Manchin’s choice to reject climate correction invites global catastrophe

West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin has been watering down the climate provisions in the Build Back Better legislation. Now, his final rejection of a stripped-down version effectively kills President Biden’s ambitious plans to reduce carbon emissions deeply enough to avoid the worst impacts of global warming as determined by the United Nations.

“The energy transition my colleagues seek is already well underway,” said Manchin, of the shift from fossil fuels to wind, solar and other forms of clean renewable power, but that’s happening far more slowly than climate scientists say is needed to curtail the carbon pollution that is disrupting the climate.

Climate change has become such a problem across the world that it now causes one natural disaster a week.

If the U.S. isn’t on pace to hit its targets, that will undermine the whole global push to switch to clean energy and cut emissions.

“We won’t be acting on the climate crisis if we don’t pass this bill, and there’s not a decade left to waste,” said Leah Stokes, a climate policy professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara

Manchin claims shifting to clean energy “at a rate that is faster than technology or the markets allow will have catastrophic consequences for the American people like we have seen in both Texas and California in the last two years,” but the real calamity will be the irreversible damage from climate change.

Even with the new plans announced by the United States, the EU and China, commitments still fall short of achieving a 1.5 °C limit to global warming as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) declared necessary.

US President Joe Biden promised to increase the United States’ financial contribution, but his commitment was still proportionately less than the costs that resulted from the United States being the largest historical emitter of CO2 and even that won’t happen now.

America is not really doing enough to act as a global leader in the fight to combat climate change although it is disproportionately responsible for the problem.

For decades, the IPCC’s reports have informed and galvanized action by governments, businesses, nonprofits and activists to reduce climate change risks. UN Secretary General António Guterres called the IPCC’s most recent report “a code red for humanity.”

Around the world, 2021 was a year shaped by weather extremes.

Germany and China saw devastating floods, while parts of Europe and the United States were ravaged by wildfires. Drought in East Africa led to crop losses and hunger, from Kenya to Madagascar. Worsening extreme weather events that have been caused by climate change have also been made more severe and more frequent.

The latest scientific evidence recognized they are human-induced disasters.

“Catastrophes such as cyclones Idai and Kenneth in Mozambique and the drought afflicting India make headlines around the world. But large numbers of ‘lower impact events’ that are causing death, displacement, and suffering are occurring much faster than predicted,” said Mami Mizutori, the UN secretary-general’s special representative on disaster risk reduction. “This is not about the future, this is about today.”