You have to be intentionally blind – unfortunately, a very common disease among politicians – to not see that global warming is no longer a debatable threat that will hit us in a few years. It’s our current reality, and if climate scientists – whose warnings have been largely confirmed – are right, it’s going to get much worse.
And Joe Manchin has just stopped what may have been the Biden administration’s last chance to do anything — any — meaningful about climate change.
I don’t want to talk too much about Manchin. In a few months it will likely be irrelevant one way or another: chances are that Republicans will dominate the Senate or that Democrats, helped by the horror of many Republican candidates, will win some seats. And it wouldn’t matter in the first place if it weren’t for the disease that infected the body politic of the United States.
Still, for what it’s worth, my opinion of Manchin is both less and more cynical than you might hear.
Yes, it represents a state that still considers itself the land of coal. [Virgínia Ocidental], though mining is now a trivial part of its economy, overshadowed by health and social care jobs — with much of the latter paid by the federal government. Yes, he receives more political contributions from the energy sector than any other member of Congress. Yes, he has a big conflict of financial interests stemming from his family owning a coal company.
However, my guess is that his act has as much to do with vanity as it does money (and nothing to do with inflation). His act, after all, kept him in the political spotlight month after month. And if you don’t believe that great events can be shaped, and great disasters caused, out of sheer personal pettiness, all I can say is that you probably haven’t read much history.
But none of this would matter if Republicans weren’t united in opposing any action to limit global warming. That opposition has only grown more entrenched as evidence of impending catastrophe has increased — and the likely financial cost of effective action has decreased.
Let’s talk about the political economy of climate policies.
It has long been painfully obvious that voters are reluctant to accept even small short-term costs in the interest of avoiding long-term disasters. That’s depressing, but it’s a fact of life that probably no amount of talking can change. That’s why I’ve long been skeptical of the view, widely held by economists, that a carbon tax — which puts a price on greenhouse gas emissions — should be the foundation of climate policy. It’s true that emissions taxes are the basic solution to pollution, but realistically, they just won’t exist in the United States.
The good news is that the spectacular technological progress in renewable energy could be the foundation for an alternative political strategy based on carrots instead of sticks. The idea –underlying Joe Biden’s Rebuild Better plan– was to rely not on taxes but on subsidies and public investment to encourage the transition to clean energy. In this way, climate action could be framed not as a sacrifice but as an opportunity, a way to create new jobs wrapped in a broader program of much-needed public investment.
The theory, which I naively subscribe to, was that such a strategy, while it might be less efficient than one centered on carbon taxes, would be much easier to sell to the American public, and that at least some Republican politicians would be willing to pass policies that promised concrete rewards to workers, contractors, and so on, without imposing new burdens on their constituents.
But the Republicans – and, of course, Manchin – were not moved. I don’t think they were motivated solely by a desire to see Biden fail. They are just deeply hostile to clean energy.
There is an obvious parallel between green energy policy and Covid-19 policy. Many people were angered by the restrictions imposed to limit the spread of the pandemic; even the requirement to wear masks involves some inconvenience. But vaccination seemed to offer a win-win solution, allowing Americans to protect themselves and others. Who could object?
The answer was: much of the Republican Party. Vaccination has become and remains an intensely partisan issue, with deadly consequences: death rates since vaccines became widely available have been much higher in Republican-majority areas than in Democratic areas.
The fact is that one of the two largest political parties in the United States seems to be viscerally opposed to any policy that appears to serve the public good. The overwhelming scientific consensus in favor of such policies doesn’t help — it actually hurts, because the modern Republican Party is hostile to science and scientists.
And that hostility, rather than the personal quirks of a senator from a small state, is the fundamental reason why we seem to do nothing as the planet burns.
Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves
