything else — except for Democrats’ attempts to govern as though Republicans did not exist.

 

“It seems odd that Manchin would choose as his legacy to be the one man who single-handedly doomed humanity” undead Clinton hack John Podesta proclaimed with his habitual fine sense of restraint and nuance. It emphatically is not the case that humanity is now doomed because Podesta’s green-business friends and benefactors are going to be deprived of subsidies and favors paid for by U.S. taxpayers, nor is it the case that Senator Manchin is solely responsible for this outcome. The Democrats’ plan is a dead letter because 49 senators support it and 51 senators oppose it.

 

In our age of very stupid tribal politics, compromise is an idea that has fallen into discredit. Where once we had admirable collaborators, now we have detestable collaborationists. It is the same thing, of course — finding common ground with those icky cootie-bearing miscreants in the other party — but where once it was seen as a necessary part of democratic life, now it’s understood as a moral betrayal. This is, of course, idiotic, and it is not even an exclusively partisan kind of idiocy: Democrats here are being frustrated not only by their inability to work with Republicans but also by their failure to bring all of the relevant Democrats on board.

 

The habit of relying on procedural maximalism — making the utmost out of every procedural bottleneck or administrative technicality right here and right now without any thought to the long-term effects of such a strategy on a government in which there are at least two parties — led the Democrats into a critical error. The Senate is split 50/50 between Democrats and Republicans, but our constitutional architecture gives a tie-breaking vote to the vice president, Kamala Harris, who is silly and shallow and politically unskilled, but nonetheless aware of which party she belongs to and able to take orders and more or less carry them out. That gives Democrats technical formal control of the Senate, which, along with their (very likely soon-to-be-demolished) majority in the House, gives them notional control of Congress as a whole. And so they proceeded as though they could simply ignore the priorities and preferences not only of Republicans but also of Democrats whose home electorates are a skootch to the right of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s and Chuck Schumer’s. Senator Manchin is about to turn 75 and has held elected office since he was 35 — he has not survived in politics for 40 years without learning how to sort out his own political interests. West Virginia may be green and mountainous, but it is not Vermont.

 

The Democrats’ climate agenda is excessively narrow and partisan, reflecting, as it does, a particularly toxic mix of corporatism and Kulturkampf politics in which corporate rent-seeking goes hand-in-hand with an unrealistic, ideologically blinkered, and — as Podesta ably demonstrates — hysterically moralistic political posture. Senator Schumer represents constituents who think that heat comes from Con Ed and that gasoline comes from wherever taxi drivers find it, and Senator Manchin represents constituents who are more familiar with the business end of the energy business.

 

The combination of green moralism with green corporatism (an unlovely and destructive feature of European politics, particularly in Germany) is defective for several reasons: It is fundamentally corrupt, as all similar corporatist enterprises are; it transforms a question of roughly quantifiable tradeoffs into an absolutist moral contest in which compromise is difficult or impossible; and — perhaps this still counts for something! — it prevents making any meaningful positive reform to environmental policy. We know what a serious climate-change policy would look like: It would account for externalities and minimize market distortions in such a way as to enable the switch to very low-emissions energy sources (nuclear power) and relatively low-emissions energy sources (natural gas) in the sector where doing so would be relatively easy (electric utilities), and thus mitigate the pain of the same transition in the less tractable sectors (transportation and agriculture), creating a large, economically and politically sustainable improvement in total emissions. In Germany, they are restarting coal-fired electricity generation because Vladimir Putin is threatening to hold Western Europe’s gas supply hostage — and because a generation of bad policy blocking the development of the necessary import-export infrastructure in the United States and in Europe has left the rich U.S. gas industry unable to replace that Russian supply in a practical and bearably affordable way.

 

It is really quite something to see Democrats raking Joe Manchin over the coals for his supposed environmental apostasy while President Joe Biden is on his elbows and knees in Riyadh begging the ghastly and murderous Saudi crown prince to ramp up oil drilling in his kingdom — where local environmental standards governing energy production are rather lower than they are in Pennsylvania.

 

The Democrats’ climate agenda is not on ice because of Joe Manchin — it is on ice because it is not a very good agenda. The Democrats don’t need a program that can command the support of one coal-state Democrat but one that can win the cooperation of ten or twelve Republicans — Republicans who may not share progressive views on climate change but who might like to see gas-producing U.S. states increase their export markets, and might also like to see their constituents’ energy prices and energy-grid reliability brought to a more desirable condition by clean, reliable, safe, modern nuclear energy — which is, if we are being honest about it, the only practical and sufficient source of electricity that is in fact operationally zero-emissions.

 

“But the Republicans are intractable!” Democrats will complain. “They are unreasonable! And they don’t care about climate change!” All of that may be true — but, if your chosen profession is politics, adapting the political realities with which you are presented is the job — not some ancillary part of the job, but the heart and the foundation of it. Chuck Schumer’s inability to win over one Democrat — or, dare we dream of it, a handful of Republicans — is an indictment of Chuck Schumer, not of Joe Manchin.

 

If the Democratic leadership cannot get a deal done, then Democrats should put the blame where it belongs — and they should consider, from time to time, that there are Republicans in Congress, and that those Republicans get a vote, too.