The ironic effort to wave away climate change in favor of ‘clean air’
Just … not exactly as you might expect.
“We have a responsibility to our climate,” Manchin said. “I haven’t met a Democrat or Republican that wants to drink dirty water or breathe dirty air. I haven’t met one yet. So they all want a better climate, but we want a balance between the environment and the climate. We think there’s a balance to be had.”
Before we parse that sentiment, remember why Manchin plays such an important role in discussions about climate change. He is the most moderate Democrat in the party’s Senate caucus, meaning he is the most likely point of defection on significant legislation. He also represents a state that is among the biggest coal suppliers in the country (though the scale of the industry in the state is more modest than many realize), and his family has a coal industry business. So he is both empowered and motivated to slow any policy efforts aimed at constraining the use of coal, one of the key contributors to climate change.
And yet his presentation of “climate” as an issue is to focus on air and water quality. In other words, to suggest that he supports addressing the “climate” in the sense that he supports limiting air and water pollution.
We’ve seen this ploy before. In fact, we saw it a few hours before Manchin’s Fox Business interview on the same network. On Wednesday morning, former president Donald Trump said much the same thing.
After referring to the “climate hoax,” Trump said that “this climate situation is killing our country.”
“I know it’s politically not correct because people don’t understand it, and they don’t,” he continued. “But I understand it — with the best air, the best water, the best everything else and not destroying our businesses.”
With all due respect, that doesn’t sound as though he understands it.
This is not the first time Trump has talked about climate change like this, nor was his progression to talking about pollution in the oceans the first time he has raised that subject. When he was president, I compiled many of the occasions on which Trump had offered bizarre or incorrect assessments of climate change. That included various previous efforts to wave away climate change as being adequately addressed by efforts to reduce air and water pollution.
Generally speaking, of course, those issues are very different from climate change. Trump and Manchin grew up at a time when air and water pollution were far worse and when things such as littering were a primary focus of environmental activism. (Fox News host Tucker Carlson grew up in that same period, as he reminded us this week.) But since the 1980s, scientists have been focused on the more difficult challenge of emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, invisible pollution that sits in the atmosphere and prevents heat from escaping into space. The issue of global warming, the primary engine of climate change, gained international attention about 15 years ago. But Trump and Manchin, either conveniently or bizarrely, indicate that they haven’t kept up.
This conflation of “climate” and “clean air” comes at a fitting moment.
As climate change became a focus of political attention, the state of Massachusetts (along with some others) sued the Environmental Protection Agency, alleging that its failure to regulate greenhouse gases was damaging the state. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA could regulate greenhouse gases using the existing authority of the Clean Air Act. That legislation is the primary reason that our air got cleaner; it allowed the government to stop rampant air pollution (in part because air crosses state lines, giving the federal government authority). The decision was a key moment in the effort to constrain greenhouse gas emissions and allowed the administration of Barack Obama to propose policies that would scale back carbon-dioxide pollution.
But less than a decade later, Michigan (and some others) sued the agency, arguing that it couldn’t impose new regulations without considering economic costs. The Supreme Court agreed.
This week, the court heard oral arguments in a lawsuit brought against the agency by Manchin’s home state of West Virginia (and some others), challenging the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the auspices of the Clean Air Act. As you might expect, the now heavily conservative court expressed sympathy to West Virginia’s argument.
In other words, Trump and Manchin are trying to suggest that addressing climate change is just about addressing air quality — as the effort to combat climate change using air quality legislation is under threat in the Supreme Court.
Both men did mention the central argument offered against strictly limiting emissions: that it would impose costs on some businesses, including ones in the coal industry. For years, environmentalists have pointed out that the costs of these emissions are borne either by the emitter or the public in the form of exacerbated climate effects — that in other words, polluters are just outsourcing the cost of the pollution. But because the cost of capturing or preventing pollution is immediate and measurable and the costs of climate change less immediate and less concrete, the business interests have often carried the day. So Trump and Manchin suggest that we don’t need to worry any more about the climate than we do that the air is clean, given that we don’t want to impose costs on businesses that contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.
Climate change is not clean air. But even as Trump and Manchin pretend that cleaning up the air is as much as we need to do to address climate change, the government is close to losing its ability to address climate change under the Clean Air Act.
