Senate Dems: Don’t Let Manchin Do Big Oil One Last Favor

A story. In December of 2015, everyone who worked on climate issues was in Paris for the white-knuckled final negotiations of the historic accords. While that was going on, Big Oil’s friends in Congress passed—almost without debate—an end to the longstanding ban on oil exports from the U.S. I cobbled together—with the help of the Sierra Club’s Mike Brune—what may have been the only op-ed opposing the measure, in a Paris cafe fueled by pain au chocolat. But the Democratic Senators I reached out to back home laughed—it wasn’t a big deal, they said, and anyway they were getting a production tax credit for wind energy in return. They were wrong: America in a decade has gone from not exporting oil and gas to becoming the world’s biggest producer. Bigger than Russia and the Saudis.

The moral of the story is: Big Oil is sneaky, and they will use moments when attention is diverted (say, by the advent of a truly powerful new presidential candidate) to advance their agenda. And the point of the story is: They’re trying it again.

A couple of days ago—while all of us were paying attention to Brat Summer, heterosectionality, and the general splendor of Kamala Harris’ first week (huge thanks to the members of the climate community who came together online last night to raise huge money for the campaign)—Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) announced he had cobbled together a new proposal for “permitting reform.” On the face of it, some of the new proposal makes real sense: 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.

This week saw the hottest temperatures on our planet in at least the last 125,000 years. Get real.

But remember: Joe Manchin has taken more money from the fossil fuel industry than anyone else in D.C. (Which is saying something—he’s the Simone Biles of corruption). And so it’s not surprising that there’s a huge cost for this sane policy change: The bill will also try and force the approval of huge new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals along the Gulf Coast. This is not only disgusting on environmental justice grounds (watch Roishetta Ozane explain the cost to her community) but it is also the single biggest greenhouse gas bomb on planet Earth.

Jeremy Symons, the veteran climate analyst who has supplied the most relevant climate analyses throughout the LNG fight, came up with these numbers last night. If enacted, he said, 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.” It is exactly, to the letter, what Project 2025 has called for.

And yet it has some actual chance of passing. Martin Heinrichs, the Democratic senator from New Mexico, endorsed it on 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?

Because remember: The ultimate goal of climate policy is not to rewire America so it can use more renewable energy. That is a good goal, and it will make money for solar and wind developers which is why many of them will support this bill. But the goal of climate policy is to prevent the planet from overheating. And 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 backward. (You’ve also screwed over the American consumers who still depend on natural gas and will now pay more, which is one reason senators like Ed Markey (D-Mass.) have taken a dim view of this proposed law).

The big green groups have come out strongly against it. Here’s the position of the League of Conservation Voters, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and EarthJustice, and the Sierra Club, and Oil Change International. And here’s mine: This week saw the hottest temperatures on our planet in at least the last 125,000 years. Get real.

This week saw the explosion of joy that comes when politicians stand up to business as usual. Don’t undermine all of it with a “deal” whose main beneficiary is Big Oil. 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 U.S. President Joe 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.

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!