In West Virginia, the Senate Race Outcome May Shift Limits of US Climate Ambitions
In West Virginia, the Senate Race Outcome May Shift Limits of US Climate Ambitions
The departure of Sen. Joe Manchin appears to end the second-leading coal-producing state’s decades at the fulcrum of federal energy policy.
It's not like he ever voted with Democrats anyway. Fuck that guy.
He did sometimes:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act
I mean he made the law worse too let's not give him too much credit, but a republican wouldn't have even bargained on it.
I won't say you're wrong about yes he made it worse but he did ultimately accept the compromise version and help make it happen, but even that is a sort of charitable reading. He waited until the much more aggressive first iteration had gotten most of the way through to completion, and then fucked it all up (presumably in the hopes they'd just give up), and so everyone had to go back to the drawing board and do it again with a pared back version, which was the Inflation Reduction Act, and then when that passed he took all kinds of credit for it, even though he still did his best to kneecap its actual implementation when it came to anything that might lose money for any of his campaign contributors or personal investments, which are many and mostly destructive.
It is almost impossible to overstate what a piece of shit Joe Manchin is.
Climate "ambitions", huh. The pressing need to avoid or mitigate the collapse of civilization is merely an "ambition" now...
I mean it’s certainly not a policy reality, or a fucking priority or anything
😢
Hm, I thought it was missing some big stuff -- I had some impression that BBBA was targeting a 50% reduction in emissions by 2030, and the IRA reduced it to 40% (this was the only actual list I could find in quick searching, and says it was missing "A range of policies that were previously part of the Build Back Better Act ... like electric power transmission, CO2 pipelines, and building energy efficiency" which makes basically 0 sense to me and sounds like an LLM hallucination. What the fuck is a CO2 pipeline.)
I wasn't able to find a really detailed breakdown of what might have been missing from it, so honestly I could be wrong.
I do agree with you that the IRA was a massive step forward from the usual US government "total inaction or else make it worse" policy, and that Manchin supporting it despite the fact that it was actually trying to do some significant good things is a shocking and welcome surprise. You kinda have a point there.