All that for this ? Less than 100 days before the midterm legislative elections and in a context of deep Democratic disappointment with President Joe Biden, the Senate’s adoption on Sunday of a broad environmental and health investment bill undoubtedly constitutes a success and a progress. A rare major legislative success for Biden who really needs it when his popularity is peaking at 35% and a majority of Democrats would prefer not to see him stand for re-election in 2024. Certain progress, yet to be tempered, in the fight against global warming — carrying a significant but insufficient commitment to reduce GHG emissions in the United States by 40% before 2030.
We didn’t believe it anymore, to tell the truth. Eighteen months that government action was paralyzed by the Republican opposition as a whole, the intra-democratic quarrels between the center and the left of the party and the odious blackmail of these two troublemakers who are the Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. These two having finally rallied at the cost of significant concessions, the bill called the Inflation Reduction Act, adopted on Sunday in a snatch by the 50 Democrats plus Vice President Kamala Harris, after a “vote -a-rama” night, includes the largest environmental investment ever made in the United States: 370 billion US dollars over ten years. And it contains, a flagship initiative on the social level, measures aimed at lowering the price of drugs for the elderly – who pay them up to ten times more than in Canada. What the Republicans have also opposed on the pretext – as false as it is ultra-capitalist – that price fixing would harm medical research.
Nevertheless, the new law, albeit a major step forward in the circumstances, is a comically lightened version of the pharaonic Build Back Better (BBB), legislative framework that Biden had put forward when taking office in January 2021. An ambitious “Rooseveltian” initiative amounting to some 3000 billion dollars, the BBB would expand the social safety net like never before and ecologically rebuild the national economy. Buried, therefore, the great promises of creating a parental leave system or establishing free access to kindergarten and public universities.
Further development of solar and wind energy, financial aid for the energy transition for families and businesses, subsidy for the purchase of an electric car (as if it were a panacea)… In environmental matters, the fact remains that the reduced version of the BBB, which the Democrats are pleased to have voted today, contains measures which are essentially incentives, while the urgency of the situation would require far more muscular measures, read a pricing system for the carbon, whether by tax or quota formula, as exists in Canada, Europe and China. The United States is still a long way off.
The new law, which the House will approve this week, is partly a decoy insofar as Mr. Manchin, a senator from West Virginia whose electoral machine is generously financed by the gas industry, will obviously not have given him his support without elevator return. Namely the support of the White House for the construction of a controversial 500 km gas pipeline (the Mountain Valley Pipeline) which crosses the Appalachians. He was promised, what is more, that other pipelines would be authorized in an expeditious manner in the United States… It turns out, however, that the Mountain Valley Pipeline, if we are to believe the New York Timeshad for years been the subject of militant opposition so intense that the realization of the project was seriously compromised.
So go the lobbies and the American political culture, blocked by its fractures. The Gordian knot “ecological transition vs dependence on fossil fuels” is not resolved by this law. Nevertheless, it is widely hailed by progressive circles as a capital first step. However, it will not be for long, and the GHG reduction targets will remain theoretical if other steps are not quickly taken in the United States, the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases on the planet.
What impact on the fortunes of the Democrats and Joe Biden? That their climate plan helps to energize their electorate, it should be. If the political winds were favorable to him this summer on a certain number of files, the slope remains no less steep for the president, as the polls are unfavorable to him. The state of the economy being proof of everything, the employment figures published last Friday, indicating that the labor market was in its best shape for 50 years, will have been a balm for him. Let’s see what effect the inflation data to be released on Wednesday will have on him.