The guy reps West Virginia which IS a fossil fuel state…
What do you expect?
This puts him directly at odd’s with his parties progressive’s and environmentalist’s….
Manchin IS holding a LOT of cards right now….
(IN his vote and Senate committee chairmanship)
Democrats NEED his vote…..
Climate worries be damned….
Centrist Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) is insisting that natural gas be allowed to have a central role in President Biden’s clean energy agenda, which puts him on a collision course with Democratic lawmakers who worry he will have the power to water down what they see as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to address climate change.
Manchin, the chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, is pushing to have sole jurisdiction in the Senate over the $150 billion Clean Electricity Performance Program, which would provide grants to utilities that increase their share of clean energy sources.
He is flexing his muscle by calling for natural gas to be part of Biden’s clean energy solution even though the House Energy and Commerce Committee specifically excluded natural gas from the clean energy program by defining clean electricity as having a carbon intensity of less than 0.10 metric tons of carbon dioxide per megawatt-hour.
Asked by The Hill on Thursday whether he would insist on natural gas being part of Biden’s clean energy standard, Manchin said “it has to be.”
“I’m all for all of the above, I’m all for clean energy but I’m also for producing the amount of energy that we need to make sure that we have reliability and I’m concerned about that,” he said.
Manchin also confirmed what he has communicated to colleagues in recent weeks that he does not think that utilities should be pressured to purchase electricity generated from natural gas produced with carbon-capture technology.
“I’d love to have carbon capture — we don’t have the technology because we haven’t really gotten to that point and it’s so darn expensive that it makes it almost improbable,” he added.
This is setting off alarm bells among Democratic senators who want to enact energy reforms that bend the curve of projected global warming down…