On His Way Out The Door, Joe Manchin Plants A Big Wet Kiss On The LNG Industry – CleanTechnica

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Joe Manchin has made a pretty good living from the coal industry. For decades, he has reaped enormous profits from a company he founded that sells gob — a particularly dirty kind of coal left over from mining operations — to the very few thermal generating plants that still burn this low quality stuff, according to a report by Politico. He has also been a fierce critic of any new regulations designed to lower carbon emissions from coal-fired generating stations. If you were to say that Manchin is a political grifter, few would argue with you.

Manchin will retire from the Senate at the end of this year after serving the people of West Virginia — and himself — since 2010. He was instrumental in the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 — although, he has complained bitterly that the Biden administration has done things with that legislation that were never intended. In protest, he recently set aside his affiliation with the Democratic Party and declared himself to be an Independent.

Machin Has A Parting Gift For LNG

But before he leaves the fair city of Washington, DC, he has one more favor he wants to do for his buddies in the fossil fuel industry. In a blog post last week, Bill McKibben revealed that Joe Manchin announced recently he had drafted a new proposal for “permitting reform.” On the face of it, some of the new proposal makes real sense, McKibben said. Among other things, it would ease the process of approving the badly needed transmission lines for moving solar and wind power back and forth across the continent. Getting approvals to do that often takes years, which needlessly delays the transition to renewable energy.

But McKibben warns us to remember that Manchin has taken more money from the fossil fuel industry than anyone else in Congress, so it’s not surprising that there is a huge quid pro quo tied to his proposal. The proposal also tries to force the approval of huge new LNG export terminals in the Gulf of Mexico. This is not only disgusting on environmental justice grounds, McKibben says, but it will also be the single biggest greenhouse gas bomb on planet Earth.

Manchin & Project 2025

Jeremy Symons, the veteran climate analyst who has supplied the most relevant climate analyses throughout the LNG fight, told McKibben that if enacted, the LNG portion of the Manchin bill would “lock in new greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 165 coal fired power plants or more” and “erase the climate benefits of building 50 major renewable electricity transmission lines.”  And that, McKibben points out, is exactly what Project 2025 — the draconian plan cooked up by the Heritage Foundation as a blueprint for Trump 2.0 — calls for. It is a set of draconian proposals that would demolish most of the environmental protections put in place by the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act over the past 50 years.

In a sense, the US Supreme Court has already started that process by overturning the long standing Chevron doctrine and telling courts they should be making policy decisions on environment protection, not deep state operatives at the EPA, NOAA, and other government agencies who are actual scientists with real technical expertise.

In addition to making “Drill, Baby, Drill” the official policy of the United States, Project 2025 will also advocate for a national ban on abortion and empower government snoops to track every woman’s menstrual cycles and internet activity to detect whether she might be planning to seek an abortion in places where it is still legal. More than one commentator has noticed there is a strong correlation between the sexual strictures in Project 2025 and Margaret Atwood’s chilling The Handmaid’s Tale. In typical fashion, the Republican candidate for president says he knows nothing about Project 2025 while his handpicked vice presidential candidate wrote an introduction to it.

Manchin Finds Supporters In Congress

McKibben warns that the Manchin proposal is picking up support from others in Congress. Martin Heinrichs, the Democratic senator from New Mexico, endorsed it last Wednesday — which makes a certain amount of local sense, since the state derives an outsized share of its government revenues from taxes on gas production. But Heinrichs is selling out the planet to help his state. The question is, how many of his fellow Democrats will go along? Enough to allow this legislation to move through the upper chamber?

The ultimate goal of climate policy is not to rewire America so it can use more renewable energy, says McKibben. While that is a worthy goal — one that will make money for solar and wind developers — the primary objective is to prevent the planet from dangerously overheating. If you make renewable energy easier in America at the cost of addicting developing Asian economies to exported American LNG, you have taken an enormous step backwards. You will have also screwed over the American consumers who still depend on natural gas and will now pay more because shipping the stuff overseas creates shortages here at home and shortages lead to higher prices. That is one reason why Senators like Ed Markey of Massachusetts have taken a dim view of the law proposed by Manchin.

Green groups like the League of Conservation Voters, the Natural Resources Defense Council, EarthJustice, the Sierra Club, and Oil Change International all have made their opposition to the Manchin proposal known. For himself, McKibben says, this week saw the hottest temperatures on our planet in at least the last 125,000 years. What more do we need to stop pumping billions of tons of climate-heating gases into the atmosphere?

Keeping Our Eye On The Ball

This week saw the explosion of joy that comes when politicians stand up to business as usual, McKibben says, referring to the decision by Joe Biden to step aside and allow Kamala Harris to step out of his shadow and into the limelight. “Don’t undermine all of it with a ‘deal’ whose main beneficiary is Big Oil, he pleads. Don’t give Joe Manchin a gift on his way out the door. Don’t do what you did in 2015, when you opened the door to the oil and gas export boom. Don’t turn off the same young voters that Biden turned off by approving the Willow oil complex. Don’t get in the way of the momentum we’re trying to build as November approaches,” he pleads. “And on top of all that political reality, there’s reality reality as well. Physics doesn’t get a vote in Congress, but it gets the only vote that matters in the real world. Pay attention to it for once!”

The Takeaway

Maybe Joe Manchin thinks his political buddies owe him a favor to make up for how the Inflation Reduction Act supposedly went sideways after he voted for it. Or maybe he thinks there will be some sort of reward coming his way if he manages to shove this last gift to the fossil fuel industry through Congress.

Those proposed LNG terminals will be a carbon bomb the likes of which the world has never seen. They will make it virtually impossible for the Earth to avoid a total climate catastrophe, which is why a disgraced former president promised to make sure they get approved if the fossil fuel industry just donates $1 billion to his re-election campaign. The Biden administration has put a hold on approving those terminals, but a Trump-appointed judge has ruled that the administration did so illegally.

That case will find its way to the Supreme Court in due course, but the Manchin proposal would render that process moot and force those projects forward. “Big Oil is sneaky,” Bill McKibben says, “and they will use moments when our attention is diverted to advance their agenda.” That should come as no surprise to any regular readers of CleanTechnica.