Bill Gates, Joe Manchin and the secret push to save Biden’s climate bill
and other seemingly intractable problems that have been his focus since stepping down as Microsoft’s chief executive two decades ago. As he revealed to Bloomberg Green, he has quietly lobbied Manchin and other senators, starting before President Joe Biden had won the White House, in anticipation of a rare moment in which heavy federal spending might be secured for the clean-energy transition.
It’s by far the biggest financial commitment the U.S. government has ever made to fight climate change. Thereductions that will result from this law will be roughly the same as eliminating the annual planet-warming pollution of France and Germany combined, or about 2.5% of the total global greenhouse gas output, according to researchers who specialize in climate modeling. It might be just about enough to revive the virtually left-for-dead goal of limiting warming to 1.
But innovations that start in university labs often need even more government support to reach mass adoption, according to the way Gates sees things. Take a startup making carbon-free cement — success means bringing to market a product that’s as much as three times as expensive as normal cement. On climate, the Gates playbook has been much the same. He made the case in 2015 that governments spent too little on research and development for energy technologies. In the shadow of that year’s Paris Agreement, Gates won a smaller pact among the U.S. and 20 other countries to double funding for clean-energy research within five years.
What happened next has become rather infamous for anyone who has followed the legislative politics of Washington over the past 18 months. As the crucial 50th vote for the Senate’s bare Democratic majority, Manchin held unmatched sway over negotiations that dragged on and on as progressives tried to force him to accept a $2.2 trillion version of the agenda. And then everything crashed to a halt.
But fast-spreading worries about inflation had Manchin’s attention, and on Feb. 1 he declared that Build Back Better was “dead.” Any attempts to pass a climate bill would have to start from scratch. Most observers focused on the end of what had been an enormous chunk of Biden’s agenda. subsidies before they lapsed. If the legislation didn’t get done before the August break, the opportunity could close for good, especially if Republicans take control of the House or Senate in the November midterm elections. That pressure drove Schumer to insist on moving quickly, Manchin pushed back, and once again talks collapsed on July 14. Manchin told a local radio host in West Virginia that he was wary of adding to inflation that was running at record highs, including a 9.
It was a moment of reckoning. “Everybody had to kind of look into that abyss together to get their head around the fact that something is better than nothing,” said Heather Zichal, another former Obama climate adviser who now leads the American Clean Power Association.
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