On Thursday Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, declared he won’t support climate legislation, bringing to an apparent end his long and excruciating flirtation with Joe Biden over the climate portions of the Build Back Better bill, which contained the most sweeping climate measures ever to reach the Senate floor. In July, 1997, the Senate voted 95–0 (led by another West Virginia Democrat, Robert Byrd) to pass a resolution stating that the United States should not be a signatory to what became the Kyoto Protocol. In 2009, “cap-and-trade” legislation passed the House by only a narrow margin. The bill limped to the Senate, and without a Republican co-sponsor, the bill was not brought up for a vote. So now we’ve struck out three times. The country that historically has put more carbon in the atmosphere than any other, and whose scientists played the lead role in figuring out the climate crisis, has refused to do anything about it, and hence the temperature will rise far higher than it must. Manchin will never be forgotten, not as long as humans are grappling with the most fundamental challenge we’ve ever faced.
By Bill McKibben. New Yorker. July 16, 2022.
Read article here:
