Biden’s Climate Agenda Dies In The Senate
By Paul Homewood
Wall Street Journal’s podcast on Biden’s Clean Electricity Plan is well worth a listen:
You may recall how Biden’s green agenda was gutted back in June, which I posted on here. In short, he had planned to spend $2 trillion on his clean energy plan, including massive subsidies for wind and solar.
However his attempts to include all of this in his Infrastructure Bill earlier this summer collapsed in the face of opposition not only from Republicans but also moderate Democrats.
His fall back plan was the Clean Electricity Performance Program. This would provide grants to utilities that increase the amount of clean electricity they use by at least 4% a year and penalize utilities that do not meet that standard.
The Program, worth $150 billion, was incorporated in the massive green, socialist $3 trillion spending bill, currently working its way through Congress. However, it seems like the Clean Electricity part of the bill is dead in the water, thanks to the resolute opposition of Joe Manchin, the Democrat Senator for West Virginia.
West Virginia is coal country, and Manchin knows that Biden’s Green Agenda would wipe out their economy. With the Senate split 50/50, Biden needs every Democrat vote to get his bill through.
What does all this mean?
It is all very well Biden pledging to reduce emissions, but actually managing to do it is another matter entirely.
Without that system of subsidies and penalties, utilities are not going to radically change the way they operate now. And even if electric cars grow in market share, the electricity they run on will still be primarily fossil fuel based.
Biden may have have other options at hand, including regulation, but these are just fiddling around at the edges.
This may be Biden’s last chance to force his Green New Deal through. The spending bill now being fought over only needs a majority of one in the Senate, as it is being processed as what is known as a Reconciliation Bill. But only one of these is allowed each year.
Next year, the Democrats face losing their majority in the House, along with their 50/50 tie in the Senate, given Biden’s catastrophic ten months at the helm so far.
They will have better things to worry about then than Sleepy Joe’s Green New Deal.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Come back, Donald T., all is forgiven
Nothing to forgive.
CORRECT!!!! Be ready!!
Well, no.
It just shows the America’s political leaders, are as dire as ours.
I keep saying this ……… everyone wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die. Once you get past the AGW virtue signaling there’s no support for it. All the money spent so far has been be edict, not vote.
Just look at the comments section of every ‘popular’ media, they are universally filled with derogatory comments about the climate change scam. Literally no one has any time for it and now the costs are slowly being exposed the reaction is hitting home to the people who can’t be bothered to think about the science.
Heaven knows what Tory researchers are reading, it’s certainly not what the little people are writing.
There’s no doubt that time is the enemy of the Greens. The longer the insanity of Net Zero is open to scrutiny the worse it will look. Everyone wants to save the planet, everyone is happy for someone else to pay (it’s easy for children) but the majority of people in the West don’t have thousands to spend on fantasies like this.
What nobody (on either side) seems to realize is that we cannot lower emissions without losing the only energy currently available for transportation. Either 90% fossil fuel biofuels or 100% fossil fuels, biodiesel. Nothing can be built or transported to where it is needed…solar panels, wind turbines, EV vehicles, lithium and the batteries they require. Groceries, health care.
Why this hasn’t been made clear, especially to those delegates flying in back out to Glasgow (adding to atmospheric CO2) is a puzzle in need of publicity.
Good post!
In all the hype about gas prices, few seem to have noticed that battery grade lithium carbonate got to $29,000/tonne this week (a new record), up from under $6,000/tonne at the start of the year. Those EVs are going to see some big price increases, and grid battery investment will grind to a halt.
Manchin is not the only problem.
The news stories about how Putin is playing the Europeans to drive up the price of natural gas coupled with the low output of Europe’s wind farms are showing the fallacy of delegating your energy policy to environmental fundamentalists.
Then there is China’s saber rattling in Asia and the realization that China has cornered the market to make fundamental building blocks of green power generation.
Most people in the US don’t live and breath politics like members of Congress but watching fuel prices rise after this administration canceled the oil pipeline from Canada to the US Gulf coast and the impact on household expenses from a doubling of natural gas prices from a two years ago is exactly the pocketbook issues that lead to very quick shifts in power in Washington DC. Green may be great for the elite but it is mostly pain for the majority of working class voters.
Sean:
Given that Russian deliveries of gas dropped nearly 40% from 2020 to the end of July 2021, and then a further 30% it looks (or can be made to look) like deliberate policy. But out-going Chancellor Merkel has admitted that Russia has delivered all the gas that was ordered.
Further Norway also reduced its supplies of gas to Europe, so it looks like there was a decision to reduce orders (in the expectation of a lower price) or a belief that Wind would supply enough electricity. Since the UK stopped development of new gas fields and reduced storage capacity (to 2? days in stock) it would seem the latter is the right one.
Wind supplied 25% of electricity in 2020 but now is supplying only 7%.
Data obtained from the Climate Change Committee (CCC), the official advisory body, following a legal battle, shows that a series of assumptions underpinning its advice to ministers (2020) included a projection that in 2050 there would be just seven days on which wind turbines would produce less than 10 per cent of their potential electricity output.
So far this year (2012), there have already been 65 such days, and 21 days below 5%.
In 2016 there were as many as 78 days below 10%, and in 2018 21 days below 5% capacity, and in 2019 9 days below 5% capacity. It would seem that the advice from the CCC was hopelessly misguided but did decision makers accept it? And why accept any further ‘predictions’ from a false prophet?
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Average wind speeds have been falling across Europe (and elsewhere) for decades. That’s from the IPCC report. Unfortunately, the IPCC summaries only cherry-pick the technical bits, and nobody in the climate change industry ever reads the technical bits. Any more than they do the ‘ Intended Nationally Determined Contributions’ in the Paris Accord documents, which again are the most illuminating bits.
Since offshore wind’s supposedly going to increase 4-fold by 2050, to over 40GW, just looking at percentages isn’t much use.
Graeme no 3,
you say that wind produced 25% in 2020 but now only 7%.
What was missed by many is that wind delivers all it can in general. Demand was down in 2020 due to lockdown this flatters wind’s contribution to the grid. Low demand means low output from dispatchable generators (Balancing generators) When demand rises dispatchable generation increases, mainly gas with some coal, i.e. CO2 emitting generation.
Now adding more demand (load) in the form of heat pumps and evs mean that CO2 emissions from generation will rise, certainly in the next few years as nuclear declines.in capacity. (Which offsets the construction of wind capacity) Yet the government persist in proclaiming the delusion that heat pumps and evs are ‘low carbon’. They are not, they are fossil fuelled from gas and coal. This basic grid operation, clearly seen if you look at the Gridwatch Templar web site where the graphs of gas output broadly mirrors the demand graph, with a slight distortion due to solar generation which causes the dip at around midday.
The government is confident that by 2035 the grid will be if not zero emissions close to it. I’m also expecting a large increase in porcine aviation.
The most embarrassing moment of FJB’s presidency was that he took Trump’s US self-sufficiency in energy – oil and gas etc – and reduced it to the point he had to go the the Saudis to get them to pump more oil to get him out of a jam caused by price-rises.
But he’s OK with that: his son has become an acclaimed and wealthy artist and he’s got the people to pay for a huge wall around his Delaware beach home (Mansion!). (I can’t work out if that’s to keep the public out or keep the mad man in).
No, that’s obviously to keep the rampant out of control man made disastrous catastrophic sea-level rise out of his beach property. 😇. Hhmm…. I wonder if Obama & Gore will do the same with their own waterfront mega properties?
Then again, the three of them are so (self)righteous in their support for beggaring Western Civilisation that the rising tides won’t bother them since they can obviously already walk on water anyway…….
I don’t think Al Gore has a home on a beach and Obama’s house is 3 m (give or take a few cm) above the water on the beach.
I will be happy to see otherwise.
Mancin is not a “problem” but the elites and the Greens are so, because their policies and misguided obsessions threaten our finances and lifestyles with no benefits to anyone except those in pocket from the wasted expenditures on Green policies. ,
“Biden’s Climate Agenda Dies In The Senate” is trumpeted but these journalists lack the skills to understand that this is the Democrat Party — THE party of “the means justifies the ends”.
I assure you that this bill will be resurrected and pushed through in disguise. Usual method means dividing up the old bill and adding its many parts to many other bills or regulations (as new bills/regulations, or as amendments to old ones)
This already was introduced in disguise and called an infrastructure bill. It was actually a social welfare and climate change bill. Pelosi knew that the longer it languished after release, people would learn what was in it. Major news outlets now refer to it as a social or domestic policy and climate bill. The more accurate branding has not made it more compelling. The end of October deadline to pass something may have more to do with COP26 than American domestic policy.
For those interested in the CEPP fiasco-in-waiting, here is my earlier analysis. (Sent to Manchin and I live in West Virginia.)
https://www.cfact.org/2021/09/19/green-gold-rush-looms-for-electric-power/
https://www.cfact.org/2021/09/24/green-gold-rush-part-2-some-big-numbers/
The utilities are already building wind and solar like crazy (and crazy) because the more they spend the more profit they make (unlike people). Manchin simply pointed this out.
If you can’t put turbine blades in landfill, there’s always the ocean….
https://mobile.twitter.com/kevindstevens/status/1451733647657218048
The (partial) story behind the video…
https://www.offshorewind.biz/2021/10/21/turbine-parts-dropped-into-sea-at-ormonde-offshore-wind-farm/
The UK has reached virtual zero manmade CO2 already, with 0.00845% of world emissions.
By the time people wake up to the actual cost of this green insanity, it will be too late. Far too much money will have been wasted to even think of stopping the train