Why, when I was your age…
Seriously folks, there are certain people who get their jollies and raise their profiles on the “they’re all the same” narrative.
In fact, I’m so old I remember when Ralph Nader mislead a lot of mostly young, mostly naive, mostly lefties, into the notion that “There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between George Bush and Al Gore”.
Al Gore.
I know most of a million people in the Middle East who would like to take issue with you, but they can’t – because they’re dead. So please reconsider.
As an example of the confusion, one can cite climate campaigner’s anger about the Biden administration’s permit for the Willow Project in Alaska, an oil drilling project.
Let’s be clear. There is no universe in which this project didn’t get some kind of permit, due to actions of previous administrations that created a legal dilemma for the Biden administration.
According to the two people familiar with the deliberations, the administration concluded that it doesn’t have the legal authority to deny permits to ConocoPhillips, which has long held leases on the land in the petroleum reserve.
The cornerstone of Mr. Biden’s new Arctic environmental pledges is a declaration that the entire Arctic Ocean will be off limits to oil and gas leasing, completing an effort that began under President Barack Obama.
Mr. Biden was acutely aware of his campaign pledge, according to multiple administration officials involved in discussions over the past several weeks. Environmental activists had also openly warned that Mr. Biden’s climate record, which includes making landmark investments in clean energy, would be undermined if he approved Willow, and that young voters in particular could turn against him.
ImageApproval of the Willow project marks a turning point in the administration’s approach to fossil fuel development. Until this point, the courts and Congress have forced Mr. Biden to sign off on some limited oil and gas leases. Willow would be one of the few oil projects that Mr. Biden has approved freely, without a court order or a congressional mandate.
And it comes as the International Energy Agency has said that governments must stop approving new oil, gas and coal projects if the planet is to avert the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.
Ultimately, the administration made the internal calculation that it did not want to fight ConocoPhillips, the company behind the Willow project.
ConocoPhillips has held leases to the prospective drilling site for more than two decades, and administration attorneys argued that refusing a permit would trigger a lawsuit that could cost the government as much as $5 billion, according to administration officials who asked not to be identified in order to discuss legal strategy.
“The lease does not give Conoco the right to do whatever they want, but it does convey certain rights,” said John Leshy, who served as the Interior Department’s solicitor under President Bill Clinton. “So the administration has to take that into account. I would not say their hands were tied, but their options were limited by the lease rights.”
The leases are basically a contract and if the Biden administration denied the permits, essentially breached the contract, without what a court considered a valid argument, a judge would likely find in favor of the company, Mr. Leshy said. It would be unusual for a court to simply order the government to issue permits; more likely a judge would award damages, he said.
That figure could include not just compensation for investments ConocoPhillips has already made but also profits that the company could have gotten if it had been allowed to drill, Mr. Leshy said, putting a potential judgment into the billions of dollars.
Ms. Murkowski said she believed the legal argument was the turning point for Mr. Biden. “There was no way around the fact that these were valid existing lease rights,” she said. “The administration was going to have to deal with that reality.”
To try to minimize the fallout, the Biden administration demanded concessions. It slashed the size of the project from five drilling sites to three. ConocoPhillips agreed to return to the government leases covering about 68,000 acres in the drilling area, which lies within the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. And the administration said it would put in place new protections for a nearby coastal wetland known as Teshekpuk Lake. Those measures would effectively form a “firewall” that would prevent the Willow project from expanding, the administration said.
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The Biden administration’s consternation with the internal resistance of Senator Joe Manchin in relation to climate policy has been well documented, and it’s actually a credit to the administration that the largest climate bill in history was delivered with Mr Manchin’s cooperation, but not until a number of not entirely palatable to environmentalists provisions were hammered out.
The capstone of Sen. Joe Manchin’s four-decade political career — a sweeping climate law worth hundreds of billions of dollars — might well have cost him his Senate seat.
For months, the West Virginia moderate worked behind the scenes to force the White House to tailor its biggest climate ambitions to meet his demands. He inserted oil and gas provisions and demanded Democrats trim down the $3.5 trillion plan known as “Build Back Better” and rechristened it the Inflation Reduction Act. It passed the Senate nearly two years ago.
But it didn’t matter: Most West Virginians still hated the IRA anyway, even though it has benefited the state with new manufacturing and energy projects.
“He knew when he supported the Inflation Reduction Act it would likely make his reelection very, very difficult, if not impossible,” said Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), an ally. “He accepted that.”
While his staff fretted over his sinking poll numbers after the IRA passed in the summer of 2022 — his approval rating plunged by double digits — Manchin appeared unbothered, deciding, as one former aide granted anonymity to speak freely said, “the political price was worth it.”
For his part, Manchin — chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee — dismissed the idea that the backlash back home drove him into retirement.
“The politics are what the politics are,” he told POLITICO’s E&E News earlier this year.
He argued, as he often does, that the IRA was incorrectly implemented by the Biden administration and unfairly demonized by Republicans.