What Joe Manchin got in the climate bill for West Virginia, energy industries, sick coal miners, Toyota and himself

Manchin (Tom Williams, CQ-Roll Call, via Getty)

"Congress is suddenly poised to pass the most ambitious climate bill in United States history, largely written by a senator from a coal state who became a millionaire from his family coal business and who has taken more campaign cash from the oil and gas industry than any of his colleagues have," Brad Plumer and Lisa Friedman of The New York Times write of West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a moderate-to-conservative Democrat who holds much power in the 50-50 Senate.

So what did Manchin get in his deal with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer? The federal government would lease more public lands and waters for oil and gas drilling, forcing President Biden to break a campaign promise. Tax credits for carbon capture technology that "could allow coal or gas-burning power plants to keep operating with lower emissions" would be expanded, the Times reports. And Manchin got a vote on a separate bill "to speed up the process of issuing permits for energy infrastructure," such as a West Virginia gas pipeline, the Times reports.

There's more. The trust fund for coal miners with black-lung disease would become permanent; new incentives would be offered "to build wind and solar farms in areas where coal mines or coal plants have recently closed," and there would be "generous tax credits for nascent technologies like carbon capture and storage and low-emissions hydrogen fuels, which Mr. Manchin has supported."

“Those are his pet projects,” James Van Nostrand, a law professor at West Virginia University, told the Times. “I think he’s going to say, ‘I used my strategic position to bring back benefits for West Virginia.’ And he’ll probably do pretty well in the next election.” Some environmentalists complained about more oil and gas leasing, "but energy analysts and many of the country’s biggest environmental groups said that any additional emissions from fossil fuel leasing would be dwarfed by the clean-energy provisions in the bill," the Times reports.

The bill was a long time coming, and "At every step of the way, Mr. Manchin shaped the legislation," the Times reports. He killed a plan to pay utilities to replace fossil-fuel power with renewables and "bigger tax credits for consumers who bought union-made electric vehicles, a measure that was opposed by Toyota Motor, which operates a non-union plant in West Virginia. And he ensured that the tax credits for electric vehicles could not be used by the wealthiest Americans." He won a lower fee for leaks of methane and "ensured that longstanding tax breaks for the fossil fuel industry, which many Democrats wanted to repeal, went untouched."