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      Joe Manchin pushes for climate cuts as West Virginia battered by crisis

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      West VirginiaJoe Manchin pushes for climate cuts as West Virginia battered by crisis The conservative Democrat is busy trying to strip out many of the policies to tackle the problems his home state is facingKyle Vass in West VirginiaWed 27 Oct 2021 03.00 EDTLast modified on Wed 27 Oct 2021 03.02 EDTThe rise of Joe Manchin as a key power player for Democratic policymaking in 2021 is the result of a perfect storm for the US senator from West Virginia.Spies next door? The suburban US couple accused of espionageRead moreHis position as the Senate’s most conservative Democrat means he often has final say in what his party is able to push through, especially when it comes to Joe Biden’s ambitious domestic agenda on infrastructure, far-reaching social policies and a powerful attempt to tackle the climate crisis.A drive through West Virginia’s countryside – which is still enthusiastically Donald Trump country – reveals a patchwork of communities battered by the climate crisis and barely held together by deteriorating infrastructure. Yet Manchin – balking at a $3.5tn price tag of Biden’s reconciliation bill – is busy trying to strip out many of the policies that would try to tackle these crises that are so seriously affecting many of his fellow West Virginians.West Virginia, a landlocked state, leads the nation in the number of the infrastructure facilities – hospitals, fire stations, water treatment plants, power stations – located on land prone to severe flooding. It even beats out Louisiana and Florida. Of course, the climate crisis is seeing flood events hit record levels across the US.Beyond the inspiration for John Denver’s hit song, West Virginia’s country roads are actually a source of fear and frustration for residents. Nearly half of the roads in the state are routinely battered by severe flooding.When power outages – some of the longest and most frequent in the nation – hit the state, they are often lethal, a reality made clear when a single flood event in 2016 took out power for over half of the state’s homes and killed 23 people in 12 hours.Earlier this year, tens of thousands of people were left without power for more than two weeks in freezing temperatures when ice storms felled trees on to power lines across the state and closed roads.But, for many West Virginians the reality of flooding and infrastructure failure are more insidious than isolated events.For Jill Hess, it’s trying to make it back to Fairmont, her home town and the birthplace of Joe Manchin, every time there’s talk of a storm. For the past five years, Hess made it a priority to see to it that her mother, Sue Hess, who was surviving on oxygen concentrators, wasn’t stranded powerless and alone.“Every time it would rain or snow she would really go into panic mode.”Jill said that growing up, outages weren’t frequent. But as her mother grew older and weaker, so has the power grid.Despite spending over a billion dollars trying to prevent the grid from failing, the frequency and duration of outages have steadily increased as the temperature of the Earth has risen, causing places like West Virginia to experience increased storm activity.“I can’t tell you how many times she would say, ‘I need you to be ready and available if anything happens because we have a severe thunderstorm warning coming through.’”Jill would hop in her car to drive towards her mother, dependent on oxygen machines, in Fairmont. But with storms in West Virginia come road closures, shutting down the most direct route to any given place. Adding 15 minutes to be rerouted around a mountain felt like 15 hours to Jill knowing her mother was running out of oxygen.For Jill, there’s a cruel irony to how her mother spent her final years. Sue had been a home health nurse, traveling across the county to help people who couldn’t make it to hospital. In 1968, she traveled to nearby Farmington, the 375-person town, to take care of wounded survivors of the Farmington mine disaster. In the floods of 1985 that killed 38 people across the state, Sue had gone from house to house helping provide medical assistance and supplies to families whose livelihoods had been devastated by flooding.Now, despite having retired in a nice home less than a mile away from the same hospital at which she had completed her nursing program, Sue found herself helpless. She relied on a combination of asking her daughter to drive in and calling 911 for ambulance rides to take to her somewhere she could breathe.Before she died, Sue racked up a four-figure ambulance bill nearly every time the power went out.“They would just literally park her in the waiting room of the ER, on oxygen until it was clear that the power came on.” The average power outage in the state lasts for 11.4 hours – the second highest in the nation.The five years of needless suffering her mother was put through before she died in December comes down to infrastructure for Jill. What she finds especially frustrating is that Manchin isn’t detached from this reality – it’s the one he grew up in. Before he was a politician, the Hess family used to get Christmas cards from the Manchins.Jill has no doubt that Manchin knows exactly how hard climate change is making life for the people he grew up around.National news outlets have been quick to connect the financial dots on Manchin. Clean energy initiatives could affect his bottom line in multiple ways because that bottom line is joined at the hip to one of the biggest drivers of climate change in the world: the fossil fuel industry.Put simply, the US senator is blocking legislation that would demand better of the dirty energy companies that make up his investment portfolio and his 2022 election cycle contributors list. And, he’s doing so to the environmental, social and economic detriment of his state.According to a report by the West Virginia Climate Alliance, efforts at addressing climate change such as the Green New Deal, which Manchin has opposed, would create 10m jobs across the nation and introduce regulations that could clean West Virginia’s notoriously polluted waterways – a byproduct of the state’s reliance on coal.Manchin’s own coal company, which he formed before assuming public office, has earned him $5.2m in dividends over the past 10 years. Manchin also has received more money from oil and gas companies than any other senator in next year’s election.As Manchin has gotten richer, his state has gotten warmer. The decrease in cold snaps through the year could, according to the Climate Alliance report, bring about a proliferation of invasive plant species and a significant increase in ticks which transmit Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever.But, putting personal profits over his own party and its environmental initiatives is hardly new for Manchin. In fact, it’s a fundamental part of the story behind his rise to power.Before he was the single greatest source of frustration for Democrats in America, he showed West Virginia he would rather work with Republicans against his own party than support anything that resembled environmentalism.In 1996, Charlotte Pritt beat Manchin in the Democratic primary for governor – the only person, to this day, to hand him a defeat in an election. But Pritt ran as an environmentalist, urging West Virginia to develop industries that weren’t centered on polluting the earth and creating deplorable working conditions.Shortly after losing to Pritt, Manchin sent 900 letters to top Democrats around the state saying he wouldn’t support Pritt because she wasn’t “interested in the concerns of moderate and conservative Democrats”. Instead, Manchin’s letter added he would be supporting the Republican candidate, Cecil Underwood. Underwood won.But, two decades later, economists and climate scientists have sided with Pritt, not Manchin, on what’s best for the state.A 2019 report from the West Virginia Center on Budget & Policy emphasized the dangers of the state continuing to depend on its “rich non-renewable depleting natural resources”, because it made terrible financial sense. Failures to diversify the economy, the author wrote, only perpetuates the boom and bust economies that have plagued the state and put it on a “collision course with efforts to combat climate change.”Nicolas Zégre, a hydrologist at West Virginia University, agrees that there is a false dichotomy where economic progress is wrongly pitted against combating climate change. Zégre, who researches flood risk vulnerability in West Virginia, said in fact it’s the opposite: the state and its already struggling economy can’t afford to continue to be battered by climate change.Pelosi ‘very confident’ Democrats will reach deal to salvage Biden agendaRead more“What are our elected representatives doing to protect West Virginians? The answer is very little.”For Zégre, the way forward for Manchin and anyone claiming to represent the interest of West Virginians is to invest in a sustainable and clean version of what this state could be, adding “none of that is going to happen until our decision makers, first of all, acknowledge that climate change is happening”.One example of how Zégre sees the state positioning itself for both economic diversification and a shift towards alleviating climate change is by cleaning up its waterways – 70% of which are too dirty to “support natural biological function”.A shift towards clean water, according to Zégre, would create a pathway for West Virginia to provision even more water than it does for surrounding states, a practice that’s only going to increase in value as climate change causes unprecedented droughts.Zégre urges West Virginia’s politicians, especially Manchin, to realize how vulnerable their state is to the reality of climate change.“We have so much opportunity, yet many of our leaders look backwards for a model of what the future should be.”TopicsWest VirginiaClimate crisisDemocratsUS CongressUS SenateUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Fossil fuel messaging has won over Republican voters, poll reveals

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      Climate crimesEnvironmentFossil fuel messaging has won over Republican voters, poll revealsNew polling data shows two-thirds of Republicans do not want to hold oil and gas companies accountable for the climate crisis Supported byAbout this contentAlvin Chang and Andrew WitherspoonTue 26 Oct 2021 08.00 EDTNearly two in three Republicans believe oil and gas companies are at least somewhat responsible for the climate crisis – but they don’t want to keep these companies accountable.In fact, even when they were told that oil and gas companies knowingly misled the public about their products driving climate change, most Republicans said the public and the government should not hold those companies accountable.These findings are part of a new YouGov poll commissioned by the Guardian, Vice News and Covering Climate Now, which reveal America’s lasting attachment to the fossil fuel industry.Most Republicans believe oil and gas companies are somewhat responsible for climate changeThe poll findings suggest that much of the marketing campaigns that fossil fuel companies have released to paint themselves in a positive light have worked.Revealed: 60% of Americans say oil firms are to blame for the climate crisisRead moreAbout 90% of Republicans said they have neutral or positive feelings toward America’s two biggest fossil fuel companies, Shell and Exxon. But about half of Democrats said the same, despite more than 90% of them saying oil and gas companies were at least somewhat responsible for climate change.Notably more Americans had negative opinions about BP, possibly linked to the negative publicity the company received after the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig accident in the Gulf of Mexico, which is still the biggest oil spill in American history.Opinions on top oil and gas companies are split down party linesFor decades oil and gas companies ignored their own scientists who told them their products were harmful to people and the environment as early as the 1970s.In fact, they bankrolled multimillion-dollar campaigns to downplay the climate crisis and misled the public by saying global heating was a theory not based in scientific fact.This poll shows these efforts have been largely successful, especially among Republicans who have been heavily influenced by misleading stories in conservative media like Fox News.Majority of Americans don’t think oil and gas companies participated in climate change disinformationOil and gas companies have also pushed advertising that insinuates that individuals should be responsible for climate change, not corporations like themselves.According to this poll, their efforts have worked – even on Democrats. The idea of a “carbon footprint” was introduced by fossil fuel companies to encourage individuals to reduce their emissions, and framed Earth’s runaway emissions as a problem to be changed by habit.Meanwhile, researchers have found that just 20 oil and gas companies are responsible for more than one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide since 1965.What Americans say they’re willing to do or already do to mitigate the climate crisisIn a covert recording released by Greenpeace earlier this year, the Exxon lobbyist Keith McCoy is heard on camera saying the company is actively fighting the Biden administration’s efforts on climate change, and admits that Exxon pushed back against climate science – something most Americans don’t know yet.“Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes. Did we hide our science? Absolutely not. Did we join some of these shadow groups to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that’s true. But there’s nothing, there’s nothing illegal about that,” he says in the recording. “We were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders.”This story is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of news outlets strengthening coverage of the climate storyTopicsEnvironmentClimate crimesUS politicsOil (Environment)Fossil fuelsEnergyOil (Business)newsReuse this content More

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      Lethal ‘forever chemicals’ taint our food, water and even blood. The EPA is stalling | David Bond

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      OpinionPollutionLethal ‘forever chemicals’ taint our food, water and even blood. The EPA is stallingDavid BondThere is no longer any population or place on earth untouched by PFAS contamination. We are living through a toxic experiment with no control group Sun 24 Oct 2021 06.31 EDTLast modified on Sun 24 Oct 2021 06.32 EDTThis week the EPA announced a new roadmap to research, restrict, and remediate PFAS – a group of industrial “forever chemicals” that have been linked to cancer and are found in our food, water, and even our blood. President Biden is requesting $10bn in the infrastructure bill to address PFAS. But this new attention still falls short of what’s required to confront an unprecedented crisis that affects the health of the entire United States and countless people across the world.EPA unveils new strategy to address US contamination of ‘forever’ chemicalsRead moreToday, toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are everywhere we’ve thought to look for them. As engineered, these synthetic chemicals glide through air and water with ease, evade all natural processes of decay, and inflict debilitating injuries even at exceedingly low levels of exposure. The petrochemical industry has its fingerprints all over the ubiquity of PFAS, yet that very ubiquity is now being used as an excuse against doing anything about it. PFAS are becoming too toxic to fail.The EPA’s hyped national PFAS testing strategy bemoans how “impossible” it is for the EPA “to expeditiously understand, let alone address, the risks these substances may pose to human health and the environment.” Overwhelmed by rampant PFAS contamination, the EPA is asking the petrochemical industry to study these chemicals one by one in the hopes of eventually building enough data to regulate them. Yes, one by one. The timeline proposed will take another century (or two) to make its way through the entire family of PFAS, which now number in the thousands.The manifold ways that PFAS makes a mockery of our regulation of toxins cannot be the end of our ability to prosecute petrochemical malfeasance. Rather, this should be the start to fixing everything that went wrong.The companies behind PFAS knew about its toxicity for decades, but that knowledge was hidden in corporate archives and subject to shamefully lax government oversight.When 3M and DuPont learned about alarming patterns of birth defects and cancers in their own workers at PFAS plants in the 1970s and 1980s, both companies smothered the evidence. In the 1970s, the navy and air force looked the other way when they found PFAS migrating off their bases and into nearby communities. By the 1990s, 3M and DuPont both realized that their PFAS operations were polluting municipal drinking water at levels they considered harmful. As revealed by investigative reporting and dramatized in the 2019 film Dark Waters, corporate executives helped destroy the evidence while giving false assurances to residents and regulators alike.Over the past century, the petrochemical industry had countless opportunities to recognize the dangers of PFAS and install safeguards. Instead, they launched even more PFAS into the world. In defiance of their own internal scientific appraisals of the deadly effects of PFAS, 3M and DuPont integrated these chemicals into a widening array of industrial ingredients, firefighting equipment, and consumer goods. Incredibly, both companies also disposed PFAS waste into watersheds providing drinking water to more than 20 million Americans and irrigation to farms in 13 states.Over the past 50 years, 3M and DuPont manufactured more than enough PFAS to contaminate the drinking water of every single American. PFAS was sold to plastics plants, carpet and shoe factories, and oil and gas drilling sites across the US, where it was routinely discarded by the ton into the environment. Some industries even endorsed the distribution of PFAS-laden waste to farmers as a soil supplement.Now worried about impending liability, the petrochemical industry and the military are busy torching stockpiles of PFOA and PFOS (the two PFAS compounds closest to being regulated) despite growing concern that burning merely redistributes these inflammable toxins, especially into the poor communities of color where waste incinerators cynically base their operations. As the US and Europe move towards regulating some PFAS chemicals, the petrochemical industry is moving PFAS operations to more permissive regimes in Brazil, China, India, and Russia.Each time the question of containing PFAS came into view, 3M, DuPont, and now Chemours launched a perfluorinated blitzkrieg. They flooded the zone. And looking back, a rather demented product defense strategy becomes apparent: total contamination. Rather than controlling PFAS toxicity, the petrochemical industry universalized it.By the time sickened industrialworkers and farmers demanded action, lawyers pried open the corporate archive, and the EPA started issuing voluntary guidelines for a handful of PFAS compounds, it was almost too late to clean up the mess. The poison was out of the bag. An EPA review released this week identified more than 120,000 sites in the US alone that are probably contaminated with PFAS.There is no longer any population or place on earth untouched by PFAS contamination. We are living through a toxic experiment with no control group. This alarming reality trips up the comparative methods typically used to study toxicity and public health. It is also becoming a rather shameless legal argument in courtrooms across the country.When PFAS was discovered in my hometown of Bennington, Vermont, the plastics factory that emitted these chemicals for decades landed on a novel defense: that PFAS are so pervasive that it’s impossible to determine who is responsible. Residential trash with trace amounts of PFAS and the world at large, the company argued, were the real perpetrators of our PFAS troubles, not the plastics factory that accepted delivery of PFAS by the truckload for more than 30 years.And now American Chemistry Council lobbyists and defense attorneys for the petrochemical industry are hard at work nominating PFAS contamination to the welcoming committee of a brave new world of total contamination. It’s a planetary future they cast as inevitable, surprisingly democratic, and without any liable author. According to their victim-blaming PR campaign, anyone who has worn a Gore-Tex rain jacket or thrown away a McDonalds wrapper is just as guilty as the companies that illegally hid the toxicity of PFAS while spewing millions of pounds of this poison into our lives.PFAS are everywhere, but this disconcerting fact should not distract us from the petrochemical operations holding the smoking gun – smoking, in no small part, because they are still emitting PFAS. The omnipresence of PFAS does not lessen the threat they pose to our health, but it does mean we need bolder ways of prosecuting these environmental crimes against humanity.Yet instead of toughening regulation of the petrochemical industry, the EPA and many state agencies are throwing their hands up at the sheer ubiquity of the problem.Regulatory agencies are proposing natural “background levels” for a synthetic chemical conjured up a mere 75 years ago – in effect giving tacit approval for the history of gross negligence that got us here. That’s not all. The agencies shift blame for this predicament to residents by listing household items containing trace amounts of PFAS alongside factories that emitted it by the ton annually, as if those are equivalent sources; agencies refrain from sampling groundwater near industries suspected of using PFAS; agencies stack science committees with industry lobbyists while putting up roadblocks for independent scientists to participate; agencies applaud a pyrrhic victory of finally deciding to regulate PFOA and PFOS some 20 years after they learned about their toxicity while the petrochemical industry happily churns out a witches’ brew of new unregulated PFAS chemicals; and agencies endorse incineration as a PFAS disposal method while acknowledging that there is no evidence that combustion destroys these flameproof chemicals. And, of course, they make grand commitments to keep studying the problem in the hopes of taking action in, oh, a decade or so.Revealed: more than 120,000 US sites feared to handle harmful PFAS ‘forever’ chemicalsRead moreThe point is clear: by way of regulatory indifference, delay, and now despair, responsibility for the toxicity of forever chemicals is shifting from the corporations who profited from them to the communities who must now live with them.All is not lost. While PFAS inspires paralysis in state agencies, people living on the frontlines of this crisis – in rural towns next to military bases, working-class neighborhoods adjacent to plastics factories, communities of color near incinerators burning PFAS – insist we do everything we can, now. They demand an immediate stop to all releases of PFAS. They demand we compel the industry and the military to start cleaning up sources of PFAS contamination. They demand we ban PFAS as a family of chemicals, not only in the US but across the world. They demand we pass the PFAS Accountability Act, legislation that insists manufacturers retain liability for all the damage PFAS inflicts after they leave the factory. And they demand we hold polluters fully accountable for the decades of damage they’ve done.These communities insist polluters pay for water filtration systems for every affected home and business, medical monitoring for the lifetime of worry that people in polluted communities now carry, and independent scientific monitoring for the generations that PFAS will haunt affected areas.The EPA and state agencies must follow their lead. We cannot retreat into a broken system of indifference and carefully planned inaction. Nor can the ubiquity of PFAS become an excuse for those that profitably manufactured this mess. Any further delay would be an epic dereliction of duty.
      David Bond is the associate director of the Center for the Advancement of Public Action (CAPA) at Bennington College. He leads the “Understanding PFOA” project and is writing a book on PFAS contamination
      TopicsPollutionOpinionUS Environmental Protection AgencyDuPontUS politicscommentReuse this content More

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      Climate advocates who backed Sinema exasperated by blocking of Biden bill

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      DemocratsClimate advocates who backed Sinema exasperated by blocking of Biden billArizona senator – who once led the state Green party – has refused to specify which parts of the $3.5tn budget bill she objects to Maanvi Singh@maanvissinghFri 22 Oct 2021 06.05 EDTLast modified on Fri 22 Oct 2021 06.06 EDTWildfires, deadly heat, drought and flooding show how climate change has “already arrived” in Arizona and action is desperately needed, according to climate and progressive advocates who helped elect Kyrsten Sinema to represent the state in the Senate.Many of them are wondering why their senator seems to have “turned her back” on her background in environmental politics and is now blocking Democrats’ multitrillion-dollar legislation to address climate change.“The climate crisis is here – it has already arrived in Arizona,” said Vianey Olivarria, a director of Chispa Arizona, the state branch of the League of Conservation Voters, which had endorsed Sinema for senator. “We don’t have a lot of time to waste.”Sinema is one of two centrist senators – with Joe Manchin of West Virginia – who have opposed the Biden administration’s $3.5tn budget bill that contains the bulk of the Democrats’ climate change agenda.This summer, the earth in parts of Arizona cracked – desiccated by decades of megadrought. But some communities also flooded. Ferocious wildfires have eaten through half a million acres this year. And a prolonged, record-breaking heatwave – supercharged by human-caused climate change – killed dozens in Phoenix and surrounding suburbs.This week Sinema was back at the White House for private talks with Joe Biden on the legislation, which would need the votes of all 50 Democratic senators to pass. It would enact dramatic cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, boost renewable energy programs and fund climate resiliency programs.Sinema’s office has emphatically contested New York Times reporting earlier this month that Sinema demanded $100bn in cuts specifically to climate programs. But she has said little in public on her position and her obstruction of the reconciliation package overall has confused, disappointed and angered progressive voters and climate activists in her home state.Indeed, Sinema began her political career leading the Arizona Green party. Over the years, her politics shifted – and she positioned herself as a moderate Democrat willing and able to work with Republicans that dominated state politics – but even then, she said she modeled herself after the late John McCain, the Republican senator of Arizona who pushed for bipartisan climate action throughout his career.“When Senator Sinema ran for office, she promised to fight for climate change and invest in our communities,” said Casey Clowes, an organizer with the Sunrise Movement in Tempe, Arizona. In 2018, Clowes said she voted for Sinema, and volunteered for more than 250 hours to help send Sinema – the first Arizona Democrat in 30 years – to the Senate. “Now she’s been unaccountable and inaccessible,” Clowes said. “I think a lot of us are fed up.”On Thursday, a group of veterans advising Sinema resigned, and accused her of hanging her constituents “out to dry”.Unlike Manchin, Sinema has not publicly voiced her concerns with the reconciliation bill – aside from rejecting its overall price tag.Manchin, a conservative Democrat who has received more in political donations from the oil and gas industry than any other senator, has made clear that he objects to provisions that would slash planet-heating emissions. But Sinema – who has become infamous for evading questions from constituents and journalists – recently told the Arizona Republic that she had “an interest in policies addressing climate change”, without offering much detail on which policies she was interested in. The senator has resisted raises to individual income and corporate tax rates to fund climate change and social safety net programs but hasn’t made clear what alternative funding schemes she would support.“Since she’s been in office, it’s been nearly impossible for community members to connect with her,” said Columba Sainz, a consultant with Moms Clean Air Force in Arizona. “We don’t know whether Sinema will protect us.”Sainz, whose youngest daughter has wheezing episodes and respiratory problems triggered by poor air quality, said: “In my family, heat is our enemy. It interacts with stagnant air to create and trap ozone pollution.” She works with other families who cannot afford air conditioning during punishing heatwaves. The state recorded more than 500 heat-related deaths in 2020, which public health experts say is probably an undercount. In Maricopa county alone, officials tallied at least 113 heat-related deaths this year so far.Who is Kyrsten Sinema? Friends and foes ponder an Arizona Senate enigmaRead more“We need funding for adapting to climate change,“ said Gregg Garfin, a climatologist at the University of Arizona. Several cities in Arizona, including Phoenix and Flagstaff, have already made climate change a priority, starting community programs to harvest rainwater amid drought or plant trees to shield poor, urban neighborhoods from the punishing summer heat. “But addressing the crisis has been an unfunded mandate,” he said. “They need more investment.”The budget bill endorsed by the majority of Democrats in Congress would finance a Green Bank to help communities install solar panels and electric vehicle charging stations, and create a Civilian Climate Corps of young Americans to build climate-resilient infrastructure.Clowes, who has a chronic illness that makes her especially vulnerable to heatstroke, said Sinema’s resistance to legislation that could help fund cooling centers and heat-defying infrastructure, and bring down the emissions fueling extreme heat in the region, has left her angry. Along with other members of the Sunrise Movement, Clowes camped outside Sinema’s office in Phoenix this week. “It’s really painful to watch my home become uninhabitable,” she said. “And see Senator Sinema turn her back.”TopicsDemocratsUS SenateUS politicsClimate crisisnewsReuse this content More

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      Manchin thwarts Biden’s climate plan: Politics Weekly Extra

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      As Joe Biden gears up for his trip to Glasgow for the Cop26 summit, Senator Joe Manchin continues to try to water down the reconciliation bill, which as it stands includes transformational provisions to stem the adverse affects of the climate crisis. Joan Greve and Oliver Milman look at the potential fallout for the world if Manchin gets his way

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      ‘No more time to waste,’ chair of House climate panel warns ahead of Cop26

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      Climate crisis‘No more time to waste,’ chair of House climate panel warns ahead of Cop26Democrat Kathy Castor warns that even Biden’s ambitious Build Back Better bill ‘doesn’t really get us to net zero by 2050’ Lauren Gambino in Washington@laurenegambinoThu 21 Oct 2021 03.00 EDTLast modified on Thu 21 Oct 2021 03.01 EDTThe alarm bells are ringing. A code red has been declared. With no less than the future of the planet at stake, Kathy Castor, chair of the select committee on the climate crisis, has warned Democrats that there is precious little time left to enact the US president’s aggressive climate agenda and avert the most catastrophic impacts of global warming.“We just don’t have any more time to waste,” the Florida congresswoman said in an interview with the Guardian ahead of crucial UN climate talks in Scotland. “We have got to act now or else we’re condemning our children and future generations to a really horrendous time.”‘This is our last chance’: Biden urged to act as climate agenda hangs by a threadRead moreClimate scientists say the world must keep the average global temperature from rising more than 1.5C (2.7F) compared with the pre-industrial era, or risk catastrophically more dangerous effects of climate change. Upon rejoining the global effort to confront the climate crisis, Joe Biden vowed that the US would cut emissions by 50% to 52% below 2005 levels by the end of the decade.Perhaps the best hope of achieving that goal is embedded in legislation pending before Congress that must overcome the objections of a coal-state senator and razor-thin Democratic majorities. If enacted, Castor said the plan to slash planet-heating emissions by accelerating America’s transition away from fossil fuels would be “the most important and far-reaching clean energy and climate bill ever passed by the US Congress”.But with days left before Biden is expected to depart for the summit, significant obstacles remain.Senator Joe Manchin, one of the party’s last remaining holdouts, made clear that he would not support a proposed clean electricity program, effectively gutting the most powerful piece of Democrats’ climate plan. The $150bn proposal, known as the Clean Electricity Performance Program, used a carrot-and-stick approach to reward energy utilities that transitioned from coal and natural gas toward clean power sources like wind, solar and nuclear energy, and penalizing those that do not.Now White House officials and congressional negotiators are scrambling to salvage pieces of the plan while finding alternative policies that will keep the US on track to meet the president’s emissions targets, including, potentially, a tax on carbon dioxide pollution.“It’s clear that investing in clean electricity is one of the most effective ways to unlock emission reductions and create good-paying jobs across our economy, which is why we’ve fought to include a robust Clean Electricity Performance Program in the Build Back Better Act,” Castor said in a statement following news of Manchin’s objection to the program. “Every step we take now to clean up our electricity sector will make a world of difference in the decades to come – and we cannot afford to keep kicking the can down the road.”After the Democratic takeover of the House in 2018, Castor was tapped to lead the newly created House select committee on the climate crisis. Its task was to conduct research and hearings that would educate the public about the threat posed by climate change and pave the way for mitigation legislation.Last year, the panel’s Democratic members released a sprawling climate plan that aimed to put the nation on the path to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. It also aimed to make environmental justice a priority by focusing on the communities that are the most vulnerable to climate change.A summer of devastating heatwaves, wildfires and hurricanes has made the risk of inaction painfully clear to Americans across the country, Castor said, speaking from Tampa, Florida, where rising sea levels are no longer a threat but a costly reality for many residents.“When you have farmers whose crops or livestock have been flooded out or dropping from an extreme heat, or wildfires are burning through your town, or your electric grid isn’t resilient and people die in Texas because of a cold snap, that’s a wake-up call,” Castor said. “And I think now people are really looking at policymakers and asking, ‘What are you going to do about it?’”Republicans remain a chief obstacle to Democrats’ climate goals.After years of denialism, there is a growing acceptance of climate science among rank-and-file Republicans, particularly those representing frontline districts battered by climate-fueled disasters. And yet, the party remains largely opposed to plans to stop burning fossil fuels, which climate scientists say is the most efficient and effective strategy to guard against an even hotter planet.Castor said Republicans are missing a once-in-a-generation economic opportunity. Democrats have touted the transition to clean energy as an economic boon, with the president repeatedly promising “jobs, jobs, jobs”.“As clean energy grows in districts across the country, you’ll see more Republicans finally understanding it creates jobs and is less costly for the folks they represent,” Castor predicted. “That’s kind of the only pathway out of the trap they’ve gotten themselves into – to talk about climate but not do anything about it.”Democrats face a difficult electoral map in 2022, with their control of both chambers at risk. Many activists and Democratic lawmakers believe they have one, perhaps fleeting, chance to aggressively confront climate change before possibly losing their majorities to Republicans, who are far less likely to act on the crisis.Castor believes that the Democrats’ spending bill cannot be the last legislative action taken by this Congress. But she is less concerned by the political deadline than the scientific one.Despite the difficulty of finding a consensus among Democrats on climate legislation, Castor believes there is more Congress can do this term. As an example, she pointed to a funding bill passed by the House that aims to minimize the carbon footprint of the Department of Defense, by making military bases more resilient and bolstering investments in research to better understand the security implications posed by climate change.At the same time, she expects the president will continue to use his executive authority and the rule-making powers of the Environmental Protection Agency to combat climate change.“We’ll have a lot more to do,” she said. “Even if we pass the Build Back Better Act as it is, that doesn’t really get us to net zero by 2050, which is the goal.”Democrats are increasingly optimistic that they will send Biden to Glasgow with an agreement that proves the US is capable of making good on its climate promises. How Democrats accomplish this – and whether they can do it by 31 October, when the summit is due to begin – is unclear.TopicsClimate crisisHouse of RepresentativesUS politicsBiden administrationCop26featuresReuse this content More

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      Joe Manchin leads opposition to Biden’s climate bill, backed by support from oil, gas and coal

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      US CongressJoe Manchin leads opposition to Biden’s climate bill, backed by support from oil, gas and coal West Virginia senator objects to bill that would steadily retire the coal industry which continues to provide ample financial support to himOliver Milman@olliemilmanWed 20 Oct 2021 06.00 EDTLast modified on Wed 20 Oct 2021 13.28 EDTIn the tumult of negotiations over the most consequential climate legislation ever proposed in the US, there is growing scrutiny of the fossil fuel industry connections of the man poised to tear down the core of the bill – the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin.Manchin, a centrist Democrat, has objected to key provisions of a multitrillion-dollar reconciliation bill that would slash planet-heating emissions and help the US, and the world, to avert catastrophic climate breakdown. In a finely balanced Senate, Democrats need all 50 of their senators to vote for the bill, with no Republicans willing to vote for the climate measures.The legislation would steadily retire the coal industry that once formed the backbone of the West Virginia economy and continues to provide ample financial support to Manchin, who has spent the past four decades as a political heavyweight in his Appalachian home state, including acting as its secretary of state, governor and now US senator.Chart showing Joe Manchin has received the largest donations across multiple energy sectorsIn the current electoral cycle, Manchin has received more in political donations from the oil and gas industry than any other senator, more than double the second largest recipient. He is also the No 1 beneficiary of donations from the coal mining sector, leads the way in money accepted from gas pipeline operators, and is sixth in the ranking of senatorial donations from electricity utilities.This industry largesse has led to accusations that the senator has been unduly influenced by the companies that have helped stoke the climate crisis. Manchin’s office did not respond to a request for comment.But Manchin’s ties to the fossil fuel industry run deeper than political donations. After initially working in his family’s furniture and carpet business, Manchin set up a coal brokerage firm called Enersystems in 1988, running it until he became a full-time politician.The majority of Manchin’s assets are in a coal brokerage firm’s stockDespite handing control of Enersystems to his son Joseph, Manchin’s links to the business have proved fruitful to the senator. His shares in Enersystems are worth between $1m and $5m, according to his latest financial disclosure document, with the senator receiving more than $5m in dividend income from the company over the past decade. The coal brokerage represents 71% of Manchin’s investment income, and about a third of his total net worth.The reconciliation bill contains a huge expansion in tax support for clean energy and electric vehicles and new curbs on methane, a potent greenhouse gas, but the core of the climate measures is something called a Clean Electricity Performance Program (CEPP). The $150bn scheme would use payments and penalties to spur utilities to phase out fossil fuels from the US electricity system over the coming decade.The program, along with the clean energy tax credits, “are the best shot we’ve had in a generation to supercharge the clean energy transition and reduce fossil fuel pollution in marginalized communities”, said Patrick Drupp, deputy legislative director of the Sierra Club.Manchin has called the bill’s spending “reckless” and said it “makes no sense” to pay utilities to increase their share of renewable energy when they are doing so already. This is despite the fact that barely any utilities across the US are adding solar, wind and other sources of clean energy at the rate envisioned by the bill to force emissions down quickly enough to stave off climate disaster.“His statement on this is demonstrably false. Utilities aren’t growing renewables that quickly, certainly not in West Virginia,” said Robbie Orvis, senior director of energy policy design at Energy Innovation. “It’s not a secret he has ties to the coal industry. One would hope anyone elected to Congress would not hold significant financial holdings in industries they would consider regulating, but that’s the system we have, unfortunately.”Recent analysis by Energy Innovation found that the CEPP is the “carbon reduction lynchpin” of the legislation, representing around a third of the emissions cuts that would come from the bill. “It’s really unfortunate that the CEPP is not on the table anymore,” said Orvis. “But this bill would still result in a huge cut in greenhouse gas emissions, it does a lot. There may be a way to fill the gaps left by CEPP.”Projected emission reductions of Build Back Better programs by 2030Joe Biden has set a goal for the US to cut its planet-heating emissions in half this decade, before zeroing them out by 2050. America is currently on track for a 17% to 25% cut in emissions by 2030, an analysis released on Tuesday by Rhodium Group found, leaving up to 2.3bn tons of emissions left to eliminate in order to meet the goal. John Larsen, director of Rhodium Group, said that with further cuts from the federal government and states, “the US’s ambitious 2030 climate target is within reach, even with a more limited policy package from Congress”. But he added: “The US and the world have little time or room for error to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.”TopicsUS CongressOil and gas companiesCoalOilUS politicsFossil fuelsEnergy industrynewsReuse this content More

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      ‘This is our last chance’: Biden urged to act as climate agenda hangs by a thread

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      Climate crisis‘This is our last chance’: Biden urged to act as climate agenda hangs by a threadFailure to pass legislation to cut emissions before the UN summit in Glasgow could be catastrophic for efforts to curb global heating Oliver Milman in New York and Lauren Gambino in WashingtonMon 18 Oct 2021 06.00 EDTLast modified on Mon 18 Oct 2021 16.25 EDTWith furious environmental activists at the gates of the White House, and congressional Democrats fretting that a priceless opportunity to tackle catastrophic global heating may be slipping away, Joe Biden is facing mounting pressure over a climate agenda that appears to be hanging by a thread.Biden’s allies have warned that time is running perilously short, both politically and scientifically, for the US to enact sweeping measures to slash planet-heating emissions and spur other major countries to do the same. Failure to do so will escalate what scientists have said are “irreversible” climate impacts such as disastrous heatwaves, floods, wildfires and a mass upheaval of displaced people.The climate disaster is here – this is what the future looks likeRead moreThe administration’s multitrillion-dollar social spending package, widely considered the most comprehensive climate legislation ever put forward in the US, must survive razor-thin Democratic majorities in Congress and, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has vowed, pass in time for crucial UN climate talks in Scotland that begin in about two weeks.Embedded in the measure are plans to dramatically cut carbon emissions warming the planet and fueling climate disasters, a potentially historic set of policies that Pelosi has said would serve as “a model for the world”. But the 31 October deadline for passing the spending package and a smaller companion infrastructure bill appears increasingly ambitious as negotiations drag on between the White House, Democratic leaders and a pair of centrist holdouts in the Senate.The prospect of the world’s leading economic power arriving in Glasgow with no domestic policy to cut emissions will make it harder to convince other major emitters, primarily China, to do more at a time when governments are collectively failing to avert unlivable global heating.“They will look ridiculous if they show up with nothing,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat, told Guardian. “It would be bad for US leadership, bad for the talks and disastrous for the climate. Just disastrous.“The vast majority of Senate Democrats understand this is our last chance to act,” Whitehouse continued. The bill includes a program of payments and penalties to ensure utilities phase out fossil fuels from America’s electricity supply, a huge expansion in tax credits for clean energy and new restrictions on methane, a potent greenhouse gas that is emitted from oil and gas drilling. The legislation would slash US emissions by about 1bn tons by 2030, bringing Biden within striking distance of his target of cutting America’s emissions in half by this point.Whitehouse also revealed that the president’s administration “will not oppose” a new price on carbon emissions being added to the bill, following negotiations with Senate Democrats. “We have a very good chance of getting that,” he said. The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the talks.The carbon fee, which would initially be set at $15 per ton of emissions before rising rapidly upwards over the course of several years, has long been a favored policy of economists and some moderate Republicans as a way to encourage polluters to switch to cleaner energy but has latterly been disregarded by activists and progressives.However, these measures will have to garner the vote of every Democrat in the Senate to pass, with Joe Manchin, a centrist from West Virginia, skeptical of the size and scope of the $3.5tn spending proposal. Manchin, a major recipient of donations from the coal industry, has said it “makes no sense” to pay utilities to phase in solar and wind power.Manchin is reportedly set to block the clean electricity program, which forms the main muscle of the climate package. This could prove a hugely consequential blow to the effort to constrain dangerous global heating. “This is high on the list of most consequential actions ever taken by an individual senator,” tweeted the climate campaigner Bill McKibben. “You’ll be able to see the impact of this vain man in the geologic record.”Whitehouse admitted it was unclear what Manchin will ultimately do but that he was confident that “there’s a window in which negotiations with Joe can produce a bill to reduce emissions enough so we are not in danger’s way.”Democrats are working feverishly to trim the $3.5tn proposal to about $2tn, in order to win the votes of centrists without losing the support of progressives. Among the many pressing questions Democrats must answer as they hurtle to meet their end-of-the-month deadline is how bold to go on climate.“There’s a lot of talk recently about what progressive lawmakers need to be willing to cut – what we have to be willing to negotiate on?” Senator Ed Markey, a lead proponent of the Green New Deal, said on a call with reporters this week. “Well, we can’t negotiate with deadly wildfires. They don’t negotiate. We cannot negotiate with massive hurricanes. They don’t negotiate. We can’t negotiate with floodwaters, sea level rise and drought and temperature rise. We can’t negotiate how much these climate-fueled disasters are costing us, tens of billions of dollars so far this year.“It’s time for us to stop talking about what is politically feasible, and start talking about what is scientifically necessary – we cannot compromise on science,” he said. Failure to pass the legislation would be disastrous for the US and the global community, the US climate envoy, John Kerry, said in an interview with the Associated Press.“It would be like President Trump pulling out of the Paris agreement, again,” he warned.The Build Back Better plan will put America on track to meet its goals, but it must not be the only action congress takes to combat the climate crisis, said congresswoman Kathy Castor, a Florida Democrat and chair of the House select committee on the climate crisis. More federal action is needed to meet the scale of the emergency, she said.“Even if we pass the Build Back Better Act as it is, that doesn’t get us to net-zero by 2050, which is the goal,” she said in an interview. Pointing to the latest climate research and a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that declared a “code red” for humanity, she added: “We are going to have to do more.”While Biden can do little about the machinations of the Senate, the president has come under growing criticism that his own actions have not matched his rhetoric. Biden, who has said that the “nation and the world are in peril” from a “code red” climate emergency, has reincorporated the US to the Paris climate agreement and sought to restore some of the environmental rules axed by Donald Trump.But his administration has also approved a flurry of new oil and gas drilling permits on public lands, urged oil-producing countries to ramp up production to help lower gasoline prices and declined to stop major fossil fuel projects such as Line 3, an oil pipeline expansion in Minnesota that has sparked violent clashes between police and those protesting against its construction. “I think [the administration] has missed an enormous opportunity to join the battle against those behind the problem – the fossil fuel industry,” said Whitehouse. Simmering resentment at the president exploded outside the White House last week, with four consecutive days of protests resulting in nearly 300 climate activists being arrested and removed by police. On Thursday, a banner was unfurled reading “We need real solutions, not false promises”, with protesters calling on Biden to declare a climate emergency and halt a slew of proposed pipelines and drilling projects – a report released by Oil Change International has found that 21 major fossil fuel projects under review by the administration would cause the emissions equivalent of 316 new coal-fired power plants if they went ahead.“We felt we had someone who had our back and then he [Biden] wavered,” said Joye Braun, a campaigner at the Indigenous Environmental Network who traveled from South Dakota for the protests. “He made a lot of promises to us, as Indigenous people, that he’s not following through on. To allow something like Line 3 makes no damn sense.”Climate scientists have echoed the need for urgency. The world is on course for nearly 3C of heating by the end of the century, which would bring punishing impacts to people around the globe. Precipitously steep emissions cuts need to occur immediately to avoid this turmoil, scientists say.“Unless we have greater progress on CO2 cuts we are faced with a miserable outcome,” said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke University. “A world above 2C is not a pretty one. This reconciliation bill isn’t enough and it’s discouraging to see the Biden administration still approving fossil fuel projects. That should be very much in our past.”In recent days, the White House and Democrats have sought to temper expectations that Democrats would reach a deal before the summit – and that a failure to meet their deadline would hurt Biden’s credibility as a global leader in the fight against climate change.“None of our objectives for the president’s climate agenda begins or ends on November 1 and 2, or the week after,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters last week. “Whether our agenda has passed or not is not going to be the defining factor.”The stars may not be aligned long to address climate breakdown. Democrats, having waited a decade for this opportunity, could lose control of Congress in midterm elections next year to a Republican party still unwilling to confront, or even acknowledge, the crisis. The prospect of not acting for another decade is almost unthinkable.“We can’t fail again,” said Whitehouse. “We just can’t.”TopicsClimate crisisJoe BidenBiden administrationUS SenateUS CongressUS politicsCop26newsReuse this content More