Debt deal includes green light for controversial pipeline

Environmentalists are outraged by the deal between President Biden and Republicans to raise the debt ceiling because it would also speed up construction of a hotly contested gas pipeline and includes unusual measures to isolate that project from judicial review.

The $6.6 billion Mountain Valley Pipeline, intended to transport natural gas about 300 miles from West Virginia’s Marcellus Shale Fields across nearly 1,000 streams and wetlands before terminating in Virginia, is a top priority of Democrat Senator Joe Manchin III. of West Virginia, but has been fought for a decade by environmentalists and many Virginia Democrats.

A constellation of environmental groups condemned the pipeline’s inclusion in a debt limit deal, with one group, Climate Defiance, planning to protest Tuesday night at the home of Senator Chuck Schumer, the New York majority leader.

One of the companies behind the pipeline, NextEra Energy, is a major donor to Mr. Schumer and Mr. Manchin. In the 2022 cycle, NextEra employees and political action committees gave $302,600 to Mr. Schumer and $60,350 to Mr. Manchin, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Mr Manchin faces a potentially difficult re-election campaign next year, and if he completes the pipeline, he could win voters. Governor Jim Justice, a popular Democrat turned Republican, has announced he will seek the Senate seat in West Virginia, a ruby ​​state that President Trump won by nearly 40 percentage points in 2020. Retaining that seat is a priority for Democrats.

“We are in a bleak moment,” Climate Defiance said wrote on Twitter. “The politicians we entrusted our lives to have betrayed us to fossil fuel CEOs. We’ve been stabbed in the back. We don’t know if we will win, but hell, we won’t go down without a peaceful uprising the likes of which you’ve never seen.”

But White House negotiators, who inserted the pipeline language into the debt limit deal, say Mr Biden honored an agreement he struck with Mr Manchin last summer to secure the senator’s casting vote to pass the groundbreaking Inflation Reduction Act. to approve more than $370 billion for clean energy projects.

White House officials say the benefits of that law far outweigh the new greenhouse gas emissions from the West Virginia pipeline. They also noted that they could stop Republicans from rolling back many of the clean energy provisions of the climate law as part of the debt limit compromise.

The bill includes some other small steps to get energy projects of all types approved more quickly by amending federal licensing policies under the National Environmental Policy Act. White House officials said they viewed construction of the Mountain Valley pipeline largely as a fait accompli, as more than half of the project has been built and only a handful of permits have yet to be issued.

But opponents of the pipeline argue completion was far from certain as several lawsuits are pending. A provision in the debt agreement could deem those challenges moot and block future lawsuits.

The agreement would instruct federal agencies to approve all outstanding permits for the pipeline within 21 days and exempt those permits from judicial review. And if any entity should wish to challenge the legality of that decision, the legislation transfers jurisdiction from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, where environmentalists have won some court victories, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

“This is an unprecedented final battle around the courts, which have repeatedly denied permits due to MVP’s failure to comply with fundamental environmental laws,” said Ben Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club, who has challenged several permits related to the pipeline. “We are exploring the legal implications of this proposal and our next steps.”

In March, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled in favor of a case brought by the Sierra Club and other environmental groups that argued that the pipeline should be subject to stricter Clean Water Act reviews.

Virginia Democrat Senator Tim Kaine said he plans to introduce an amendment to remove pipeline language from the debt limit bill. A spokeswoman for Mr Kaine said he was “extremely disappointed” with the language which “bypasses the normal judicial and administrative review process that any other energy project must go through”.

On Tuesday, Virginia’s six House Democrats introduced an identical amendment, though they did not threaten to vote against the larger bill if their attempt to change it fails.

“We are deeply concerned about the adverse climate and environmental justice impacts this project will have on vulnerable communities in our Commonwealth,” the Virginia House Democrats said in a statement. “This project would have a disproportionate impact on the most vulnerable among us, including low-income people, the elderly, and tribal and aboriginal communities across Virginia.”

The Mountain Valley Pipeline has been opposed for years by environmentalists and civil rights activists. Scientists have warned that countries should stop approving new fossil fuel projects if they want to limit global warming, something President Biden says is a top priority.

It’s unusual for Congress to step in to protect specific infrastructure projects from court scrutiny, said Michael Gerrard, an environmental law expert at Columbia University. In a similar case in the 1970s, Tennessee legislators managed to exempt a dam in their state of the Endangered Species Act to overcome legal challenges, a move that attracted much attention at the time.

The effort to accelerate the Mountain Valley pipeline could set a precedent for other projects to go to court, Mr Gerrard added. “You can imagine another company saying to their favorite senator, ‘Hey, Joe Manchin did this for them, why not for us?'” he said.

Some activists warned the move could cost Mr Biden election year support among the young, climate-conscious voters who helped elect him in 2020, but are now angered by his administration’s approval of multiple fossil fuel projects, including the Mountain Valley Pipeline, the Alaskan oil drilling project known as Willow, and a controversial pipeline project that would carry hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil through Minnesota’s delicate watersheds.

That anger comes even as Mr. Biden has pushed through both the new climate law, which is expected to reduce America’s climate-warming carbon dioxide emissions by up to a billion tons by 2030, and proposed regulations that would cut a whopping 15 billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2055.

Federal regulators have estimated that if all the natural gas carried in the Mountain Valley Pipeline were burned in power plants and homes, it would release about 40 million tons of carbon dioxide a year — the equivalent of what nine million cars produce annually.

But calculating the full impact on climate change is trickier, experts said. Some of that gas would have burned anyway even if the pipeline hadn’t been built, and some of it could replace coal, an even dirtier fuel still widely used in the Southeast, though regulators haven’t tried to quantify these factors .

Several climate policy experts said it’s worth allowing the Mountain Valley Pipeline to keep the Inflation Reduction Act intact when it comes to reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

In a deeply divided Congress, compromise is essential, said David Axelrod, the Democratic strategist who helped Barack Obama win the White House. “The question is whether the steps forward you’re taking are greater than the steps back you need to take for these deals to work,” he said. “And Biden makes those calculations.”

And by giving Mr. Manchin a win to trumpet his voters, Democrats could hope to keep the West Virginia Senate seat, “which will have much more long-term benefits for climate policy and politics,” says Paul Bledsoe, a former climate aide in the Clinton administration, wrote in an email.

Mr Axelrod said he did not think Mr Biden would lose the support of climate voters once the race for the presidency was clearly determined.

“The question at the end of the day is not what people feel now, but what judgments they will make in the fall of 2024,” said Mr Axelrod. “But the choice is probably so strong and important to the climate movement that it’s probably a good bet that people will be highly motivated.”