Evan Vucci/AP Photo
President Joe Biden speaks about climate change and clean energy at Brayton Power Station in Somerset, Mass., on July 20, 2022.
An old power plant that burned hundreds of thousands of tons of coal was a provocative choice for the setting of President Biden’s visit to Massachusetts, coming as it did at a low point for an administration still tallying up the climate policy damage wrought by a single member of Congress and the Supreme Court’s decision curbing EPA regulatory powers. Once the largest coal-fired power plant in New England, the Brayton Point Power Station ended its run in Somerset, Massachusetts five years ago. In its last decade, the facility was passed from owner to owner until the last one decided to decommission it. Brayton Point had long been criticized by residents and environmentalists as the source of fish kills, of tens of thousands of asthma attacks, and more than 100 premature deaths every year. Now repurposed to become the state’s first offshore wind manufacturing facility, Brayton Point is as a testament to the inevitable fate that coal will meet in places like West Virginia.
At least one West Virginia Democrat has yet to get that message. Hearing only the cha-ching of an old-fashioned cash register ringing up the profits from fossil fuels, Sen. Joe Manchin bit off, chewed up and spit out the administration’s climate agenda like so much chaw. The collapse of the president’s legislative program and the Democratic Party’s standing has left even the most casual observer of politics and human nature wondering about the strategic competence of the White House.
In the absence of congressional legislation, the onus is now entirely on the White House to resuscitate a climate action plan. The buzz on the eve of Biden’s visit to Braydon Point was that nothing short of an emergency declaration—a move that would send strong domestic and international signals about the country’s seriousness in prioritizing climate—would suffice. Late Tuesday afternoon, however, Biden scuttled a declaration and the die was cast. The executive orders the president announced Wednesday did little to reverse the damage to national climate policy and America’s international credibility to deal with the crisis.
Executive orders are especially attractive tools for presidents to use to implement environmental policies. Roughly one-third of Franklin Roosevelt’s more than 3,700 executive orders, the most of any president, dealt with the environment. Bill Clinton’s 1994 Executive Order 12898 directed federal agencies to consider the environmental justice implications of their actions on minority and low-income populations. The downside of executive orders, of course, is that they can be reversed by the next Oval Office occupant.
The new executive actions are largely reactive rather than proactive measures. The most significant decision establishes wind-energy development areas, spanning some 700,000 acres in the Gulf of Mexico and other areas in Southeast and Mid-Atlantic waters. FEMA gets a $2.3 billion boost to fund resilience efforts to protect communities against heat waves, fires, floods, and other dangers. The Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) will now provide funding for efficient air conditioning equipment, cooling centers, and other programs, in addition to its existing heating programs.
Yet most of Biden’s climate orders have been symbolic (establishing climate as a national security/foreign policy priority) or bureaucratic (establishing a White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy, a Civilian Climate Corps, and re-establishing the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology). Of the seven climate issues that the Prospect has been following on its Executive Action Tracker, Biden has acted fully on just two: proposing an SEC rule requiring public companies to disclose their climate risk assessments, and establishing a rule governing methane emissions.
He has refrained from phasing out federal financing of fossil fuel and related infrastructure abroad and he has not halted approval of new interstate oil and gas pipelines that require federal permits. An emergency declaration would have allowed Biden to meet the “code-red” threats head on. He could halt crude oil exports, end offshore oil and gas drilling, and fund new clean energy initiatives.
President Biden has doubled down on his quest for the Capitol Hill’s elusive bipartisan unicorn hiding somewhere in the cloakroom of a 50-50 Senate.
Eighteen months of Republican intransigence and fruitless negotiations with Manchin raise the question of whether Biden has grasped how much the political landscape has changed since he was vice president. Manchin’s double-dealing is outside the consensus-building norms that Biden absorbed during his decades in the Senate—yet the hope that he could find common ground with Manchin reflects his misreading a man whose personal financial interests line up with the green skeptic politics of his intensely Trumpian state. Where the Obama White House had all but ignored Manchin, Trump showered attention on him. Not surprisingly, Manchin responded by supporting attacks on the EPA with gusto, beginning with voting to confirm one of Trump’s more odious picks, Scott Pruitt, a climate denier, as EPA administrator. “We both come from energy producing states and have a great deal in common,” Manchin said of Pruitt.
A similar misreading characterizes Biden’s relationship with Mitch McConnell. For the Senate Republican leader, Biden is Barack Obama 2.0; his goal, as it was during Obama’s tenure, is to usher Democrats from the White House by any means necessary, which McConnell made crystal clear by his refusal to convene a hearing on Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination. Despite those realities, the president doubled down on his quest for the Capitol Hill’s elusive bipartisan unicorn hiding somewhere in the cloakroom of a 50-50 Senate.
In his attempts to negotiate with the Republicans and Manchin, “Joe Biden is instinctively more of a senator than a president and more of a negotiator than a commander,” says Kirby Goidel, a Texas A&M University political science professor. “His natural instinct is to try to find common ground with people and to assume that they can reach some level of agreement.”
That strategy, however, falls apart when the Republicans’ only goal is obstruction. Progressives’ fears that decoupling the infrastructure bill from the Build Back Better social and climate programs would doom Democrats’ best chance in decades to weave a stronger social safety net and crackdown on fossil fuel extraction proved prescient. Equipped with a better understanding of contemporary political hardball than the president, progressives are furious.
Some moderate Democrats, however, are clamoring for a second round of how-do-you-like-me-now climate talks with Manchin. However, Biden may have finally realized that wasting more political capital on the one of the country’s leading climate obstructionists would be a first-order failure of leadership at time when the world can least afford such missteps.
