West Virginia needs the Biden energy agenda
As we speak, Democrats in Congress are hashing out the details of the budget reconciliation bill that will contain the vast bulk of President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda. It is meant to be passed alongside the recent bipartisan infrastructure package that came out of the Senate.
One of the unique features of this political moment is that virtually every individual Democrat has the power to sink the whole enterprise — there are zero Dem votes to spare in the Senate and only a handful in the House — but if any of them sink it, it all goes down. If progressive Dems kill the bipartisan infrastructure bill, conservative Dems will kill the reconciliation bill, and vice versa. (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently agreed to hold a vote on the bipartisan bill on Sep. 27, but progressives have pledged not to vote for it unless reconciliation also gets a vote.)
They either all succeed together or all fail together. And if they fail, the party will get crushed in 2022 and 2024. None of them will escape unscathed. They’ve got to make it work.
For obvious reasons, there’s an enormous amount of speculation about how various Democrats will play their hands in these negotiations. I can’t claim to understand the motivations of everyone involved. The recalcitrant House “moderates” are some mix of irrational and malicious. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is utterly opaque.
But Sen. Joe Manchin makes sense to me, for the simple reason that I believe he has West Virginia’s best interests at heart. And that’s why I’m confident he’s going to find his way to supporting an ambitious reconciliation bill. He knows West Virginia needs it.
The simple fact is, West Virginia’s energy economy is not on a sustainable course. US coal is on the way out.
This is true across the country and it’s true in West Virginia. One of the state’s two big utilities, American Electric Power (AEP), will shut down 5,574 megawatts of WV coal generation by 2030, and the rest of it by 2040. The other, First Energy, has pledged carbon neutrality by 2050. The number of US coal mines continues to fall.
Many of the states biggest private sector employers, like Walmart, Kroger, Lowe’s, and Proctor & Gamble, have set aggressive emission-reduction goals and are looking for clean electricity (which they must currently purchase out of state).
The people of West Virginia largely understand that an inexorable energy transition is underway. They are scared it will l
