The Whole World Is Hating on Joe Manchin

China used last year’s Cop26 climate talks in Scotland to “insidiously point out to every country that US just can’t implement”, said Rachel Kyte, dean of The Fletcher School at Tufts University and a climate adviser to the UN secretary general. Kyte said many governments believe Biden is well-meaning but cannot follow through on his commitments, a frustration compounded by a lack of American action on related areas, such as climate finance for poorer countries.

“There’s almost a resentment that the US just can’t deliver,” she added. “There’s this sinking feeling about the politics of America. You can’t turn your back on the US because it’s still the biggest economy, but what are countries supposed to do?”

Much of this angst is now being channeled towards Manchin.

After more than a decade in national politics, the 74-year-old senator has suddenly garnered a level of infamy far beyond his fiefdom of West Virginia, where the centrist Democrat has served as governor and senator while reaping millions of dollars through his personal investments and campaign contributions from a coal industry that continues to loom large in his state. It’s a situation that has caused bafflement overseas.

“Who is Manchin, the Dem senator from West Virginia who betrayed Biden?” La Repubblica in Italy has demanded. Clarín, a newspaper in Argentina, has called Manchin a “rebelde” and a “tycoon with ties to the mining structure of West Virginia, the other Virginia of the USA.” Helsingin Sanomat, a Finnish newspaper, also noted Manchin’s links to the fossil fuel industry and lamented that he has “disagreed with the most ambitious climate action” put forward by the US.

The negotiations with Manchin involve stakes far greater than any normal political maneuvering in Washington. The world is already being strafed by wildfires, heatwaves, floods and societal instability wrought by the climate crisis and rising temperatures are on track to breach limits set by governments in the Paris climate accords, a situation that would push some parts of the world beyond human livability.

Salvaging this situation will be virtually impossible without swift action by the US, the world’s second largest carbon polluter and a major oil and gas exporter. Analysts say the half a trillion dollars of support for renewable energy and electric cars in the Build Back Better bill would give the US a decent chance of cutting its emissions in half this decade, which Biden and scientists say is imperative to avoid climate breakdown.

But Manchin’s opposition has already ensured the removal of a key element of the bill, a plan to force utilities to phase in clean energy over time, and the prospect of him joining Republicans to block the overall package has seen him come under intense criticism within the US.

Climate activists have confronted Manchin in Washington and kayaked to his yacht to remonstrate with him. Some fellow Democrats say he has “failed the American people.” Even the Sunday Gazette, the local paper of Charleston, West Virginia, has run a headline of ‘We need this so bad,’ in reference to the bill.

All this has been to little effect, although Manchin did say earlier this month there could still be agreement on “the climate thing,” offering some vague hope to activists while not quite quelling their anger. “Senator Manchin is a fossil-fueled sociopath on a Maserati joyride while he lets the world burn,” said Janet Redman, climate campaign director at Greenpeace USA. “At the end of the day, Manchin cares less about his constituents than he does about the fossil fuel industry.”

The current, floundering attempt to pass climate legislation is a grimly familiar episode in a lengthy record of American inadequacy. Donald Trump donned a coal miner’s helmet on the campaign trail and removed the US from the Paris climate deal. Barack Obama failed to get cap-and-trade legislation past a recalcitrant Congress. George W Bush rejected the Kyoto climate accords. In 1993, a previous Democratic senator from West Virginia, Robert Byrd, blocked a Bill Clinton plan to tax carbon emissions.

Manchin is, in some respects, a “fall guy” for a deeper American political dysfunction over the climate crisis, Kyte said. “If Republicans weren’t in the lock-grip of certain vested interests, if they had a policy on climate adaptation or green jobs for the future, Joe Manchin wouldn’t have the influence he has,” she said.

“Joe Manchin has become the personification of a problem and removing him doesn’t solve it,” Kyte added. “It doesn’t give us a bipartisan agreement of the danger we are in. A political culture that allows you to enrich yourself and your family from industries you regulate and not declare a conflict of interest lies beyond Joe Manchin, it’s bigger than just him.”

Even if American political inertia hasn’t changed, the world certainly has—the last seven years were the planet’s hottest on record, cataclysmic wildfires are now year-round events in the US west and deadly flooding swamps basements in New York, picturesque towns in Germany and subways in China. There is mounting fear that the world, including the US, does not have the time for yet another futile American effort to address the unraveling climate crisis.

“Unfortunately, politicians getting fossil fuel money are standing in the way and sacrificing the rest of us once again,” said Vanessa Nakate, a climate justice activist from Uganda. Nakate pointed out that Africa was suffering from climate change even though it is responsible for just a small fraction of global emissions.

“We are so reliant on the choices others make,” she said. “Our lives are literally in their hands.”