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Congress Is Debating Biggest Climate Change Bill Ever. Here's What's at Stake

56 points by graderjs 5y ago

djohnston 5y ago
> Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia has ties to the coal industry, and he told CNN he won't vote for the package. He argues utilities already are moving away from coal, so it doesn't make sense to "pay companies to do what they're already doing." It's not the blatant self interest and lobbying that I find most offensive, but the need for these politicians to make up such silly lies and the gullibility of the constituents who accept them.
- Proven 5y ago
  I find most offensive that someone can decide what to do with my money, or make international commitments for future fiscal spending even though the amount or anything else for that matter (including benefits) is completely unknown and there's absolutely no recourse for getting my money back in the case the plan doesn't work. Does anyone but public governments make spending decisions like that?
- sul_tasto 5y ago
  I’d like to think that if there were alternative good paying jobs in WV, many would gladly give up the coal mining jobs. It seems like this bill could be an opportunity for WV to chart a different course in exchange for its vote.
  - nradov 5y ago
    Past efforts to retrain coal miners have been generally ineffective. President Biden told them to learn to code, which didn't go over too well. https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/476391-biden-tells-coal-miners-to-learn-to-code https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/47... I support efforts to give miners other opportunities but we have to be realistic about what's possible.
  - causi 5y ago
    In the entire country there are less than sixty thousand coal miners. They're a political tool to be exploited by others; their own vote counts for almost nothing.
- pirate787 5y ago
  There is such ignorance and arrogance on the coasts about places like West Virginia. The state is extremely poor and coal is still a massively important industry. Manchin is driving a bargain and is representing his people, who've ruined their economy and environment powering the rest of the country for the last 100 years. The rest of the country needs to help make the impact on coal country manageable as part of the transition to clean energy.
  - mistrial9 5y ago
    > There is such ignorance and arrogance on the coasts about places like West Virginia. yes, agree > The state is extremely poor ok > coal is still a massively important industry similar arguments could be made for plenty of industry, historically.. even going back 200 years > Manchin is driving a bargain and is representing his people you are dramatically off-base on this. People do not form industry, companies, their executives and stakeholders form industry. Individuals are paid wages and then also have expenses, for example to their landlords, and also a company store perhaps? > who've ruined their economy and environment many lives are suffering now, and in the past, agree > powering the rest of the country for the last 100 years wasted water, electricity and money, are not unique to our age > The rest of the country needs to help make the impact on coal country that has been an explicit goal for union organizers, environmentalists, policy makers and is a core reason to have a common governance. Your emotional appeal is probably well-meaning, but.. falls apart quickly. King Coal - your time is over
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      > People do not form industry, companies, their executives and stakeholders form industry. Peoples' jobs are a part of industry. It's not just the CEOs and shareholders. And the point was, Manchin is not just representing CEOs. He's representing little peoples' jobs. At this point, you were kind of ignoring what pirate787 was actually saying, and therefore your reply was rather wasted. > ... and also a company store perhaps? This just looks like smear tactics. Are there any company stores in 2021? I'm pretty sure they're at least quite rare.
- nradov 5y ago
  You can question Sen. Manchin's motives but his statement isn't wrong. Coal is generally no longer price competitive with natural gas and renewables for power generation. The fleet mix is already shifting and will continue to do so even absent government mandates or subsidies. (There may be environmental reasons to accelerate that shift even faster.)
  - TremendousJudge 5y ago
    if utilities move to natural gas we don't solve the emissions issue
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      Gas is a massive improvement over coal. The supply chain has tons less carbon per MW (pumps and pipes vs trains and trucks and drilled wells vs mines) Obviously there's huge pollution improvements. And most importantly gas can be throttled so it leaves lots of room for renewables to pick up load.
      - throwaway894345 5y ago
        It's an improvement, but insufficient to meet emissions objectives. Of course, if we taxed carbon we could actually rely on the market sorting itself out without gaping loopholes (e.g., virtually the entire transportation sector).
    - belltaco 5y ago
      CO2 isn't the only pollutant. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/coal-and-the-environment.php#:~:text=Several%20principal%20emissions%20result%20from,respiratory%20illnesses%20and%20lung%20disease https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/coal-and-the-enviro... https://www.psr.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/coal-ash-hazardous-to-human-health.pdf https://www.psr.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/coal-ash-haza...
    - imtringued 5y ago
      Natural gas produces less emissions and act as a flexible backup for renewables. There is no good reason to support coal anymore and natural gas plants need expensive fuel which means they can't compete when wind and solar are producing power. It's the perfect compromise.
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  I'm not a fan of propping up the coal industry, but it's hard to argue that he's fighting against his constituent's interests here. WV is coal country — he's not lying to his base.
- Pxtl 5y ago
  Realistically the Democrats need to take more seats in the Senate so that people like Manchin and Sinema can be outvoted, but that's kind of impossible with the anti-democratic structure of the Senate giving disproportionate representation to the more sparsely-populated Republican-controlled states.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    I agree that Democrats need more seats, but the problem isn't the structure of the senate. A decade ago Democrats had the Rust belt and many other sparsely populated states were swing states, but they decided to go out of their way to alienate rural voters with extreme and unnecessary prejudice. Doubling down on identity politics from 2015-2020 only sealed the issue. Democrats have the better policies, but they pick completely unnecessary and counterproductive fights.
    - jgwil2 5y ago
      > they decided to go out of their way to alienate rural voters This is beside the point. Rural voters are overrepresented by the structure of the Senate. You could argue that Democrats have used poor political tactics, but the fact is that in a representative system they wouldn't need to kowtow to rural voters in order to get a majority.
      - throwaway894345 5y ago
        The "right" balance of representation between rural and urban voters is a subjective question, but I think the fact that one party can't both overwhelmingly succeed and repeatedly, deliberately, and overtly offend millions of voters suggests that the balance of representation is working properly. To put it a little differently, I want a political system that incentivizes cooperation and good behavior and disincentivizes bad divisiveness and bad behavior. In this particular case, our political system actually delivered on that. So while in many other regards our system may be broken, I don't think the balance of representation is particularly broken.
- crisdux 5y ago
  I find it offensive when folks on HN completely get the facts wrong and disparage people for no good reason. The utility industry has cut electricity generation from coal by 50% in about 15 years. Manchin is right.
  - antattack 5y ago
    That was the easy half. Second half will be much harder to accomplish.
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      With cheap solar and cheap gas I don't see how it's going to be any harder than having the self control to not shoot ourselves in the foot before the coal infrastructure ages out.
  - fweespeech 5y ago
    > The utility industry has cut electricity generation from coal by 50% in about 15 years. Manchin is right. The problem is, by common projections such as: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/abandoning-60-percent-of-global-oil-and-gas-might-limit-warming-to-1-5-c/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/abandoning-60-per... We need to cut it by another 60% by the end of the year. That is not happening without government intervention. You have to understand if you aren't 70+, this is going to impact you much worse the longer we wait to make changes.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    The first half of his sentence is right. The full sentence and implications are not right.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    1. Manchin is a toad whose personal wealth is invested in the fossil fuel industry nevermind whatever the industry pays him to advocate for it. Manchin is the worst kind of moderate democrat, and he absolutely deserves to be disparaged. 2. What matters is the rate at which we're shedding emissions, not the rate at which we're cutting coal. Moving from coal to natural gas represents a reduction in emissions, but it's not enough to meet our emissions targets, hence this bill.
sul_tasto 5y ago
Are bipartisan bills a thing of the past? I don’t have any sources, but I thought a sizable segment of the voting public in the US favored bipartisanship. Just wishing we weren’t so polarized…. Also wishing I better understood what interests were pushing the polity towards polarized ideologies. I’m not convinced it’s a completely organic phenomenon (rather, that there are special interests benefiting from the polarization).
- nradov 5y ago
  The US voting public favors bipartisanship as an abstract concept. But they don't reward bipartisanship at the ballot box.
- whateveracct 5y ago
  Wasn't the >$1T infrastructure bill a bipartisan effort?
  - bpodgursky 5y ago
    Yeah but it only passed the Senate. House leadership won't allow a vote on it until the democrat-only $3.5T bill passes.
    - dillondoyle 5y ago
      I wouldn't call that bet. My bet is reconciliation gets diluted to about the same spend level and they both pass.
- fweespeech 5y ago
  > Are bipartisan bills a thing of the past? Did you ask this question about all the partisan bills passed by the GOP when they were in power? And if so, was the answer not the same? > I don’t have any sources, but I thought a sizable segment of the voting public in the US favored bipartisanship. In the abstract, yes. In reality, politicians get punished for failing to deliver on campaign promises and the GOP obstructs campaign promise success using any means possible. So its political suicide for a Democrat to rely on that. Which leads to: > Just wishing we weren’t so polarized…. Also wishing I better understood what interests were pushing the polity towards polarized ideologies. I’m not convinced it’s a completely organic phenomenon (rather, that there are special interests benefiting from the polarization). Yup. Its called oligarchy and its the real government model of the US at this stage. Polarization is really just two camps of rich people fighting it out with PR/political campaigns. More polarization leads to better viewing and better base turnout. One group of rich people who think the rich should be taxed more, that climate change should be tackled, etc. And one group of rich people who want lower taxes and to obstruct the first group.
mLuby 5y ago
s/Ever/Yet/ Saves one character and leaves room for the near-certainty that there will be larger spending bills in the coming decades.
thehappypm 5y ago
I don't understand why we're talking about spending trillions so flippantly and none of it has anything to do with health care. That's the biggest issue in the US today. I've never even heard of a trillion dollar spending bill until the pandemic, now it seems almost commonplace. If you want to spend trillions, give us real change.
- BossingAround 5y ago
  I'd say healthcare is a huge issue in the US. That said, there won't be any need for healthcare if we don't do anything about climate change...
  - mrfusion 5y ago
    What could happen in the next 20 years that makes us not need healthcare? I haven’t heard of anything that extreme.
    - BossingAround 5y ago
      The fact that you're asking "what could happen within the next 20 years" when it comes to the life on our planet screams the doom of the human race to me. Jesus...
      - thehappypm 5y ago
        "Life on our planet"? You think that climate change is going to end life on Earth? That's crazy. Climate change is a threat to modern human civilization. Not life as a whole.
  - jjcon 5y ago
    Not sure what that is supposed to mean? Well need healthcare regardless of climate change effects
  - thehappypm 5y ago
    I think people dying of treatable diseases is a much more real issue to most Americans than climate change.
mchusma 5y ago
Getting laws passed via "budget reconciliation" should be stopped, it is a slippery slope. Both parties are so busy with short term thinking they are willing to erode a lot of checks and balances. (This is also how we have expanded so much power in the executive branch).
- smileysteve 5y ago
  If laws can only be passed using reconciliation (because of the filibuster) then only reconcilation will create laws.
- bbatha 5y ago
  We're already at the bottom of the slope and covered in mud. This isn't the place to draw the line. Since 2012 virtually all major legislation has passed through reconciliation and it has pretty common dating back to the 90s.
- gaze 5y ago
  what checks and balances? lol.
hourislate 5y ago
How much of this is just more handouts to Industry? Separating the tax payer from their hard earned money. You think they could come up with a better plan to help Joe6Pack but that would reward their rich friends. Americans can't read beyond the headline to realize they are being fleeced. Why can't we demand a better approach with money going directly to the the citizen to upgrade their home insulation, windows, install solar panels, etc. Solar Panels should be heavily subsidized along with battery storage for the homes and businesses. We shouldn't have to pay 25k to have a decent installation. More Government waste and handouts while the environment goes down the shitter.
- mistrial9 5y ago
  > Americans can't read beyond the headline to realize they are being fleeced. the cynical view is that plenty of people who can read are also economically invested in the existing system, while many people who do not read much, are fed those headlines > More Government waste and handouts while the environment goes down the shittier painful, true, agree
Glench 5y ago
I actually just wrote my congressperson a letter about this! You can read it here: https://glench.notion.site/A-Climate-Letter-to-My-Congressperson-d9ef8cfd03834ac0a9b3cfc64fd61568 https://glench.notion.site/A-Climate-Letter-to-My-Congresspe...
elihu 5y ago
Interesting that there's money being set aside to convert trucks to electric. I'm assuming that means converting existing trucks and isn't just a shorthand for replacing old gas trucks with new electric trucks. I think EV conversions of regular passenger cars should also qualify for a tax credit. (Perhaps there should be a few minimum standards for safety and usefulness.) EV conversion is rarely done now because it's a lot of work and doesn't make financial sense given the cost of parts, labor, and custom engineering. However, if the costs were less it might be more of a thing. Especially if major manufacturers started selling kits that can be installed by a mechanic in a reasonably short amount of time. This could create a lot of jobs. Some other things I think we should be looking at are establishing some pilot projects and mechanical and electrical standards for electrified highways. EVs would be a lot more attractive and less expensive if people could drive cross-country without lugging around 800 pounds of batteries and instead could recharge at regular intervals while they're moving at freeway speeds on major interstate highways. The benefits for long-haul trucking would also be enormous. Something else to look at is establishing high-capacity transcontinental high-voltage DC lines so we can buy and sell renewable power internationally. If we can sell surplus solar energy to Asia and Europe during our day and buy solar energy from the Sahara during our night, then we wouldn't need to spend so much on grid-scale battery arrays.

56 points by graderjs 5y ago

> Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia has ties to the coal industry, and he told CNN he won't vote for the package. He argues utilities already are moving away from coal, so it doesn't make sense to "pay companies to do what they're already doing." It's not the blatant self interest and lobbying that I find most offensive, but the need for these politicians to make up such silly lies and the gullibility of the constituents who accept them.

Proven 5y ago
I find most offensive that someone can decide what to do with my money, or make international commitments for future fiscal spending even though the amount or anything else for that matter (including benefits) is completely unknown and there's absolutely no recourse for getting my money back in the case the plan doesn't work. Does anyone but public governments make spending decisions like that?
sul_tasto 5y ago
I’d like to think that if there were alternative good paying jobs in WV, many would gladly give up the coal mining jobs. It seems like this bill could be an opportunity for WV to chart a different course in exchange for its vote.
- nradov 5y ago
  Past efforts to retrain coal miners have been generally ineffective. President Biden told them to learn to code, which didn't go over too well. https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/476391-biden-tells-coal-miners-to-learn-to-code https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/47... I support efforts to give miners other opportunities but we have to be realistic about what's possible.
- causi 5y ago
  In the entire country there are less than sixty thousand coal miners. They're a political tool to be exploited by others; their own vote counts for almost nothing.
pirate787 5y ago
There is such ignorance and arrogance on the coasts about places like West Virginia. The state is extremely poor and coal is still a massively important industry. Manchin is driving a bargain and is representing his people, who've ruined their economy and environment powering the rest of the country for the last 100 years. The rest of the country needs to help make the impact on coal country manageable as part of the transition to clean energy.
- mistrial9 5y ago
  > There is such ignorance and arrogance on the coasts about places like West Virginia. yes, agree > The state is extremely poor ok > coal is still a massively important industry similar arguments could be made for plenty of industry, historically.. even going back 200 years > Manchin is driving a bargain and is representing his people you are dramatically off-base on this. People do not form industry, companies, their executives and stakeholders form industry. Individuals are paid wages and then also have expenses, for example to their landlords, and also a company store perhaps? > who've ruined their economy and environment many lives are suffering now, and in the past, agree > powering the rest of the country for the last 100 years wasted water, electricity and money, are not unique to our age > The rest of the country needs to help make the impact on coal country that has been an explicit goal for union organizers, environmentalists, policy makers and is a core reason to have a common governance. Your emotional appeal is probably well-meaning, but.. falls apart quickly. King Coal - your time is over
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    > People do not form industry, companies, their executives and stakeholders form industry. Peoples' jobs are a part of industry. It's not just the CEOs and shareholders. And the point was, Manchin is not just representing CEOs. He's representing little peoples' jobs. At this point, you were kind of ignoring what pirate787 was actually saying, and therefore your reply was rather wasted. > ... and also a company store perhaps? This just looks like smear tactics. Are there any company stores in 2021? I'm pretty sure they're at least quite rare.
nradov 5y ago
You can question Sen. Manchin's motives but his statement isn't wrong. Coal is generally no longer price competitive with natural gas and renewables for power generation. The fleet mix is already shifting and will continue to do so even absent government mandates or subsidies. (There may be environmental reasons to accelerate that shift even faster.)
- TremendousJudge 5y ago
  if utilities move to natural gas we don't solve the emissions issue
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    Gas is a massive improvement over coal. The supply chain has tons less carbon per MW (pumps and pipes vs trains and trucks and drilled wells vs mines) Obviously there's huge pollution improvements. And most importantly gas can be throttled so it leaves lots of room for renewables to pick up load.
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      It's an improvement, but insufficient to meet emissions objectives. Of course, if we taxed carbon we could actually rely on the market sorting itself out without gaping loopholes (e.g., virtually the entire transportation sector).
  - belltaco 5y ago
    CO2 isn't the only pollutant. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/coal-and-the-environment.php#:~:text=Several%20principal%20emissions%20result%20from,respiratory%20illnesses%20and%20lung%20disease https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/coal-and-the-enviro... https://www.psr.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/coal-ash-hazardous-to-human-health.pdf https://www.psr.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/coal-ash-haza...
  - imtringued 5y ago
    Natural gas produces less emissions and act as a flexible backup for renewables. There is no good reason to support coal anymore and natural gas plants need expensive fuel which means they can't compete when wind and solar are producing power. It's the perfect compromise.
bpodgursky 5y ago
I'm not a fan of propping up the coal industry, but it's hard to argue that he's fighting against his constituent's interests here. WV is coal country — he's not lying to his base.
Pxtl 5y ago
Realistically the Democrats need to take more seats in the Senate so that people like Manchin and Sinema can be outvoted, but that's kind of impossible with the anti-democratic structure of the Senate giving disproportionate representation to the more sparsely-populated Republican-controlled states.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  I agree that Democrats need more seats, but the problem isn't the structure of the senate. A decade ago Democrats had the Rust belt and many other sparsely populated states were swing states, but they decided to go out of their way to alienate rural voters with extreme and unnecessary prejudice. Doubling down on identity politics from 2015-2020 only sealed the issue. Democrats have the better policies, but they pick completely unnecessary and counterproductive fights.
  - jgwil2 5y ago
    > they decided to go out of their way to alienate rural voters This is beside the point. Rural voters are overrepresented by the structure of the Senate. You could argue that Democrats have used poor political tactics, but the fact is that in a representative system they wouldn't need to kowtow to rural voters in order to get a majority.
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      The "right" balance of representation between rural and urban voters is a subjective question, but I think the fact that one party can't both overwhelmingly succeed and repeatedly, deliberately, and overtly offend millions of voters suggests that the balance of representation is working properly. To put it a little differently, I want a political system that incentivizes cooperation and good behavior and disincentivizes bad divisiveness and bad behavior. In this particular case, our political system actually delivered on that. So while in many other regards our system may be broken, I don't think the balance of representation is particularly broken.
crisdux 5y ago
I find it offensive when folks on HN completely get the facts wrong and disparage people for no good reason. The utility industry has cut electricity generation from coal by 50% in about 15 years. Manchin is right.
- antattack 5y ago
  That was the easy half. Second half will be much harder to accomplish.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    With cheap solar and cheap gas I don't see how it's going to be any harder than having the self control to not shoot ourselves in the foot before the coal infrastructure ages out.
- fweespeech 5y ago
  > The utility industry has cut electricity generation from coal by 50% in about 15 years. Manchin is right. The problem is, by common projections such as: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/abandoning-60-percent-of-global-oil-and-gas-might-limit-warming-to-1-5-c/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/abandoning-60-per... We need to cut it by another 60% by the end of the year. That is not happening without government intervention. You have to understand if you aren't 70+, this is going to impact you much worse the longer we wait to make changes.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  The first half of his sentence is right. The full sentence and implications are not right.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  1. Manchin is a toad whose personal wealth is invested in the fossil fuel industry nevermind whatever the industry pays him to advocate for it. Manchin is the worst kind of moderate democrat, and he absolutely deserves to be disparaged. 2. What matters is the rate at which we're shedding emissions, not the rate at which we're cutting coal. Moving from coal to natural gas represents a reduction in emissions, but it's not enough to meet our emissions targets, hence this bill.

sul_tasto 5y ago

Are bipartisan bills a thing of the past? I don’t have any sources, but I thought a sizable segment of the voting public in the US favored bipartisanship. Just wishing we weren’t so polarized…. Also wishing I better understood what interests were pushing the polity towards polarized ideologies. I’m not convinced it’s a completely organic phenomenon (rather, that there are special interests benefiting from the polarization).

nradov 5y ago
The US voting public favors bipartisanship as an abstract concept. But they don't reward bipartisanship at the ballot box.
whateveracct 5y ago
Wasn't the >$1T infrastructure bill a bipartisan effort?
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  Yeah but it only passed the Senate. House leadership won't allow a vote on it until the democrat-only $3.5T bill passes.
  - dillondoyle 5y ago
    I wouldn't call that bet. My bet is reconciliation gets diluted to about the same spend level and they both pass.
fweespeech 5y ago
> Are bipartisan bills a thing of the past? Did you ask this question about all the partisan bills passed by the GOP when they were in power? And if so, was the answer not the same? > I don’t have any sources, but I thought a sizable segment of the voting public in the US favored bipartisanship. In the abstract, yes. In reality, politicians get punished for failing to deliver on campaign promises and the GOP obstructs campaign promise success using any means possible. So its political suicide for a Democrat to rely on that. Which leads to: > Just wishing we weren’t so polarized…. Also wishing I better understood what interests were pushing the polity towards polarized ideologies. I’m not convinced it’s a completely organic phenomenon (rather, that there are special interests benefiting from the polarization). Yup. Its called oligarchy and its the real government model of the US at this stage. Polarization is really just two camps of rich people fighting it out with PR/political campaigns. More polarization leads to better viewing and better base turnout. One group of rich people who think the rich should be taxed more, that climate change should be tackled, etc. And one group of rich people who want lower taxes and to obstruct the first group.

mLuby 5y ago

s/Ever/Yet/ Saves one character and leaves room for the near-certainty that there will be larger spending bills in the coming decades.

thehappypm 5y ago

I don't understand why we're talking about spending trillions so flippantly and none of it has anything to do with health care. That's the biggest issue in the US today. I've never even heard of a trillion dollar spending bill until the pandemic, now it seems almost commonplace. If you want to spend trillions, give us real change.

BossingAround 5y ago
I'd say healthcare is a huge issue in the US. That said, there won't be any need for healthcare if we don't do anything about climate change...
- mrfusion 5y ago
  What could happen in the next 20 years that makes us not need healthcare? I haven’t heard of anything that extreme.
  - BossingAround 5y ago
    The fact that you're asking "what could happen within the next 20 years" when it comes to the life on our planet screams the doom of the human race to me. Jesus...
    - thehappypm 5y ago
      "Life on our planet"? You think that climate change is going to end life on Earth? That's crazy. Climate change is a threat to modern human civilization. Not life as a whole.
- jjcon 5y ago
  Not sure what that is supposed to mean? Well need healthcare regardless of climate change effects
- thehappypm 5y ago
  I think people dying of treatable diseases is a much more real issue to most Americans than climate change.

mchusma 5y ago

Getting laws passed via "budget reconciliation" should be stopped, it is a slippery slope. Both parties are so busy with short term thinking they are willing to erode a lot of checks and balances. (This is also how we have expanded so much power in the executive branch).

smileysteve 5y ago
If laws can only be passed using reconciliation (because of the filibuster) then only reconcilation will create laws.
bbatha 5y ago
We're already at the bottom of the slope and covered in mud. This isn't the place to draw the line. Since 2012 virtually all major legislation has passed through reconciliation and it has pretty common dating back to the 90s.
gaze 5y ago
what checks and balances? lol.

hourislate 5y ago

How much of this is just more handouts to Industry? Separating the tax payer from their hard earned money. You think they could come up with a better plan to help Joe6Pack but that would reward their rich friends. Americans can't read beyond the headline to realize they are being fleeced. Why can't we demand a better approach with money going directly to the the citizen to upgrade their home insulation, windows, install solar panels, etc. Solar Panels should be heavily subsidized along with battery storage for the homes and businesses. We shouldn't have to pay 25k to have a decent installation. More Government waste and handouts while the environment goes down the shitter.

mistrial9 5y ago
> Americans can't read beyond the headline to realize they are being fleeced. the cynical view is that plenty of people who can read are also economically invested in the existing system, while many people who do not read much, are fed those headlines > More Government waste and handouts while the environment goes down the shittier painful, true, agree

Glench 5y ago

I actually just wrote my congressperson a letter about this! You can read it here: https://glench.notion.site/A-Climate-Letter-to-My-Congressperson-d9ef8cfd03834ac0a9b3cfc64fd61568 https://glench.notion.site/A-Climate-Letter-to-My-Congresspe...

elihu 5y ago

Interesting that there's money being set aside to convert trucks to electric. I'm assuming that means converting existing trucks and isn't just a shorthand for replacing old gas trucks with new electric trucks. I think EV conversions of regular passenger cars should also qualify for a tax credit. (Perhaps there should be a few minimum standards for safety and usefulness.) EV conversion is rarely done now because it's a lot of work and doesn't make financial sense given the cost of parts, labor, and custom engineering. However, if the costs were less it might be more of a thing. Especially if major manufacturers started selling kits that can be installed by a mechanic in a reasonably short amount of time. This could create a lot of jobs. Some other things I think we should be looking at are establishing some pilot projects and mechanical and electrical standards for electrified highways. EVs would be a lot more attractive and less expensive if people could drive cross-country without lugging around 800 pounds of batteries and instead could recharge at regular intervals while they're moving at freeway speeds on major interstate highways. The benefits for long-haul trucking would also be enormous. Something else to look at is establishing high-capacity transcontinental high-voltage DC lines so we can buy and sell renewable power internationally. If we can sell surplus solar energy to Asia and Europe during our day and buy solar energy from the Sahara during our night, then we wouldn't need to spend so much on grid-scale battery arrays.