After bipartisan rebuff, Manchin abandons private legislative deal to help fossil fuel projects
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) has announced he is abandoning the bipartisan deal he struck with Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) to help coal projects in his state. According to the Washington Post, Manchin, who is himself a climate denier, will instead push the Obama administration for legislation designed to help the coal industry. This comes just weeks after a bipartisan committee concluded that the so-called Manchin-Cantwell bill would “harm” not help the coal industry.
It’s bad news for the coal industry and good news for the president, who has made fighting climate change a central plank of his administration. The move by Manchin, a former Democratic leader in the Senate, may come as a blow to Democratic leaders in the Senate who are trying to persuade Republicans and President Obama to take action on climate change. A number of Democrats in the Senate support a carbon tax, saying it would be preferable to a cap-and-trade system. The carbon tax would be paid for through fees on gasoline, which was the centerpiece of the climate bill Obama signed into law in December.
For starters, the carbon tax would raise a lot more revenue than the cap-and-trade system would have. Over the next 12 years, the Senate bill would raise somewhere between $1.3 billion and $3 billion annually from increasing the price of gasoline, according to estimates by the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a left-leaning energy think tank. That’s slightly more than the $1.2 billion the Obama administration proposed to raise per year from a carbon tax in its plan released in November.
But the problem for the president is that while both Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress see the tax as a more effective way to fight climate change, an overwhelming number of Americans don’t like the idea of