Joe Manchin and the Supreme Court have undeniably stalled and obstructed climate action with their decisions this summer.
Just two weeks after the US Supreme Court voted to handcuff EPA efforts to regulate power plant emissions, Senator Joe Manchin’s abominable decision to pull back from supporting funding for climate and environmental justice initiatives in a budget reconciliation bill—at least until September—has dealt a deep, potentially knock-out blow to the US’s efforts to tackle climate change.
I should probably write a post about how Manchin’s framing of his decision as being about our current, genuinely difficult economic reality is just dead wrong because, over and over again, analyses show that spending to address climate change now will save us enormously in the decades ahead.
I could write a post updating my framing of the SCOTUS decision in a recent interview with CNN’s Kim Brunhaber: that the EPA must make the most of its remaining authority to address emissions, state-level efforts to cut emissions must grow, and Congress must pass a reconciliation bill with robust funding for climate and clean energy if we are to live up to our 2030 emissions reduction goals. If we are left with just two legs on that already wobbly stool, a post about what we can still accomplish with those two legs and why we so desperately need the third would be appropriate, I’m sure.
Or how about a post comparing the $300 billion that reconciliation package could have invested in climate, jobs, and justice over the next ten years to other buckets of funding Congress has authorized over the past year—the $768 billion allocated to the Department of Defense for this year alone or the $54 billion in military aid to Ukraine since March, for example? A post that questions our priorities as a nation.
Or a post dissecting the level of fossil fuel industry support Joe Manchin and several of our supposedly non-partisan Supreme Court justices receive. A post about how out of step Congress is with the climate and energy policies Democratic and Republican voters want to see. A post about what it signals to the rest of the world that the nation that has contributed the most to global warming emissions over time refuses to take responsibility for its actions.
But writing any of those posts would require analytical level-headedness to outweigh the rage, disappointment, and heartache I feel right now. None of them would reveal how utterly gut-wrenching it is to try to explain to my kids why I’m upset. None of them would keep me from feeling like Manchin’s announcements and walkbacks over the last 24 hours are transparently callous, politically motivated equivocations. And none of them would prepare me for the question I dread getting most from reporters in the coming days: “Is there any hope left?”
Opinion | Manchin to Climate: Drop Dead | Kristy Dahl (commondreams.org)