ENERGY
& ENVIRONMENT
The Manchin pressure campaign: CEOs, labor bosses
and Bill Gates
The people involved who spoke with POLITICO described
an effort with multiple entry points.
Clean energy manufacturing companies with plans to set
up shop in Sen. Joe Manchin's (D-W.Va.) state helped orchestrate the 13-day
effort to change his mind. |
By ZACK
COLMAN, JOSH SIEGEL and KELSEY TAMBORRINO
07/29/2022
05:01 PM EDT
When Joe
Manchin balked at the clean energy incentives in Democrats’ expansive spending bill
two weeks ago, the corporate C-suites and union boardrooms jumped into action.
With
hundreds of billions of dollars of incentives for manufacturing, electric
vehicles, nuclear power and carbon capturing technology hanging in the balance,
executives from some of the nation’s biggest companies and labor unions made
their case to the Democratic West Virginia senator: The next generation of
clean tech needed Washington’s backing to take off.
Clean
energy manufacturing companies with plans to set up shop in Manchin’s state
helped orchestrate the 13-day effort to change his mind, more than 20 people
involved in the effort told POLITICO — eventually helping to get his backing
for the $369 billion in incentives in the newly dubbed Inflation Reduction Act,
H.R. 5376 (117). That push — which two of the people said included a call from
Bill Gates, whose venture capital firm has backed a West Virginia-based battery
start-up — was taking place alongside a campaign by other senators along with
economist and inflation hawk Larry Summers to convince Manchin of the merits of
the bill.
“It was
across the board,” said National Wildlife Federation CEO Collin O’Mara, who
according to other participants was central in organizing the campaign to
persuade Manchin to restart talks. “He heard from a wide range.”
The people
involved who spoke with POLITICO described an effort with multiple entry
points. They said Manchin’s staff was eager to set up meetings and kept
conversations going to assuage their boss’ concerns about inflation, supply
chains and energy.
“I am
absolutely aware that many, many folks called Manchin, and many corporate
leaders wanted to get this done,” said one environmental group leader involved
in the outreach, requesting anonymity to discuss sensitive dynamics given that
the legislation has not yet passed.
Manchin
told reporters on a Thursday call that he “never walked away” from talks on
July 14, the day when news emerged that he would not support the climate
measures. He said he and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer quickly
thereafter were “trying to see if there was a different approach we could take.
And we did that.”
On Capitol
Hill, Democratic Sens. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, Chris Coons of Delaware
and Tina Smith of Minnesota continued engaging with Manchin and his staff
behind the scenes, even as more vocal proponents of climate action in the
Senate urged the caucus and President Joe Biden to move on with the narrower
bill that focused on health care subsidies and cutting prescription drug costs.
Hickenlooper
compared the persuasion campaign to the anticipation of a holiday present.
“You hope
and you hope and you hope and yet in the back of your mind, you know, ‘I’m
probably not going to get it.’ I mean, it’s just too much,” he said. “And then
you get it.”
Power
generation companies that had multiple meetings with Manchin over the last 18
months pressed for a deal as well, with Duke Energy and Constellation Energy
making the case for the clean energy package in the days after Manchin appeared
to walk away from the energy and climate measures.
A senior
executive with a clean power company said his firm communicated with Manchin,
Schumer and Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) in the past two weeks
“softly reminding them” that “tens of billions of dollars in investment are at
stake here.”
“We never
saw this as dead,” the executive said. “We always held out hope. One thing
about Manchin is if you look at what he says, he tells you exactly what he’s
thinking. That shaped our attitude looking at what’s next. Our approach was
‘let’s do everything in our power to make sure they have as much encouragement
as possible.’”
Off the
Hill, O’Mara was busy in the intervening days rounding up conservative
economists to address Manchin’s concerns that the spending package would fuel
more inflation.
Ultimately,
Summers, the former Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, made the
case that the climate package would not stoke inflation as Manchin had feared.
Economists from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and
deficit reduction advocate Maya MacGuineas, president of the nonpartisan think
tank Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, also briefed Manchin during
that period, according to people familiar with the meetings. MacGuineas did not
confirm or deny the meeting.
“But I will
say this is a tremendous turnaround of a bill that was originally a
fiscally-reckless budget-buster and now would fight inflation, help avoid or
minimize a recession, and achieve a number of policy objectives,” she said in
an email to POLITICO. “I can’t think of the last time we saw a turnaround like
this in policymaking.”
Jason
Walsh, executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of labor and
environmental groups, said several West Virginia companies pushed Manchin to
back the credits as well — even suggesting failure to pass the bill imperiled
their plans to invest in new operations.
“There were
folks who I can’t talk about who are directly involved in potentially
developing clean energy manufacturing in the state of West Virginia where site
visits had happened where all they needed was a set of investments,” Walsh
said. “And that communication happened as well.”
A senior
executive with a utility operating in Appalachia said that his company
communicated with Manchin how aspects of the bill such as tax credits to build
clean energy manufacturing plants at former coal sites and incentives for
developing small nuclear reactors and hydrogen would help West Virginia’s
economy.
“We know
coal plants are ultimately going to close,” the executive said. “What is going
to replace them? What are the jobs? What are we transitioning to? In this case,
we are going to explore hydrogen, new nuclear and get manufacturing in the
state.”
Nucor
Corp., the largest U.S. steelmaker, which is building a new plant in West
Virginia, also reached out to Manchin’s staff — as did the Carbon Capture
Coalition, a cross-sector group that includes labor unions, oil companies and
manufacturers, according to a person familiar with the contacts.
Nucor did
not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Form
Energy, a battery storage startup backed by Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures
and which has plans for a West Virginia manufacturing hub, walked Manchin’s
staff through its growth trajectories with and without the proposed suite of
legislative incentives, a person directly familiar with the interaction said.
That person
said Form Energy officials showed the differences on a graph. Its investors —
including Gates — also called to assuage Manchin’s concerns over disbursing the
tax credits to companies through a direct pay system rather than using tax
equity markets. Manchin had balked at the direct payments but eventually
accepted them in limited form in the bill.
“It wasn’t
a quid pro quo kind of thing,” the person said, adding that Manchin’s staff
wanted to “answer nagging questions to get him to yes.”
Gates,
through Breakthrough Energy Ventures, did not respond to a request for comment.
And labor
unions also pressed Manchin. The United Mine Workers of America engaged
throughout the 13-day period with Manchin’s staff, though largely over another
issue both Manchin and the union had fought for years to secure: a tax on coal
companies to pay into a trust fund for miners suffering from black lung
disease.
UMWA
spokesperson Phil Smith said Manchin’s staff “were all for it.” Yet, it was
still a surprise to see that tax fully and permanently restored in the bill
because “nobody told me or anybody else that, yes, this is going to be in
there,” he said.
Local
advocates for pushing West Virginia into new forms of energy also made a late
push.
Brandon
Dennison, the CEO of the economic development organization Coalfield
Development, pointed to companies like Solar Holler, a West Virginia-based
solar installer whose employees are members of the International Brotherhood of
Electrical Workers labor union.
Solar
Holler CEO Dan Conant told POLITICO he’d spoken often with Manchin, explaining
his firm would benefit from the direct pay clean energy incentives because, as
a nonprofit, it lacks the tax liability to obtain financing through tax equity
markets. Conant spoke with Manchin’s staff after the bill text dropped late
Wednesday and was pleased some of those provisions were included.
Dennison
said that when he talked to Manchin’s staff in the past two weeks, he made it
clear that passing clean energy incentives was about giving West Virginia “a
chance to stay an energy state.”
“If we want
to benefit from the investments and the jobs that are going to come with that
transition, we need to be part of the proactive solutions and policies rather
than constantly playing on defense,” Dennison said. “That’s the case I
tried to make.”
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário