President Joe Biden has found himself stuck in the middle of the Democratic Party on environmental issues despite running on a sweeping green agenda, a tension that remains unresolved as he prepares to seek a second term.
Biden has attempted to govern with narrow Democratic majorities that have given outsized influence to a fossil fuel state centrist, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), while facing a slew of domestic and international conditions — the war in Ukraine, last year’s spike in gasoline prices, inflation, OPEC+ production cuts — that have forced him to go slower than he would prefer in pursuing his green agenda.
PRICE TAG FOR BIDEN SIGNATURE CLIMATE LAW BALLOONS TO MULTIPLE OF INITIAL ESTIMATES
Liberals who hoped Build Back Better would be a down payment on the Green New Deal have been frustrated while a much smaller number of centrists — along with the vast majority of Republicans — believe Biden hasn’t done enough to boost U.S. energy production.
That problem hasn’t abated this year, even as Republicans seized control of the House. Sens. Jon Tester (D-MT), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), and Jacky Rosen (D-NV) joined Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ), who still caucuses with Senate Democrats, in voting with Republicans to overturn a Biden administration water rule.
Sen. Angus King (I-ME), who caucuses with the Democrats, joined Manchin in voting to rescind a Biden administration regulation that expanded the definition of an endangered species’ critical habitat under the Endangered Species Act. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) sided with Manchin and Republicans in overturning certain protections for the long-eared bat.
Although Democrats slightly expanded their Senate majority to 51-49 from a deadlocked chamber that required Vice President Kamala Harris to break ties, Biden has lost on all these resolutions because of Democratic defections.
If anything, the political math has gotten harder because of a Republican House and a handful of red state Democratic senators who are up for reelection in 2024 at the same time as Biden. They are mostly more popular than the president in their home states, while the committed progressives represent safe blue districts.
Even the biggest green legislative victory of last year, the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act from the ashes of Build Back Better, sold to progressives as a climate bill, has become the source of infighting. Manchin has been battling the Biden Treasury Department over the implementation of its electric vehicle tax credits. The permitting reforms that Manchin wanted in exchange for the legislation remain stalled.
Yet Biden has also done no shortage of things that have outraged the environmental Left too. When the administration moved forward with an oil lease auction, the White House was excoriated for breaking its climate change promises. "Today I woke up enraged, but not surprised, that Biden would choose to cater to fossil fuel corporations over our futures," Varshini Prakash, executive director of the environmentalist Sunrise Movement, said in 2021.
The Biden administration’s support for an Alaska oil drilling project first approved under former President Donald Trump has elicited an even more negative response from environmental groups. "It is a serious misstep to pass on administrative authority to constrain an out-of-control oil industry while simultaneously punting to a deadlocked Congress for climate action," GreenPeace USA’s John Noel told Reuters.
Higher energy prices prompted Biden to let ConocoPhillips build its Willow oil project on federal land. But the oil industry continued to rap the administration for unpredictability at the same time green groups revolted.
It is nevertheless the divisions among Democrats that have posed Biden’s greatest challenge. Environmental policy was among the issues where Biden made promises to both progressives who had backed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) for president and suburban swing voters seeking compromise.
That’s why multiple factions of the Democratic Party saw Biden as a kindred spirit on the environment. When Build Back Better was still in play, before being killed by Manchin, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) summed up the progressive dilemma.
"One thing that I am very excited about is that I do believe that we have been able to influence a lot of thinking on climate and infrastructure," she said. "As much as I think some parts of the party try to avoid saying 'Green New Deal' and really dance around and try to not use that term, ultimately, the framework I think has been adopted."
But that wasn’t Ocasio-Cortez’s only observation about the doomed Biden reconciliation bill.
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"The size of it is disappointing. It's not enough," she said.
But with a minuscule Senate majority and lack of Democratic unanimity ahead of an election year, it might have to be.