How can Manchin
I too keep wondering how Manchin can justify putting his personal political survival ahead of the planet.
Late in the evening on Friday 15 October an alert appeared on my phone that seemed at last to portend the end of the world. Two weeks before the UN climate summit in Glasgow – a make-or-break moment for American leadership and international ambition – Senator Joe Manchin had decided to gut our country’s best, and perhaps last, attempt to save itself. With three decades left to decarbonize the global economy, and a window of Democratic control unlikely to recur for years, Manchin’s benefactors in the coal and gas industry had managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, killing the Clean Electricity Performance Program that would finally have brought their lucrative global arson spree under control.
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My rage might consume me if I couldn’t set it down here: not only is Joe Manchin devastating the constituents he claims to work for, consigning them to a future of constant, devastating floods. Not only is he shilling for an industry that has ravaged his home state, snaring West Virginians in a resource trap. Not only is he making a choice that could single-handedly warm the planet by several tenths of a degree, precipitating millions of avoidable deaths and dimming the prospects of my entire generation.
The truly maddening thing is that he refuses to look his decision in the face, hiding instead behind the debunked and convenient lies furnished by his donors, who maintain that they can burn coal into mid-century without risking a catastrophe.
And the even more maddening thing is that he’s doing all this for his own petty self-interest. 7 billion people v one guy, and not even a guy with several more decades ahead of him (he’s 74). 7 billion people plus all the other life forms.
This is the problem with the Democratic Party. It’s a big tent coalition in order to scrape together the votes required to even come close to winning under the increasingly gerrymandered and unloved playing field that is US politics. The result is that it includes people who are basically the left wing of the Republican Party. It locks them into an ineffectual stasis time after time and prevents them from ever implementing meaningful lasting change. I’d call it a plan or a conspiracy, but the political system drives people to act like this for much more mundane and venal reasons. On top of all that the Overton window has shifted so far to the right since the 1970’s that even current Dem centrists would by and large have fitted happily into Reagan’s GOP on many if not most issues.
Why do we care about Manchin more than we care about, say, McConnell? Simply because he has a D next to his name? Any one of the Republican Senators is as responsible for this as Manchin is.
It is not just Manchin. Nancy Pelosi was utterly dismissive of the Green New Deal. The gerontocracy currently running the US government has no motivation to concern themselves with a future, because they really do not have one. And even among the Democrats, I think they just do not care if they take us down with them.
The problem any political coalition that has a narrow majority faces is getting all of its members to agree on legislation. I’m not surprised at how this has played out, as I recall how contentious the passage of the Affordable Care Act was when the Democrats had bigger majorities in both the House and Senate back in 2009. The progressives in the House have held the infrastructure bill hostage in order to try and get more of what they wanted in the reconciliation bill, while Manchin and Sinema have refused to agree to a bigger reconciliation bill. Biden has tried to negotiate with both of these sides and hasn’t had much success.
Over a month ago House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had been wanting very much to get at least the infrastructure bill passed just to give Democrats a needed win, and now it looks like she had the right idea. In retrospect also, it might have been rash on Biden’s part to have backed a far spendier reconciliation bill than was realistic to get yes votes from Manchin and Sinema on.
Manchin really has to be thought of in terms of whom he is keeping out of the Senate, rather than just a recalcitrant Democrat. Trump won that state by 39 points. The margin in the Senatorial race (not Manchin’s) was 43% for the Republican. Expecting Manchin to be the last Democratic vote is and was leaving hostages to fortune, there isn’t another Senator with that sort of swing between Senate and Presidential partisan support. Manchin’s likely replacement (Morrissey in 2018) not only would block any climate legislation, but would not be available for a Democratic majority at all. In 2024, it will likely be someone in the Tuberville mold.
J.A., one of the things I’ve noticed is that Democrats have more difficulty keeping party members in line with the party platform. Republicans are good at it; they do purges, and they withhold committee appointments to those who don’t vote “right”. As a result, the moderate Rs have disappeared, and the crazies have taken over. The Dems aren’t good at playing hardball with members of their own party…which has typically been one of the things I liked, that they aren’t forcing conformity as strictly…but now it is becoming a problem getting anything done.
They might be opposing it for the wrong reasons, but just how “green” is the Green New Deal? A massive buildup of solar power and wind power will require a huge input of destructive mining, toxic, energy intensive industrial materials processing, fossil fuels, expanded transport infrastructure, and result in the destruction of whatever habitat the new “clean” power infrastructure is built in. Calling such a plan “green”, or claiming the resultant electricity generated is “clean” or “renewable” does not make it so. These terms hide a huge amount of destructive industrial activity and environmental degradation. As Bright Green Lies points out, the push for solar and wind power is intended to save industrial civilization, not future of life on Earth. Its goal is to perpetuate the very system of destruction that created the crises we face. It’s based on the false belief that we can have it all, a global, industrial, consumer society and a healthy, thriving natural environment.
not Bruce, that is one of the things that environmentalists and ecologists are very divided over. Those of us who are concerned strongly with the economy find all the proposals to save our driving habits rather than make the needed changes incomplete and even foolhardy. My son and I had a big discussion one day about why I don’t advocate electric cars (especially in my town, where the power is coal), and why I don’t think we should build solar panels into roads. I told him we need fewer roads, less consumption, and so forth, but like everyone else, he is unable to imagine a life different than the one we live.
And a lot of it is economy, too. Our economy relies on consumption, and everything that is put out there calls for more consumption. The idea of changing the economy is further away than ever. I tell people the economy is man-made, the ecology is not. The ecology is more complex by orders of magnitude than the economy, and we understand it far less. Which one should we be thinking about changing? They nod sagely, walk away, and forget anyone ever brought it up.
Iknklast:
We’re wedded to economic theories that make no sense. Of course states can cancel debts without loss. Of course states can print money to pay off their own debts without causing inflation.
And of course we can pay otherwise redundant people a living wage to do things that will benefit the environment or at least help us move cities inland, dismantle harmful infrastructure like dependence on personal transport and improve shared infrastructure.
This is not a naive understanding of economics. It’s infuriating, and it will be the death of us all.
latsot:
While states can spend (and canceling debts amounts to spending, because said debts were created by prior spending) without taxing to pay for it, they still can’t spend for things any more than their own economy can actually produce. When they do, the result is inflation. For instance, the incredible inflation that recently occurred in Zimbabwe was the result of the state issuing currency in amounts that were far in excess of Zimbabwe’s actual economic output.
not Bruce @ 7: I appreciate what you have said here. I was not commenting on the content of the deal, as I was commenting on the reluctance of the leadership to even entertain it as a possibility.
JA, that fits with what I was saying. We committed ourselves to a particular kind of economic system, and now we can’t see any other way. People assume it is natural, and the right way to do things, and the idea of changing anything is terrifying.
I don’t know what changes we need to make in the system; at least, not all of them. We do need to take care of our citizens, and we need to take care of our environment, but to most people those citizens are not valuable and the environment is not valuable.
Capitalism sucks at protecting the environment, but there is little to no evidence that Communism was any better. What we need is a radical shift in our thinking, and I don’t see that coming soon.
iknklast,
Economist Dani Rodrik’s political trilemma is illustrative of the choices we are faced with. According to Rodrik, democracy, national sovereignty, and global economic integration each have conflicts between them, and while you can combine any two of these three you can’t have all three simultaneously and in full. For example, Brexit was in part driven by a desire by many Leave voters for greater national sovereignty even if that meant losing integration with the EU.
With respect to global warming then, no matter how much Greta Thunberg may scold the U.S. and other nations for not doing enough, there is no global authority that can impose its will on them to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. So change is going to take a lot of slow boring of hard boards, as Max Weber put it. From what I’ve read on renewable energy, the U.S. can replace up to 80% of its current fossil fuel use via solar and wind and biomass fuels, while other measures like improving dwelling energy efficiency and building more densely can help with the rest.
So I choose to be hopeful, and put my money where my mouth is by remodeling our retirement home in Arizona to make it more energy efficient and install solar panels to light and heat it and charge personal vehicles. Yes, it will cost a lot of money but as the kids these days put it, I’m happy to pay it forward.
J.A.
New Monetary Theory disagrees. What you’re talking about is political rather than economic reality. A state’s debt isn’t the same thing as a household’s debt.
iknklast:
That is also what I was saying.
JA, its fine to be optimistic, but since we’ve already passed several tipping points, it is probably unfounded. We can’t solve all our problems with solar panels and wind farms because emissions control will not solve our problems. Global warming isn’t the problem, it’s the fever that tells us there is an underlying problem. We can fix emissions all we like and still careen to ecological disaster at a breakneck pace. And, even if I thought we would reduce our emissions, we needed to do it a long time ago, say, about the 1980s…earlier would have been better, but there was still time to fix things by the end of the 1980s. By the beginning of this century, we were already in too deep, but we could slow down global warming. At this point? Maybe we can slow it down or keep it to a lesser warming, maybe we can’t.
Here’s a simple proposition: when the economic system comes into conflict with the ecological one, it is the economic one that must give way. If it does not, we are like crash dummies heading toward the wall. That will mean some serious long-term thinking, and some serious action that goes beyond rhetoric. This is what no one wants to hear, so we continue to think up simple solutions to complex problems, simple solutions that promise to leave everything essentially as it is, no lifestyle changes necessary.
The simple truth is, we can’t solve this problem while there are 7 billion people in the world. Every solution we come up with will “hurt the poor” (even those that won’t, or will even help, like mass transit). As Jesus said, the poor will be with us always, providing a convenient excuse for middle class drivers of luxury automobiles that don’t want to do more than change their fuel source.
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latsot,
A state’s debt isn’t the same thing as a household’s debt.
It’s not the debt really that’s the issue, it’s the ability of a nation’s economy to provide what its government and people are demanding of it. Issuing more currency and/or floating more treasury notes to finance spending doesn’t magically grant the cornucopia of goods and services that are wanted if they simply can’t be produced.
Consider the effect that the discovery of gold in the New World had on Spain’s economy. As gold and silver poured in it chased after the fixed amount of goods that the Spanish economy could actually produce, and the result was price inflation, not just in Spain but in other European nations as well. Just printing money doesn’t actually make stuff.
Well, if we just wait a little, we won’t have to imagine at all: it will be here.
Very well put. Our global economy is a pale, weak imitation of the exchange of energy, information, and elements that happens in nature, which we have been inerfering with and disrupting to our shame, and at our peril. Yes, a company going out of business is nothing compared to species going extinct. The former is like a car running out of gas; the latter more like multiple organ failure.
What about a stable, functioning biosphere? Without one of those, the other three items aren’t worth a bucket of warm spit.
The more I read, the more that 80% figure sounds like a fantasy. The amount of fossil fuels that would be expended to “replace” that 80% would be enormous, vitiating the supposed “cleanliness” of these energy sources. Certainly increasing efficiency is good, but actual reductions in energy use are what’s required.
Problem is the true cost of the “improvements” proposed are not monetary. If money were the only problem, we’d be laughing. Solar panels and batteries are technologies that depend upon mining rare earth metals, which results in massive ecological damage to wherever they are extracted, the ores then rely on extremely toxic refinement and processing, which is dangerousto whatever locality these steps are taken. Both of these steps need huge amounts of (fossil fuel) energy the machinery and processes involved. On top of that are the inputs required for transport, installation, maintenance, as well as replacement and disposal at the end of these items’ service lives. Almost all of this chain is toxic and destructive. Yet it is called “green.” The monetary cost is trivial in comparison. There’s plenty of room for profit, too. For too many, that’s the important part. All that toxicity and habitat destruction are “externalities” that can be written off, ignored and forgotten. Unti they come back and bite our heads off.
You’d think this would be foundational to any and all economic theories and practices. The fact that it is not shows you that economics is not dealing with reality.
If we do not solve our end of these problems ourselves, they will be solved for us, with a comprehensiveness and ferocity which will be terrible to behold, let alone experience first hand. We have yet to see the totality of Nature’s “market corrections.” If we are very lucky, we never will.
Democracies seem to be not very good at selling bad news. Who will be first to declare that economic growth is bad? How do you get elected calling for wartime levels of sacrifice in a war where the enemy is the electorate’s lifestyle? What party looking for votes is going to promote a “No Children” Policy? Nobody is going to run on a platform that clearly outlines the actual problems we face, or solutions that will actually work. Those solutions would require degrees of self-sacrifice, self-denial, and surrender of accustomed comforts and privileges that nobody has ever had to deal with willingly. As things get worse, protecting natural refugia that will be needed as loci of healing, regeneration and restoration will be harder and harder as humans become more desperate (and as some continue the cycle of despoilation which has been, up to now, so profitable for them). Earth is going to have the final say, but nobody is courting its vote, or pandering to the non-human inhabitants of any country.
What we need to do requires actual change, sacrifice and, in Western countries at least, a sharp reduction in our standard of living. Yet a non-trivial percentage of the populations of over-developed contries don’t believe there is any crisis at all. We’re having trouble convincing some people to get free shots and wear masks during a pandemic. How the fuck do we save the world? Unfortunately, I can’t see solutions that don’t involve draconian enforcement.
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