Our Broken Politics May Break the World

Joe Manchin is only the last in a long time of Senate saboteurs

25 years ago, on the last day of the Kyoto climate talks, it appeared that the world had reached its first real breakthrough in the effort to slow down climate change. As cheering delegates signed an agreement, one of the chief lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry turned to me and said, “I can’t wait till we can get back to DC where we have this under control.” I thought he was blowing coal smoke, but he wasn’t—the US Senate never even took up the Kyoto protocol, after a West Virginia Senator named Robert Byrd poisoned the deliberations with a resolution insisting that America (which had been pouring carbon into the air for a century) shouldn’t be asked to do more than developing countries.

[I’m enjoying bringing you these dispatches from Glasgow—well, enjoyment may not be quite the right word. But I’m happy to do it. If you have the means, consider paying for a subscription—my share of those revenues will go to help launch Third Act]

Earlier today it was West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin’s turn. He’d already damaged Joe Biden’s trip to the Glasgow talks by stripping the most important climate provisions from the Build Back Better bill; playing a weak hand Manchin had left him, Biden had no real way to wedge open these negotiations. But then, minutes after Biden’s speech, Manchin twisted the knife a little more: he might not, he said, vote for any bill, leaving the implicit promise of $500 billion in clean energy funding hanging. One imagines he’ll come around eventually, but who knows: at any event, it’s just the latest example of how perfectly legal American political corruption has undercut, again and again, the world’s chances for climate progress.

After the failure at Kyoto came the failure at Copenhagen—and by this time it was clear to even the dimmest foreigner that there was never ever going to be a moment when there were 67 votes in the US Senate to pass a climate treaty. It is literally impossible to imagine a geologically relevant moment when Big Carbon won’t still own at least 34 Senators (at the moment, it owns at least 51.) And so the world gave up on negotiating treaties, and instead adopted the series of voluntary pledges that became the Paris accord.

Obviously Trump upset even this arrangement, and good on Biden for getting us back into the climate negotiations at all. But if he can’t deliver the Senate behind even the more modest legislation that seemed to be on the table when he left DC, then any US claim to be “leading by example” doesn’t ring hollow—it doesn’t ring at all. Yes, there are plenty of other climate villains, many of them on display today (Brazil’s Bolsonaro government, for instance, was insisting that it was an “environmental champion,” even as it scythes the Amazon). But every other country has been able to hide behind the Americans, for decades: everyone knows we’re the carbon champion, and if we won’t stand up to our fossil fuel lobby, why should anyone else? We’ve never had any leverage because our political system, with its (again perfectly legal) corruption gives the fossil fuel industry an effective veto over change.

That veto is bad enough when it screws up our democracy and our life. But it’s also screwing up the world’s chances for any progress at all, here in the last years when we still have a chance to really shift the outcome. Manchin’s taken more money from the fossil fuel industry than any other Senator, and it’s been the best investment they ever made; Kyoto is 5,700 miles from Glasgow, and this conference is a quarter century removed in time, but so much remains the same.