On Thursday, Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema signaled her support for the reconciliation bill now pending in Congress. By consenting, Sinema likely paved the way for a legislative package that one media outlet dubbed “the biggest and most consequential climate change bill ever passed by Congress.”

The bill — dubiously dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 — includes $370 billion in energy-related spending. That’s only an estimate. The 700-page bill is so complex that few legislators (and even fewer reporters) understand how much it will actually cost. Manchin-Schumer leaves no special interest unrewarded. The bill gives lollipops to electric vehicles and perennial-not-ready-for-prime-time technologies like carbon capture and hydrogen. The legislation is so broad and has so many carve outs that it has been lauded by Exxon Mobil and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

But the biggest favors in the bill are going to – who else? — Big Wind and Big Solar. Indeed, the language in the bill assures that the corporate welfare for wind and solar won’t expire for decades. More on that in a moment. First, the numbers.

Linowes makes a point that has been ignored by every media outlet in the country: lobbyists (and/or their helpers on Capitol Hill) inserted provisions in Manchin-Schumer which assure that Big Wind and Big Solar won’t have to stop feeding at the federal trough for decades to come. Cutting electric-sector emissions by 75% will require the sector to reduce its emissions from about 1.7 billion tons per year to about 425 million tons per year. Slashing emissions by roughly 1.3 billion tons per year would require eliminating nearly all coal- and gas-fired generation in America. According to the EPA, in 2020, those two fuels accounted for about 1.5 billion tons of emissions from the electric sector.

There is simply no way that will happen over the next two decades or so. Our electric grid needs gas- and coal-fired power plants to assure reliable and affordable electricity. Without those plants, the grid would fail and the economic and human losses would be staggering. Nuclear power could — and should — replace those gas and coal plants over the coming years, but America is closing its nuclear plants far faster than it is building them. Here’s Linowes again:

Then, referring to the raging backlash in rural America against the encroachment of wind and solar projects, Linowes wrote:

There are other problems with the Manchin-Schumer bill and how it’s being sold. To cite just one example, a press release issued by the Democrats claims it will “reduce carbon emissions by roughly 40 percent by 2030.” That claim was parroted by New York TimesNYT -1.1% reporters Brad Plumer and Lisa Friedman, without any context or skepticism. They wrote the deal will “put the United States on track to slash its greenhouse gas emissions to roughly 40 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.”

As I pointed out earlier this week, that’s an absurd claim on its face. Achieving that 40% cut will require slashing 1.2 billion tons of emissions from the U.S. economy. For perspective, that’s nearly equal to all of the energy-related emissions from U.S. industry in 2021. Put another way, cutting that much emissions — and doing so in just 7.5 years! — would require cutting domestic oil use by more than half. (Last year, oil-related emissions totaled 2.2 billion tons.)

The sad truth is that the Manchin-Schumer bill contains some of the most far-reaching energy and environmental measures of the modern era and yet the biggest provisions in the bill, including the cost of the tax credits, and how more wind and solar will affect the integrity and cost of operating the electric grid, have barely been debated in Congress. In short, Manchin-Schumer shows, yet again, how perverted the parliamentary process in Congress has become.

To conclude, I’ll cite a recent claim from John Kerry, the Biden administration’s climate envoy, who said “Solar and wind are less expensive than coal or oil or gas. They just are less expensive.” If that were true, the solar and wind sectors wouldn’t need federal subsidies. But the Washington Favor Factory never sleeps. If the Manchin-Schumer bill becomes law, Big Wind and Big Solar will be able to count on tens of billions of dollars in federal tax credits for decades to come.

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