Obstacles to Energy Consensus in Congress

Guest

Joe Manchin

Former Governor and US Senator, West Virginia

Transcript

Joe Manchin: I can guarantee the IRA is much better than anything we’ve ever had. It didn’t give money away. You had to invest and earn it, and you had to make sure that there was a process that had already been commercialized but not matured. There’s a lot of good, I would hope that the Trump administration will look at the good, extract that and stay with it, stay with what has us on the pathway to continue to be energy independent and also being conscious of the climate that we’re responsible for.

Bill Loveless: In today’s polarized political landscape, energy policy has become increasingly partisan. The challenge of balancing immediate energy needs with long-term climate goals remains elusive, especially as we face growing electricity demands and aging infrastructure. States rich in both fossil fuels and renewable resources are navigating competing priorities. At the same time, the Trump administration is pushing to defund critical energy projects under the Inflation Reduction Act, while also opening new fossil energy development on public land. And congressional efforts at energy permitting reform have stalled despite broad agreement on the need to streamline approvals. So what will it take to move beyond four-year election cycles and develop an enduring energy strategy? How can lawmakers build coalitions in this divided environment? And can we craft energy policies that serve both economic and environmental goals?

This is Columbia Energy Exchange, a weekly podcast from the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. I’m Bill Loveless.

Today on the show, former Senator Joe Manchin. Following his tenure as the governor of West Virginia, Joe Manchin served as a US Senator from 2010 to 2024. As chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, he played a pivotal role in shaping major energy legislation, including the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. Known for his centrist positions, Manchin worked across party lines on energy security, permitting reform, and infrastructure development. Today he serves on the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Energy Council. He’s also writing a memoir titled Dead Center, which is set to be released in September.

I spoke with Senator Manchin about the challenges of bipartisan cooperation, his experience drafting the energy provisions of the IRA, his permitting reform efforts, and his vision for an energy strategy that balances fossil fuel production with climate goals. Here’s our conversation, which was recorded before the US House of Representatives passed a budget reconciliation bill on May 22nd.

Senator Joe Manchin, welcome to Columbia Energy Exchange.

Joe Manchin: Well, thanks for having me, Bill. It’s great to be with you.

Bill Loveless: Well, I’ve looked forward to the conversation. Senator followed your career and your work in the center for so many years and the work you’re doing today is still so relevant to what happens on Capitol Hill. I want to get into that with you, but first I was looking back, you were first elected to the Senate in 2010 to succeed the late Robert Byrd, a very powerful Democratic leader in the Senate for many years. What was the political climate in the Senate and in Congress at that time, and how has it changed over time?

Joe Manchin: Well, let me just say I came from the world of governors and I was head of the Democratic Governors Association. Then in 2010, I became head of the National Governors Association, and I always said, as governors you couldn’t tell the political affiliation a governor may have. We all had the same problems and we all tried to help each other. So this camaraderie was something I enjoyed. I was used to it when I was governor of West Virginia. I did that with the legislature. I made them all come together. We worked together through problems. We never ostracized the other side or went after them or made them look like it was their fault. We had a problem, it was all of our responsibility to fix it. That was our approach in West Virginia when I was there and I thought, well, that would be the same approach in Washington.

And in 2010 when I had gone there, I really wasn’t excited about going to Washington, but I knew our state was in good shape and I thought I could take that same work attitude towards Washington and maybe help a little bit. And Senator Byrd was an icon for over 50 years, so I knew we could never fill his shoes. Hopefully we could follow in his footsteps to a certain extent and make sure that the independence that we have – he told me time and time again, he says, we all take the same oath, whether it’s a president or me. He said it was basically to defend and protect the Constitution. And he says, I don’t work for anyone there. I worked for everyone back home. So the president’s not my boss, majority leader’s not my boss. No one in the political party is my boss. Do I cater to them? I cater to the people that sent me there.

That’s the way I believed and that’s the way he professed. So I come there and I’m thinking, well, it’s just not exactly what I thought it was going to be because they were starting to divide more and more, and that was a time, I guess up until 2000 things were kind of compatible, if you would, and then it started getting more fierce. So I asked the question, when did all this happen? And I was told, Bill, in 2005. In 2005 when Bill Frist went to South Dakota and campaigned against Tom Daschle. Now mind you, that was a majority leader and the minority leader supposed to work together as friends every day to move our agenda forward and find out where our differences were. But when you saw open warfare and one’s trying to defeat the other, and yet they’re supposed to come home on Monday and work together, that kind of told me that that’s when it all went to heck in a handbasket, if you will. So then it just kept getting worse and worse and worse.

Bill Loveless: Yeah. I’ve read where you’ve said that after having been governor of West Virginia, you thought you were going to the big leagues.

Joe Manchin: I thought,

Bill Loveless: Yes. And instead you found that the squabbling that went on in the Senate, it felt more like the little leagues. It wasn’t the greatest deliberative body that it’s commonly called. Is that true?

Joe Manchin: Yeah. Well, the one thing about deliberative body was this, as I understood it from Senator Byrd, it is very hard to get something passed in a deliberative body because it takes time and you work because you’ve got to build a consensus of more than a simple majority, which is a 60-vote threshold, which is called the filibuster, and then the reconciliation. He had to put the Byrd Bath in place because he knew the instinct of legislators would try to subvert that and basically find a simple majority for policy. Well, you’re not supposed to have a policy for the greatest nation on earth, a superpower of the world being able to flip-flop back and forth every two years depending on who’s got the simple majority of 51 votes in the Senate. That was the purpose of it. Well, boom, here we go. And now both sides: Democrats fought me tooth and nail to get rid of the filibuster. Republicans are fighting a barrage, if you will, of how to subvert the parliamentarian. Either one of those, Bill, destroys the fabric of who we are as a deliberative body because it will be a ping pong game back and forth.

Bill Loveless: Yeah. I need you to explain the Byrd Bath.

Joe Manchin: The Byrd Bath was this, the only time we go to reconciliation is that whatever party’s in power, so remember the two numbers, you have to remember in Congress. 218 gives you the majority in the house. It’s a simple majority and simple majority rules in the house. That’s the way it was designed. I mean, they don’t even have to talk to the other side. And that’s whenever we get something from the house, a piece of legislation, it’s pretty one sided or we’ll say it’s pretty hot. We’ve got to calm it down, cool it down. As George Washington said, give it to the Senate just like a hot cup of tea and it’s got to have the saucer to cool the tea off so we can drink it. So that’s what it would take. But 51 is the magic number in the Senate too, because you set the majority, you set the agenda, and that’s a pretty good business plan.

Set the agenda. It doesn’t mean you get anything done. If you only have 51, then you need nine more Republicans when it comes time to pass major legislation. But with reconciliation, that majority party of 51 can decide we’re going to go into a reconciliation because we have a budget crisis. We have a financial crisis. And let me be very clear with you, Bill, the United States of America has a budget crisis. We have a financial crisis and no one’s talking about it. Neither side has raised it to the level that should be of concern to you, me and everybody else, that the $36 plus trillion of debt interest payment on the debt is greater than what we defend our country. The amount of money we spend to defend the country, we are out of whack. We’ve never been this far as far as debt to GDP yet no one’s raising it to a level of concern.

We’ve just been downgraded by Moody’s. And that’s because of the uncertainty that we have. Can we withstand all this debt? Does that make sure that basically the rest of the world’s going to continue to invest in our country and buy our paper, the safest paper in the world to invest in? So what happens when that’s the only purpose for reconciliation. Now, when you try to go outside of those boundaries and then the parliamentarian is ruling, and the other party would say, wait a minute, we don’t think that fits in reconciliation. It doesn’t have any financial connotation to it. So why are you letting that in? And the parliamentarian, whoever he or she would be at this time, it’s she, Elizabeth is absolutely a non-partisan parliamentarian, one of the best I think we could ever have.

Bill Loveless: That’s Elizabeth McDonough.

Joe Manchin: She’s saying that, wait a minute, that doesn’t fit your right. So the parliamentarian rules. Now let’s say that the majority party disagrees with the parliamentarian’s ruling and they’re going to push it through anyway, Bill, they can override the chair, the parliamentarian, when they do that, that’s as bad as breaking the filibuster because there is no checks and balances on reconciliation. So it takes a minority vote to get into reconciliation, and then it would only take a minority vote to change everything without any financial connotation. That’s the problem. And the Byrd Bath, when she rules, that’s the Byrd Bath. You’ve got washed out because Robert Byrd says, I’ll guarantee you, Joe, when we go into reconciliation, which by law we’re allowed to do, there’ll be those on whoever the majority side is that wants to go further because they don’t want to go through the hassle of working together.

Bill Loveless: Right, right. I want to touch on reconciliation as it’s taking place right now in a minute, but I’ve been interested in this appointment you have with the Bipartisan Policy Center to look at ways of organizing, promoting bipartisan energy legislation. Energy was a big issue for you in the Senate. You were the chairman of the Senate Energy Committee. I covered energy in Washington as a reporter in the 1980s. And back then there were differences over energy policy depending on whether you were from an energy producing or consuming state. But there were also agreements on comprehensive energy legislation across party lines up until the early 2000s. That seems like a distant memory, at least to me. Right?

Joe Manchin: Well, John Barrasso was the ranking member when I was chairman, and we were good friends and we work well together. But the main thing with the committees is making understanding, making everyone understand what’s the definition of dispatchable energy 24/7, something that can give you the lifesaving life producing energy that you need for a country such as the United States of America. So we know that we have, if you have a pile of coal, you’ve burned it in a power station and 24/7 it’ll run if you have natural gas – this has been replacing coal tremendously. That too can be. But you have to understand it can be interruptible more than coal pile just laying there beside boiler nuclear, absolutely nuclear can run with the uranium and the fuel that we have to offer for that type of scenario. So let’s look at those three really. There’s only two coal and nuclear that we can say that pretty hard to disrupt those.

They hit the fuel, they’re going to burn, they’re going to run. And then gas came in, which is now 30% more of our supply chain. So what else can we do? Well now renewables are coming on strong, and there’s been credit to basically taking an industry 20 years ago or so and giving it some incentives, tax incentives to mature it, and it’s gotten down to very low costs. But still, yet it’s interruptible. It’s when the wind or the sun, and we don’t have battery storage that gives us until the wind blows again. Until the sun shines again, we’re not there yet. So once we agree on that, how much dispatchable do we need? 24/7. How much renewable can we supplement with? Is that enough to the grid to handle the grid? I don’t need to tell you. The forecast right now are unbelievable appetite in the United States that we’re going to grow at unprecedented amounts of appetite for more energy because of the new race for AI, which I believe with all my heart and soul, we must be the predominant leader in the world for the AI technology.

With that, we have to have a lot of dispatchable power, and that’s what we’re trying to make sure that we achieve. That’s where the rubber hits the road. We can’t be, well, my personal belief is I would love to have everything renewable, no carbon footprint. Well, if you’re that belief, then fine. How many hours of the day do you wish to have energy? Because that’s really the reality of what we’re dealing with. So when we did these bills, the bipartisan infrastructure bill, my committee in a bipartisan way, we wrote a hundred billion of that bill. We did all the energy in that bill together, I think, in the bipartisan infrastructure bill. We’re the only committee that truly went through the process, Bill, that gave you what you got as far as energy during that. A lot of good stuff in there. And then you go on toward the IRA. Well, go ahead. I know you want to ask the question there.

Bill Loveless: Well, I’m glad you brought up the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act because the discussion here is how can you promote a bipartisan energy policy in the Congress given all the divides there? But there was this bill, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act of 2021, and while it wasn’t a comprehensive energy legislation, it contained, as you noted, tens of billions of dollars in energy provisions for grid modernization, clean energy technology deployment, electric vehicle infrastructure, advanced nuclear energy support and other things. And if I’m remembering correctly, there were 19 Republican senators joining all the Democrats in passing that bill as well as I think it was 13 house Republicans who voted for it. So there was a bipartisan bill on energy at that time. I mean, does that serve as a model of some sort?

Joe Manchin: It took us a while to get to that point, because you don’t just say, okay, we’re going to have a bill. Everyone has input, and in a committee process, you have amendments to be made, to be considered to be voted on. Does that go in or go out? Because we want to come out of something with a committee that we have a bipartisan majority that are supporting it. The most recent thing we did, which has never been done for as long as I can recall, that when we were doing the permitting bill here last year, we passed that out of our committee, John Barrasso and I and the Republican Democrat Committee, 15 to four, 15 to four! With the house membership, and all of our friends over there, Bruce Westerman and Garrett Graves and all of them, we worked diligently trying to get to a position that we could both agree to.

The house was coming a little bit harder. We’ll talk about that as far as they wanting to eliminate NEPA, and we were concerned about judicial reforms, accelerating judicial reforms. So there’d be certainty. You wouldn’t be tied up in court for years. You wouldn’t be increasing the cost insurmountable as far as we would say. You had boom, boom, boom, six months for this, 90 days for this preferential treatment in the court system. On and on and on is what we worked out the differences, but it got down to where we just couldn’t get past some things they’re trying to do now in reconciliation. So we’ll see what happens there.

Bill Loveless: Yeah. So what practical steps do you believe both sides can agree on to streamline energy project approvals while preserving environmental safeguards like the National Environmental Policy Act?

Joe Manchin: Let me tell you what we did. I jotted some things down, so I’m going to go make sure I don’t forget them. We set 150 days, 150 days to bring a lawsuit, and the courts must expedite. So you just couldn’t wait forever and wait until they got started and started all down the path of two, three years, and they put a billion dollars into a project, then all of a sudden you decide to sue. That was the tactic before that was used. They knew they had them to where they were in and couldn’t get out. So let’s see how much more we could get and start the sue and settle. We stopped that only 150 days. If you didn’t act in 150 days, you’re out. Create a new higher standard when courts can overturn a permit. This is where we were still working on specific words with my friends on the Republican side of the house.

They were afraid of interpretation. We thought we could work through that, and we were very close and just didn’t work out. And only parties who previously raised their concern on the permitting agency had the right to sue. So if you were in disagreement as we were going through this permitting after we had gone into the permitting end of it and you had not raised any issues, you couldn’t just jump in later on and say, okay, well, we think we can make some money here if we sue. We stopped that. If a permit is sent back to the agency, we gave the agency a shot clock within six months, do your darn job or get out of the way. You’ve got plenty of time. We did that one. And then of course, the energy and natural resources part of the bill included many of the leasing provisions that both coal states, both energy states, BLM, land, all of those were interested. We had worked through that.

Bill Loveless: Yeah. Well, it sounds like you’re saying that there was agreement, you certainly had it on the committee that you chaired, and presumably I think you thought there was a chance of getting that through the Senate, right, on a bipartisan basis. But when we look at the house, especially today in the sharp divides between Republicans and Democrats, what hope is there for some sort of bipartisan agreement on something like permitting?

Joe Manchin: Well, here’s the thing. Ours fell apart over NEPA versus judicial reform. I couldn’t just basically eviscerate NEPA. I didn’t have the support or votes on the Democratic side of the caucus to do that, but I was able to get an awful lot done that basically clarified what NEPA’s responsibilities were. And then with that, we had the judicial reform, which is what everyone agreed needed to be done, Bill. The court system was just basically just killing projects because the time, the cost, you follow me, and nothing productive was done except raising the cost. I’ll give you a perfect example. The Mountain Valley Pipeline, you’ve heard so much about the Mountain Valley pipeline started out as a little over a $3 billion project, and they went down four times – the fourth district, fourth circuit, I’m sorry, rejected before we got it done by an act of Congress and the President just shoving it through because it needed to be, the fuel needed to be down in the Carolinas to help so many people that are basically paying extremely high cost and didn’t have supply of reliable fuel.

So with that being said, it knocked the price right up to the top limit of $7 billion, almost $8 billion. It should have never gone over $3-4 billion. So who pays that price? Who pays the price for that? And this is what we’re saying. So we thought judicial reform. And you know what? The industry had a chance to look at that. We put it out on the web. Everybody knew what our agreement in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, being bipartisan coming out of that, was 15 to four. We gathered a lot of momentum and a lot of support. If we could have got our friends comfortable in the House, but the House needed a little bit more, they thought, well, let’s just get rid of everything, which is what they’re trying to do now with reconciliation, which I’m not sure it fits in there because it doesn’t have a financial connotation to regulations.

Bill Loveless: So you’re a long way from any sort of bipartisan agreement on that issue in the House right now, particularly given the tensions over reconciliation

Joe Manchin: Bill, whatever you try to do with rules like executive orders and rules can be undone as quick as they were done. What you need is legislation, codified legislation, then you have to go through the same process to undo it. That’s why the stability of the United States government and our bills and rules are pretty stable, more than any other place in the world.

Bill Loveless: You played a key role in shaping the energy provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act. What compromises were necessary to secure support, and what would you do differently now?

Joe Manchin: Well, I would’ve called the bill the Energy Security Act. It should have never been called. That was, I take blame for that. The IRA. What happened when, by the time that bill came out, my staff and I wrote the bill kind of in secrecy. The reason we did that, because as you recall, when I could not support and the one vote who stopped the BBB, my Bill Back Better was $6 trillion. And I think later it’s been said that it truly could have been a $10 trillion with everything they were giving away, and I just couldn’t get there. But there was a lot of good stuff in there we could work with. We pulled the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which had an awful lot of energy in that, we pulled that out of that and kind of reformed it. And with the BBB, it was just a transformation as far as changing our complete psyche of our responsibilities, if you will, for social services.

And I told the president, I said, Mr. President, I’ve come from the School of John Kennedy ask not what your country can do for you, what you can do for your country, and if we pass, this legislation has so much giveaway, you’re going to be changing the psyche of the nation for people to keep saying, how much more can my country do for me? Especially after COVID, when we were just sending checks to everybody and that’s fine, but enough was enough. I couldn’t do it. So when it came time and this Ukraine War and Putin weaponized energy, we were in trouble, Bill. We could not even take care of ourselves, as far as being energy independent, let alone helping our allies. And now they were in trouble because he’s cutting off oil and gas for the Nord Stream pipelines. So I said, we’ve got a big problem. And I was told, well, you’re the energy chairman.

Why don’t you write something? I didn’t want to go through what I’d just gone through for eight months being attacked from the far left on everything they wanted. And I couldn’t come to an agreement with, I didn’t even want them to know I was working on something. But I knew our country needed reliable energy. So we look at everything. We worked in our committee – bipartisan, and I knew what would pass bipartisan because we worked it and I started putting all that in. Now that’s in March, April, May and June, if you recall, by June of 2021, by June of 2021, by that time I think inflation was 9.1% [EDITOR’S NOTE: Inflation hit 9.1% in June of 2022]. Gas was $5 and inflation and gasoline and everything else was just wreaking havoc on our economy. So I said, if we do something and produce more energy, we know we’ll bring the prices down.

So that’s how we become inflation reduction. And it did. It took gasoline prices from five back down to the threes. It took inflation from nine back down to the threes and fours. It did what it was intended to do, and we didn’t give any money away. We had incentives, investment tax credits, production tax credits, 45Q. We were trying to take all the energy that, Bill, we had known could be commercialized and try to incentivize maturing it. So we would have less carbon, less of a carbon footprint, but have 24/7 reliability. So that’s where you saw SMRs, geothermal, all the things, hydrogen, all the things we knew would work.

Bill Loveless: Right? Electric vehicle support in there for electric vehicles, for batteries, for a lot of other so-called clean energy options. Now the house is considering budget proposals that would substantially pair back provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act. What do you make of the budget proposals under consideration in the Republican House today as they pertain to energy provisions of the IRA? What do you think might be changing in the law?

Joe Manchin: Yeah, what I would tell you is this. We wrote the bill, if you read the bill, how we wrote the IRA, how it was written, and then look and see how the Biden administration tried to implement it by rules. So what happens, you pass a bill, Congress votes, it’s passed, it goes to the president, the president’s people at the White House basically send it in different directions. So if it has any financial connotation, it goes to Treasury. If it has energy, it goes to energy committee, environmental [to] EPA, what we wrote specifically to try to keep the guardrails on to do what we thought, only reason we did anything for EVs, electric vehicles. Only reason at all was basically to bring the supply chain more reliable. China had a dominance of the market, they could control it. And if we’re going to get away from China’s dominance controlling us, then we had to be more self-reliant or with partners that we considered to be reliable.

That was it. So what happened is the administration, the Biden administration, John Podesta, and his environmental team in the White House – these are friends of mine, we just disagree. They tried to accelerate it. Everything we wrote in the bill, they cut in half. And that means we were still dependent on China and putting more stuff out quicker. That’s all they were concerned about. How quick could they change this market? And I said, the market’s usually changed when the people accept the change, and there’s no need for us to get the people changing when we can’t supply it unless we’re dependent on an unreliable source. So I have always said we had four countries of concern. China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. Those four countries are never going to have our best interest at heart. So we should never, ever count on anything that we would be needing from their country or trading with. Perfect example: Russia and enriched uranium, Bill, comes from Russia. It’s ridiculous. They can cut us off. China can cut us off from critical minerals, and they’re all doing it, playing the game now. So we were trying to get away from it. That’s all.

Bill Loveless: The officials of the Biden administration maintained that they in fact had reached agreements with the private sector for loans, loan guarantees, credits, and all of these sorts of things that were going a long way to establishing a domestic infrastructure, manufacturing infrastructure for all of these things that we rely on so heavily from China today. But you feel as though the administration of those programs by the Department of Energy, by the Treasury Department and others wasn’t being done according to what you intended in the law. In the IRA.

Joe Manchin: Bill, we wrote the bill. They did not write the bill. Okay. Me and my committee wrote the bill. We know what was in it, and I made sure I talked to President Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, I talked to all of them before I signed on to anything. Let me ask you this, did you ever know that the IRA paid down $230 billion of debt? It was mandatory to pay down debt in that bill? Never heard him talk about it. Okay. I told him I would not sign a bill unless someone was serious about the finances of our country. Did you know that basically we have produced more energy than ever before with that bill, more fossil, whether it be gas, oil, coal, whatever, and used it with more technology, cleaner, than any place else in the world. Never heard them talk about the energy security of using fossil.

It was always touted by the administration as a renewable energy bill, which was a falsehood. And when I saw what they were doing, I told the industry, if you have made your decisions on investments based on how the bill was written and passed versus how it’s being implemented, then I would encourage you to sue the federal government, the departments that are putting the rules out, and my committee will do the amicus brief and you’ll win every one of them in court. Because it has no findings whatsoever of what they’ve done versus what we wrote.

Bill Loveless: Yeah. So do you think then the House Republicans are justified in pairing back or eliminating these provisions in the IRA that the administration considered to be so effective in promoting clean energy transition?

Joe Manchin: Absolutely, I do. I encourage them. But now, don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.

Bill Loveless: And what do you mean by that?

Joe Manchin: By that I mean just because it had the connotation of the IRA. They’re thinking they got to throw everything out. There’s too much good in there. There was good, that incentivized there is good. Basically that people have built factories, they made commitments and this and that. Some of this money had gone out too quick. Some of this money had gone for basically people who did not meet the constraints of how the bill was written. If you want to look at how the bill was written, give you a perfect example. You had $3,750 for a car, credit for a car had to come where it was sourced and processed. Critical minerals, couldn’t be from China. Okay? But 40% the first year, then it went to 60%, then it went to 80%. [EDITOR’S NOTE: This refers to proposed guidance on the applicable percentage of the value of the critical minerals contained in the battery that must be extracted or processed in the United States or a country with which the United States has a free trade agreement.]

They cut all that in half to 20%. Well, tell me why. Because you couldn’t get it out quick enough, because you couldn’t sell more EVs and get the credit. I never believed that the auto industry in America, in my time on this earth – and I love vehicles – I never saw the federal government sending me a check to buy a car. I can’t comprehend that. But they were totally hell bent on getting this $7,500 credit. So I broke it down $3,750 for sourcing and processing, $3,750 for production anodes and cathodes and the battery itself in America. So I said, if you guys have sent your whole business plan based on $7,500 credit, God forbid, that would be a hell of a bad business plan. But if that’s what you’ve done, then the United States of America and our economy and the public are going to have a reliable supply chain that we control and not China or Russia or Iran or North Korea.

Bill Loveless: Right. So you think that it makes sense for them to go after some of these provisions in the IRA, but again, what are some of the things that you think should be maintained, some of the projects that have been funded so far, some of the other provisions that would support various technologies? What do you consider to be important to keep in mind?

Joe Manchin: Well, I believe that all the things we’ve done for energy from the standpoint, geothermal, hydrogen, all the things that we’re trying to do, SMRs, these are things that are needed. And we knew we had to give incentives. We had President Macron and Chancellor Scholz. I was in a meeting, an international meeting in France. They come after me like a scud missile. I’m destroying their country. I’m destroying their country. I have never been for carbon tax or carbon pricing because you know why? I’ve never seen a government use the resources to fix the problem with new technology. They put it in their treasury and use it for social reforms. And so they came after me and I said, don’t be mad at me. I said, we never intended to hurt our greatest allies and friends in Germany and France and all of you now.

And I said, but you’ve used the stick. We took the carrot approach. We’re going to find new technology that will help you too. And we’re bringing people here that have the ability to help us have this new technology and mature it. And they were still basically charging carbon fees. Now they’re changing a little bit too. So there’s some great things in there, and I have tried to talk to the administration. I think Doug Burgum is extremely bright and Chris Wright are extremely bright, knowledgeable, good people. I’ve been trying to work with them and show them and give them the breakdown of what you can do. If the president would change, it’s his bill now, if he changes the National Energy Security Act of 2025, the Trump Security Act, God bless him, do it, and then take the good look at that, then produce what we wanted to produce, but on the other side, don’t accelerate it. Let the people basically have the security and knowledge knowing that they have a time period to mature these technologies.

Bill Loveless: What do you think of President Trump’s energy policies, his commitment to energy dominance in the United States and his opposition to any action on climate change?

Joe Manchin: Well, the way I think about it. I just believe as humans that we have to acknowledge that we’ve had a tremendous responsible position for climate, where it’s at and what we can do to prevent it from getting worse. We can do something and we should do everything we can using technology, and I’ve said this, Bill, so many times, you cannot eliminate your way to a cleaner environment. You can innovate it through technology. Okay? It’s called global climate. It’s not called North American climate. It’s not called West Virginia climate. It’s a global climate and look where most of the pollution’s coming from today. Okay, it’s in Asia. Okay, it’s all over and you have China. Look what’s going on, my goodness, what they’re doing. Okay, but yet, still yet, they say, well, we got to quit using this. Well, I can guarantee you, if you quit using something someone else has in their backyard, India has, let’s say their coal reserves, let’s say whatever they have you don’t like and you want to stop it using fossil in America, you better find a way to use fossil cleaner and better than ever before because they’re going to use it.

And then if you’re going to develop new technology of SMRs or micros or whatever you’re going to do with nuclear, if you’re going to do things with solar, basically with battery storage, that’ll give you a hundred hours of storage. That’s a whole other ballgame. Okay? These are the things we should be trying to mature to help the free world basically help the climate because we can’t do it by ourselves.

Bill Loveless: Yeah, yeah. Just given your reference though to the global nature of this problem, climate change, do you think it makes sense to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement? As the President intends to do.

Joe Manchin: Me, I would never pull out of any agreement. I would be a voice of reason. I would be sitting there as the United States of America saying, listen, we cannot get to zero emissions unless we use technology. You can’t just eliminate your way there. It won’t work. No one’s going to do it. They might tell you they’re going to, they won’t comply, I can assure you. And what we can do is show them through technology what we could do and get ourselves to or near zero at some time in the future, but no time certain, but we can sure reduce it and negate what’s going on. Look at the demand for AI. Every country in the world I know is playing the game they’re looking for. Do we have unobstructed energy provisions that we can use all of the energy no matter if they have no environmental standards to comply with, just to produce energy to support a database for AI?

Bill Loveless: Hearing you, it seems that you may have more in agreement with the Trump administration energy and climate policy than you do with Biden energy and climate policy.

Joe Manchin: Most certainly. Most certainly. And so they wanted to eliminate. I can assure you, I have fought the Biden administration that wanted to eliminate. They didn’t want leasing. I had to fight for leasing. Do you know in the IRA, I knew I had to write into that bill a provision that you could not go on BLM land or offshore in the Gulf and put wind farms and put solar farms unless we are extracting the minerals that we had to have for 24/7 production, and I knew that we produce oil and gas out of the Gulf better and cleaner than anywhere in the world.

Bill Loveless: The bipartisan policy center council that you serve on aims to provide insights in how to advance bipartisan energy and climate objectives. The council’s membership is pretty diverse. Former CEOs, folks from environmental organizations, banking and former members of Congress such as yourself, how have those discussions gone?

Joe Manchin: They’ve been great. They’ve really been good. Everyone’s coming to that table looking for answers, and they know that we’ve come a long way in looking. They knew the IRA was basically an energy production type thing. We could basically produce the energy that we needed today, Bill, and be able to invest in the energy we wanted for tomorrow to give us that lower carbon or zero carbon 24/7 opportunity, and now you have fusion coming on. You have all the things that may be our reality. I’m not sure in our lifetime, but it’s going to happen.

Bill Loveless: We had a former senator, Heidi Heitkamp, North Dakota Democrat, on the show recently. She called for a nonpartisan rather than a bipartisan approach to energy policy. She said, “it’s just as important as being nonpartisan in our national security, and I just don’t see it.” And she added that lawmakers should be agnostic on these matters. Bipartisan. Nonpartisan. Is there much of a difference there?

Joe Manchin: The environment we’re living in today is something that we’ve never seen. It’s not normal. This is not normal. What we’ve seen to basically weaponize the political process, and what I mean by weaponizing, it basically demeans the other side. You take a side, they want you to pick sides, and I’ve always said I’m only on one side, the American side. I might have a different political view or ideology, of how you would fix things, but I’m willing to listen to the other side because I know that I don’t have all the answers and I know that they’re not always wrong. So it’s going to take both of us to make it work. And I’ve always looked at this, Bill. If I have moved the ball, moved the ball down, I’ve said, I’ll use this in sports. We all, I go to a football game. I love to see a Hail Mary pass, win the game at the last second.

We all think that’s exciting, but I’ll take a few first downs to win a game, also. I love to go to basketball and see the long three pointer, Steph Curry or Caitlin Clark. I love to see those long shots, but I’ll take a few foul shots and win the game. We have to start understanding in the political process that we live in, that you cannot allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good. If you have started and you all agree on a starting point where you are, whether it be climate, whether it be energy, whatever it may be, and you have this starting point and you’ve moved it and improved it a little bit, not everything you want, and you keep doing your job, you’re going to do what needs to be done for our country today. They don’t allow you to do that.

The perfect is the enemy of the good, because voting no, being against something is much more profitable than trying to defend something because when you’re defending it, you’re working your hind end off, trying to explain. It’s not perfect. I wish I could have made it better, but it’s better than what I started with, and I can guarantee the IRA, the Energy Security Act is much better than anything we’ve ever had. It kept us from falling into recession. It didn’t give money away. You had to invest and earn it, and you had to make sure that there was a process that had already been commercialized but not matured. Okay, we were helping you. We weren’t taking off the shelf, give me a piece of paper and we’ll send you a check for your idea. We didn’t do that. So with that, there’s a lot of good, I would hope that the Trump administration will look at the good, extract that and stay with it, stay with what has us on the pathway to continue to be energy independent and also being conscious of the climate that we’re responsible for.

Bill Loveless: I was going to ask you before we leave, what advice you would give to current lawmakers trying to build coalitions around energy issues in this increasingly polarized environment. But I think you just answered that question.

Joe Manchin: I hope so, because I know them all. I’ve worked with all of them, and everyone has good ideas. They really do. Sometimes the politics get in the way of just good compromises because it didn’t go far enough. I’m not giving enough red meat to this side or this side. We have a permitting bill that’s done. We wrote the bill. It’s finished. It should have been done. We tried to get it in. When the IRA went through reconciliation, it got washed out by the Byrd Bath. I accepted that I could have contested it and probably overrode the parliamentarian. I respected the process, and then we kept working and working, and now in all honesty, we have a better permitting bill that we finished last year right before the session was over and went home for Christmas, better than anything we’ve ever had. Gone through the 15 to four coming out of the committee. Please, my dear friends, Republicans and Democrats alike, take that bill up and codify it, put it in law, and I’ll guarantee you it will transform what we do and how we do it in America to be energy independent.

Bill Loveless: And don’t give up hope for some agreement. Right?

Joe Manchin: Never give up hope. This is the United States of America. How can you ever give up hope?

Bill Loveless: Senator Joe Manchin, thanks a lot for joining us on Columbia Energy Exchange.

Joe Manchin: Thank you, Bill. It’s great to be with you all and the bipartisan policy committee – I’m so proud to be part of it, and the only thing I can do is give my, I can show my battle scars and my wounds from trying to do what I thought is something we should be doing. Remember, I’ve said, remember this, you work for nobody but the people who brought you here, and you only serve one agency, and that is the Constitution of the United States of America to defend and protect it, and the more that we protect, by having energy security, the more we’re defending this great country.

Bill Loveless: That’s it for this week’s episode of Columbia Energy Exchange. Thank you again, Joe Manchin, and thank you for listening. The show is brought to you by the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

The show is hosted by Jason Bardoff and me, Bill Loveless. The show is produced by Mary Catherine O’Connor from Latitude Studios. Additional support from Caroline Pitman and Kyu Lee. Sean Marquand is the sound engineer. For more information about the show or the Center on Global Energy policy, visit us [email protected] or follow us on social media @ColumbiaUEnergy. If you like this episode, leave us a rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. You can also share it with a friend or colleague to help us reach more listeners. Either way. We appreciate your support. Thanks again for listening. We’ll see you next week.

In today’s polarized political landscape, energy policy has become increasingly partisan.

States rich in both fossil fuels and renewable resources must confront growing electricity demand and aging infrastructure. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is pushing to defund critical energy projects under the Inflation Reduction Act while also opening new fossil energy development on public land. And congressional efforts at energy permitting reform have stalled despite broad agreement on the need to streamline approvals.

So what will it take to move beyond four-year election cycles and develop an enduring energy strategy? How can lawmakers build coalitions in this divided environment? And can we craft energy policies that serve both economic and environmental goals?

This week, Bill Loveless speaks with former Senator Joe Manchin about the state of US energy policy. Following his tenure as governor of West Virginia, Joe Manchin served as a US Senator from 2010 to 2024. As chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, he played a pivotal role in shaping major energy legislation, including the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. Today, he serves on the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Energy Council and is writing a memoir, titled Dead Center, which is set to be released in September.

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