Fellow Democrat emerges as the enemy of Biden’s climate agenda ahead of Glasgow

President’s best hopes of passing any legislation on climate change – or anything for that matter – relies on a moderate Senator who co-founded a coal brokerage company, writes Eric Garcia

West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, centre, leaves the US Capitol following a vote on 27 October, 2021 (Getty Images)

Senator Joe Manchin has emerged as the main roadblock to Democrats’ plans on tackling the climate crisis as President Joe Biden heads to Glasgow for the climate summit, COP26.

Mr Biden has pushed the message that America is “back” on climate after his predecessor Donald Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement and mostly flouted government mandates on climate change. But in a Senate that is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, passing legislation on climate will be incredibly difficult.

As a result, Democrats’ only likely course of climate action would be through their planned social spending bill. Democrats plan to pass it through an arcane process known as budget reconciliation, which would allow them to pass a bill with only 51 votes as long as it is related to spending.

But that means that every Democrat needs to be on board, including Mr Manchin, who increasingly looks out of sync in an ever more liberal party. His first campaign featured him shooting an environmental regulation bill, showing his pro-gun bona fides. But then, he ultimately who wound up negotiating a doomed gun control bill after the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut with Republican Sen Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. As chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, he’s a large shareholder in a coal brokerage company he co-founded and his son now owns, but is now the main Senator who dictates his party, and therefore his president’s, climate agenda.

Thus, any time any Democrat promotes a new policy, reporters on Capitol Hill must ask, “What does Joe Manchin think of it?”

Similarly, any Democratic Senator must tread lightly when considering any proposal, lest they anger Mr Manchin. Last month, as Democrats in the House were balancing whether to vote for an infrastructure bill that passed on a bipartisan basis in the House before there was even text on the social spending bill, a reporter asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi if Mr Manchin said anything privately either to her or the president that made her confident.

“You think I’m gonna talk to you about my conversations with Joe Manchin in here?” she said.

Initially, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, an Independent from Vermont who caucuses with the Democrats, proposed an ambitious $6 trillion spending package that was then pared down to $3.5 trillion. But then, Mr Manchin came out in opposition to the $3.5 trillion number in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal.

Last month, Mr Manchin threw out a $1.5 trillion price tag and Democrats have been attempting to placate him ever since. This past weekend, Mr Manchin visited the president in Mr Biden’s hometown of Wilmington, Delaware to negotiate a framework of a deal with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer over breakfast.

Enter Mr Manchin. A West Virginian, Mr Manchin is in many ways a relic of a time when Democrats could appeal to white working-class voters in Appalachia. A large coal-producing state, the state’s office of Miner’s Health Safety & Training says all but two of the state’s 55 counties have coal.

Mr Manchin is one of two Democratic Senators who have long become a source of frustration for the rest of their caucus and the White House. This has inevitably led many to compare Mr Manchin to his fellow conservative Democrat Sen Kyrsten Sinema.

But the two face different political headwinds. While Ms Sinema, who became the first Democrat to win a Senate seat from Arizona since 1988, is from a state that is becoming more Democratic – her fellow Sen Mark Kelly from Arizona is also a Democrat and Mr Biden became the first Democrat to win Arizona since 1996 – West Virginia went from being solidly for Democrats to a staple of Republican politics. As a result, Mr Manchin needs to consistently worry about his right flank in the state.

West Virginia voted Democratic for decades before it started electing Republicans for president. George W Bush was the first non-incumbent Republican to win the state since 1932 because of concerns about Al Gore’s environmental policies. That same year, Mr Manchin was elected secretary of state before he was elected governor in 2004 when Sen John Kerry (now Mr Biden’s climate envoy) lost the state, and he won again in 2008, despite the state voting for John McCain.

In 2010, when longtime Democratic Sen Robert Byrd died, Mr Manchin jumped into the race and staved off a Republican mostly on the back of an ad showing him shooting Democrats’ proposed cap and trade environmental bill with a rifle, thereby also bragging about his endorsement from the National Rifle Association.

Mr Manchin also co-founded a coal brokerage firm in 1998 called Enersystems and still owns a large stake in the company, The Guardian reported. His son Joseph took over the company after the elder Manchin won his election in 2000, The New York Times reported.

Mr Manchin won re-election to a full term in 2012 despite Mr Obama losing the state. But Mr Trump won every county in West Virginia in 2016, when Hillary Clinton said during a CNN town hall in neighbouring Ohio “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” before saying “we don’t want to forget those people,” which infuriated Mr Manchin.

In 2018, Mr Manchin won by a much smaller margin, despite voting to confirm Mr Trump’s Supreme Court nominees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

Democrats’ two runoff Senate races in Georgia on 5 January gave them 50 seats and the majority, with Vice President Kamala Harris as a tie-breaker. As the Democratic Party has become liberal on economic and social policy, Mr Manchin remains a fairly conservative Democrat.

As a result, Democrats spend plenty of time meeting with Ms Sinema and Mr Manchin to find a way to win them over.

Similarly, Mr Manchin prioritises bipartisanship, frequently inviting other Senators back to the houseboat in which he lives in Washington called “Almost Heaven,” after the opening lines of John Denver’s song “Country Roads,” which is about West Virginia.

But Mr Manchin has also criticised many of the environmental provisions within the reconciliation bill, which is frequently called the Build Back Better Act. Earlier this month, he came out against the White House’s proposed Clean Electricity Performance Plan, which would have replaced coal and gas-fired power plants with clean energy like wind, solar and nuclear, The New York Times reported earlier this month.

Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, the democratic socialist congresswoman who is the architect of the Green New Deal, said she doesn’t think that Congress cannot pass two bills that in the sum total increase climate emissions for the sake of the United States’s credibility, which also includes the bipartisan infrastructure bill that passed in August.

“I think that the credibility of the United States on climate is very much on the line,” she said, adding that “Any effort to reduce our ability to reduce emissions is going to chip away at that.”

Mr Manchin’s spokeswoman Sam Runyon told the Times that the senator opposed using taxpayer dollars to do what companies are already planning on doing. Republican Sen Shelley Moore Capito, West Virginia’s other Senator, defended Mr Manchin’s position, saying she opposed it as well.

“I think it’s a punitive measure for certainly our state and we would lose a lot of jobs,” Ms Capito told The Independent. “And I think his opposition is reflecting how it would impact people we represent so I’m pleased that’s what he’s doing.”

Ms Capito said that since people don’t know what the president plans on saying in Glasgow or what he’s putting on the table, she would imagine the CEPP might have been part of it but the White House could have other things up their sleeve.

“We went through eight years under the Obama administration of very devastating job loss because of the regulatory and environmental pursuit of that administration without any consideration of the impacts for the working men and women of our state,” she said.

Mr Manchin, for his part, told reporters last week that he didn’t think his opposition to the CEPP would weaken Mr Biden’s negotiating ability in Glasgow.

“A lot of things we’ve done, more so than any other country,” he said.

Democratic Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota, who helped craft the CEPP, said she was confident there could be a replacement.

“I’m all about getting the emissions reductions that we would have gotten with the clean electricity plan and there’s a lot of conversations going on about that and I’m just going to continue to push to get the strongest possible emissions reductions in this plan,” she told The Independent.

But other Democrats are not as confident.

“Depending on how far we strip, that’s in the Build Back Better act, that’s going to determine how weak our position is,” Rep Jamaal Bowman told The Independent.

Mitch Jones, policy director for Food & Water Watch, told The Independent that the United States hasn’t been leading on climate change, which means that the impact wouldn’t be as strong otherwise.

“It’s certainly the case that if Congress is unable because of Joe Manchin’s delays to agree to an aggressive climate policy ahead of the president arriving in Glasgow, it will undermine the US ability to lead,” Mr Jones said. “The internal dilemmas of the America system for passing legislation are moot when it comes to global leadership.”