US Senator Joe Manchin has told the White House and congressional leaders that he will not support including a crucial clean-power provision in the Democrats’ spending package, putting at risk a central element of the legislation designed to fight climate change, a person familiar with the matter has said.
A final decision about the fate of the program, which would pay utilities for using clean energy and penalize those that did not, has not been made, the person said on condition of anonymity.
However, without the support of Manchin, who holds a swing vote on the package, it is not likely to survive, the person added.
Photo: AFP
“Senator Manchin has clearly expressed his concerns about using taxpayer dollars to pay private companies to do things they’re already doing,” said Sam Runyon, a spokesman for Manchin. “He continues to support efforts to combat climate change, while protecting American energy independence and ensuring our energy reliability.”
The program, known as the Clean Electricity Performance Program, has been a major priority for the White House and US President Joe Biden’s goal of decarbonizing the nation’s electric grid by 2035.
On Oct. 31, Biden is due to travel to Glasgow for the COP26 summit, where he would seek to show US leadership on fighting climate change.
“We don’t comment on the state of our negotiations with the wide array of senators offering views about the Build Back Better agenda,” White House spokesman Vedant Patel said. “The White House is laser focused on advancing the president’s climate goals, and positioning the United States to meet its emission targets in a way that grows domestic industries and good jobs.”
Manchin’s constituency, West Virginia, is a leading producer of coal, which once fueled most of the nation’s power plants, but has lost out to natural gas and fast-growing renewable energy sources such as wind and solar.
The White House and Democratic congressional leaders are discussing how to scale back the social-spending measure to win the votes of Manchin and another holdout Senate Democrat, Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema.
Manchin has said he wants a top line of no more than US$1.5 trillion over 10 years for the legislation, which backers initially wanted to total US$3.5 trillion.
Biden has said that he thinks a compromise might be found at about US$2 trillion.
Biden, speaking at the White House on Friday evening, was asked what his message would be to Manchin and Sinema.
“I’m about to deliver it,” he said, declining to specify if that meant he would speak to them later on Friday.
“The Clean Electricity Performance Program is a central part of President Biden’s plan to fight the climate crisis,” said Sam Ricketts, cofounder of the environmental group Evergreen Action. “It’s the single most-effective proposal to cut climate pollution in the Build Back Better Act.”
Democrats have pointed to other climate programs in the sweeping legislative package as they seek to pass something that Biden, who vowed to cuts US emissions in half by the end of the decade, can take with him to the UN climate summit.
Among them are hundreds of billions of US dollars in tax breaks for alternative energy and electric vehicles, and a fee on methane emissions from oil and gas operations.
A plan by approved by the US Senate Committee on Finance that ties the value of tax credits for energy production to its carbon intensity would reduce emissions in the power sector by 73 percent in the next 10 years, the panel’s chairman said.
Other climate programs that Senate Democrats have eyed for the package are the elimination of tax credits for fossil fuels and a tax on carbon-dioxide emissions that could be used to offset some of the cost of a sweeping social-spending bill.
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