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WASHINGTON – The strongest piece of President Biden’s climate agenda – his program to rapidly replace the nation’s coal and gas-fired power plants with wind, solar and nuclear power – will likely be removed from the massive budget bill pending in Congress. Congressional staff and lobbyists familiar with the issue.
Democrat Senator Joe Manchin III of coal-rich West Virginia, whose votes were crucial to the bill’s passing, told the White House that he vehemently opposes the clean electricity program, according to three of those people. As a result, White House staffers are now rewriting legislation without this climate provision and trying to put together a mix of other policies that could also reduce emissions.
A spokesperson for the Biden administration declined to comment, and Mr Manchin’s spokesperson did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
The $150 billion clean electricity program is the man behind Mr. Biden’s ambitious climate agenda. It will reward utilities that switch from burning fossil fuels to renewable energy sources and punish those that don’t.
Experts say the policy over the next decade will drastically reduce greenhouse gases that warm the planet, making it the strongest climate change policy ever enacted by the United States.
“This is definitely the most important climate policy in the package,” said climate policy expert Leah Stokes, who advises Senate Democrats on how to set up the program. “We need this fundamentally to achieve our climate goals. That’s the truth. And now we can’t. So that’s pretty sad.”
The setback also means that President Biden’s hand will weaken when he heads to Glasgow for a major United Nations climate change summit in two weeks. He had hoped to point to the clean electricity program as proof that the United States, the world’s largest emitter of planetary warming pollution, was serious about changing course and leading a global effort to combat climate change. Mr. Biden has promised that the United States will reduce its emissions by 50 percent from 2005 levels by 2030.
The rest of the world remains deeply wary of the United States’ commitment to combating global warming, after four years in which former President Donald J. Trump openly mocked climate change science and enacted policies that encouraged greater drilling and burning of fossil fuels. .
“This is going to be a big problem for the White House in Glasgow,” said David G. Victor, co-director of the Deep Decarbonization Initiative at the University of California, San Diego. “If you see the President come and say all the right things with all the right requests, and then one of the first tests of whether he can deliver fails, that raises the question whether you can believe him.”
Democrats had hoped to include the clean electricity program in their comprehensive budget bills. expand the social safety netThey plan to build muscle using a quick process known as compromise that would allow them to pass without any Republican votes. The party is still trying to figure out how to pass this budget bill, along with a bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure bill.
Democratic leaders have sworn for weeks that the clean electricity program is an indisputable part of the law. Progressive Democrats: “No climate, no deal!” chanted slogans.
Mr. Biden had hoped that enactment of the law would clean up the country’s electricity sector, which produces about a quarter of its greenhouse gases. Regardless of who occupied the White House, he wanted a program that would have long-lasting effects after leaving office.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said at an event in San Francisco on Friday morning that she was still pushing for the strongest possible climate change provisions in the bill.
“The issue we’re here today is specifically about the climate part,” the California Democrat said. “This is our moment. We can’t – we don’t have any more time to wait.”
Democratic presidents have tried to pass climate change legislation since the Clinton administration but failed. In a year of record-breaking and deadly droughts, wildfires, storms and floods that scientists say is made worse by climate change, Democrats were hoping to finally garner enough political support to enact a strong climate law, even as scientific reports say the window is closing fast on a warming planet. to avoid its most devastating effects.
An important scientific report A report published in August concluded that countries must immediately stop burning fossil fuels to avoid a future of severe drought, intense heat waves, water shortages, devastating storms, rising seas and ecosystem collapse. To prevent disaster, scientists say nations must prevent the average global temperature from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. But as countries continue to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the average global temperature has already risen by about 1.1 degrees Celsius.
Even though Ms Pelosi promised to protect these climate provisions in San Francisco, at least four people close to the negotiations in Washington described the clean electricity program as “dead.”
Senator Tina Smith, a Minnesota Democrat and the program’s lead author, said dropping the bill could win Mr. Manchin’s vote on the budget bill, which could cost him and other Democrats focus on the environment.
“We need to take strong climate action in the Build Back Better budget,” he said. “I am open to all approaches, but as I said, I will not support a budget deal that does not get us where we need to go in climate action. There are 50 Democratic senators and we all need your votes to get this budget passed.”
Mr Manchin, personal financial ties He had originally intended to write to the coal industry the details of the program as chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Mr. Manchin was considering a clean electricity program that would reward companies that switch from coal to natural gas, which is less polluting but can still emit carbon dioxide and leach another greenhouse gas, methane. Mr. Manchin’s home state, West Virginia, is one of the nation’s largest producers of coal and gas.
But in recent days, Mr. Manchin has expressed to the administration that he is now completely against the clean energy program, said people familiar with the controversy.
As a result, White House staff are scrambling to calculate the emissions impact of other climate measures on the bill, including tax incentives for renewable energy producers and tax credits for consumers who buy electric vehicles. Unlike a clean energy program, tax incentives tend to expire after a certain period of time, and a more durable strategy does not have the market-altering power.
These other programs include approximately $300 billion in tax credits to expand existing tax credits for utilities, commercial businesses and homeowners that use or generate electricity from zero-carbon sources such as wind and solar, and $32 billion in tax credits for individuals purchasing electric vehicles. It could also include $13.5 billion for electric vehicle charging stations and $9 billion to update the power grid, and $17.5 billion to make the transmission of wind and solar power more convenient and reduce carbon dioxide emissions from federal buildings and vehicles.
But analysts say that while these spending programs help make the US economy’s transition to a lower-emissions future easier and cheaper, they are unlikely to result in the same kind of rapid reduction in emissions that a clean electricity program would provide. .
It’s also possible that Democrats are trying to pass the clean electricity program as a standalone bill – but the timeline for this is narrowing as the 2022 midterm elections approach.
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