Pipe Dreams
“If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.” – Charles Dickens
In August of 2022, President Biden’s signature Build Back Better plan was all but dead. Attempts to resuscitate it in the US Senate were being held up by Joe Manchin, the Democratic Senator from West Virginia. Hailing from a state that Donald Trump carried by +39% in the 2020 Presidential Election, Manchin has always been an oddity in the Democratic Caucus. More conservative than many Republicans, he routinely provokes the ire of his progressive colleagues by voting out of step with Biden’s agenda in the sharply divided Senate. With the current 50:50 partisan split in that all-important chamber, little can get done legislatively without Manchin’s support.
And then a breakthrough happened. The bulk of Build Back Better would be reincarnated as the inappropriately named Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and Manchin would support its passage. Enabling this breakthrough was a promise from President Biden, US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to streamline the permitting of new natural gas pipelines and other energy infrastructure projects, thereby eliminating a damaging bottleneck to the development of new sources of domestic energy. In particular, finally finishing the much debated and nearly complete Mountain Valley Pipeline – a project we discussed at length in a prior piece – was a specific and top priority of the Manchin team. There was only one small catch: the IRA would pass immediately, but the three most powerful Democratic leaders merely promised to pass Manchin’s pipeline priorities in the near future. Here is how Cardinal News describes it (emphasis added throughout):
“In a textbook display of raw political power, U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, recently leveraged his position as the necessary swing vote for the Democrats’ climate bill to win a so-called ‘side deal’ whereby President Joe Biden and top congressional Democrats would support the Mountain Valley Pipeline.
Or did he?
There’s definitely a side deal; there’s no dispute about that. And the Mountain Valley Pipeline – which would run 303 miles from northwestern West Virginia to Chatham – is definitely part of it. You can read the full language of it below, as supplied by Manchin’s office. What’s becoming increasingly less clear is just when and how this side deal – officially called ‘permitting reform’ – is going to happen. Or even whether it’s going to happen.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the value of a politician’s word is not what it used to be in Washington, D.C., and the promises made to Manchin were not money good. His dead-on-arrival “permitting reform” bill is now a running joke among progressives, a symbol of one the most egregious bait-and-switch political maneuvers of all time. Worse still, last week judges in the 4th US Circuit Court appeared set to deliver yet another blow to the embattled project:
“A three-judge panel with a history of tossing out permits for the Mountain Valley Pipeline appeared ready Tuesday to reject yet another approval for the natural gas project.
During oral arguments, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals analyzed a water permit certification for the pipeline and questioned whether the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection had done enough to protect the state’s waterways from sedimentation. But the judges seemed to stop short of overturning the permit entirely.”
Much like the Keystone Pipeline, the fate of the Mountain Valley Pipeline has dissolved into yet another brutal war between environmental extremists and the energy industry. As we wrote in February, “the Mountain Valley Pipeline project received its Certificate of Convenience and Necessity from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission [FERC] on October 13, 2017, and construction began months thereafter. That it is still in political limbo more than five years later sends a loud and clear message to energy investors: look elsewhere to deploy capital.”
The abandoned promise makes tweets like the one Biden published on Wednesday evening all the more chafing:
There are important conclusions to be drawn from the Mountain Valley Pipeline saga. As much as we might wish for the situation to be different, one must analyze the pieces as they exist on the board and play the game from there. Who are the winners and losers as the US hurtles into a prolonged global energy crisis with no end in sight to its domestic war on energy infrastructure? Let’s dig in.