Joe Manchin is wrecking the Senate climate change bill

Congress has spent months trying to cobble together a spending package that tackles the majority of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda in one go. As centrists have demanded that Biden and progressives lower the price tag of the reconciliation bill, the media, including me, have often been too focused on the $3.5 trillion price tag. This in turn has been to the detriment of the popular policies in it.

To make amends, for each of the next several days, I’ll dive into an aspect of the bill and what the state of play is. Leading off this deep dive: climate change.

Of all the issues Democrats are trying to tackle in this spending package, preventing and mitigating climate change is the most consequential — on a national and a global scale.

Senate Democratic leaders told their caucus in August that the budget resolution they would soon pass would allow for “the most significant investment in tackling the climate crisis in U.S. history and put America on a path to meet President Biden’s climate change goals of 80% clean electricity and 50% economy-wide carbon emissions reductions by 2030.”