Cyclones, Corruption, and the Civilian Climate Corps: Making Sense of the Infrastructure and Reconciliation Negotiations
By Jilly Edgar
A few weeks ago, Hurricane Ida accomplished two major tasks. First, it decimated New York City’s ancient and crumbling infrastructure, killing at least 13 people in the city and destroying countless homes and businesses. Shortly afterwards, it changed a few important people’s minds about climate change. Since witnessing the damage caused in their states, moderate Democrats and Republicans previously opposed to the high cost of the infrastructure and reconciliation bills have come out in favor of making exceptions on high spending for climate-related measures. Despite the change of heart of some, there are still a few major challenges blocking the hefty spending necessary to address gaping climate and infrastructure issues between now and September 27, when the House is set to vote. Two of the most important are the close ties some players in Washington have to the fossil fuel industry and the lack of funding for a Civilian Climate Corps, a jobs program that would empower the workforce necessary to execute the plans legislated in the bills. In the heatwave of late June and early July, we in the Sunrise Movement marched on Washington to blockade the White House and were arrested outside of Senator Schumer’s New York office imploring him and Biden to tackle these challenges, but our calls have gone largely unheeded over the six slow months of negotiations.
TRACING THE INFRASTRUCTURE SPENDING
Back in March, President Biden characterized his new nearly $4 trillion proposal, divided into the American Jobs Plan and the American Family Plan, a “once-in-a-generation investment in America.” He compared the first part of that plan, also referred to as the Infrastructure Package, to the construction of the interstate highway system and the space race. At that time, it hovered around $2 trillion in investments. Since then, through rounds of negotiations in the Senate, it has swung from figure to figure: decreasing to $550 billion during bipartisan talks, and increasing again now to around $1 trillion under the Democrats’ latest compromise, almost as high as New Deal-era spending levels. So what changed?
In the early phases of the proposal, when the economy was still gearing up to “reopen,” the provisions included were impressively wide-ranging. They were designed to be financed through redistributive measures, predominantly through tax hikes on corporations and people making over $400,000 a year, tariffs on imports from countries that don’t regulate greenhouse gas emissions, and fees on methane emissions. The extensive range of categories that were set to receive significant investments include roads, electric vehicles, public transportation, buildings, electricity, schools, water, manufacturing, workforce training, research and development, and the care economy. Affordable housing alone was delegated $213 billion.
By July, however, with businesses back in gear and the stimulus package’s popularity quickly becoming a distant memory for the stingier members of Congress, negotiations with Republican senators cut the bill down to just over a quarter of its original size: $550 billion. Funds for research and development, manufacturing, schools, buildings, housing, and the care economy were eliminated entirely, along with the original clean energy tax credit to help jumpstart renewable energy development. “Traditional” infrastructure investments were all that remained, but at much lower figures save for airports, ports, and waterways, which stayed the same.
While the infrastructure bill didn’t shape up to be all that every 2 out of 3 Americans, originally wanted it to be, Democrats are working to pass their more sweeping plan in the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package, which does not require any Republican support because the budget process is not at risk of being filibustered. It has been repeatedly characterized by critics as a liberal “wish list” and continues to face severe scrutiny and opposition, despite including crucial initiatives not only to fight climate change, but also to lower and eliminate costs of prescription drugs and free community college respectively, to name a few. Some Democrats embarked on a national bus tour in early September to let voters know what they would gain from such legislation, while Republicans have simultaneously partnered with conservative groups to air ads attacking the proposal on television. The partisan battle continues, but lines aren’t so clear cut.
CHALLENGE 1: FOSSIL FUEL CORRUPTION IN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY
West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin has led the charge on amending the infrastructure package in a bipartisan manner. Manchin in particular has been publicly adamant about the importance of compromise, and has repeatedly defended the filibuster in the name of preserving democracy. Strangely, he claims to want to avoid “overtly” politicizing, well, politics. In other contexts, however, he has made it clear that climate spending specifically is the area he most vehemently opposes. In July, he told the press that he found any plans to move away from fossil fuels “very, very disturbing,” and added that eliminating their use will actually make climate change worse. The day after Ida flooded New York and Louisiana, Manchin called for a “strategic pause” on the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package, deciding that the consequences of high spending would be worse than those of ignoring climate change and its threat of destroying more homes and cities.
Manchin is not only failing to account for the amount of money it takes to rebuild after climate-related disasters strike, he is shrouding his personal stake in the fossil fuel economy in falsely noble yearnings for some past era of bipartisanship. Manchin actually has a lot of money to gain by keeping the fossil fuel machine running. In 1988, he founded Enersystems, a private coal brokerage firm and continues to hold $5 million of stock in the company, which earned him $500,000 in 2020, while his son still runs it today. Manchin is by no means the only senator to own fossil fuel stock — indeed, many members of Congress are personally invested in Exxon — but Manchin has the most.
He also relies on fossil fuel money when it comes to campaign donations, having received some of the largest chunks from the industry out of any other Senate Democrat in 2018. The symbiotic monetary relationship between Manchin and fossil fuel companies makes remarks from the likes of Exxon lobbyist Keith McCoy — that he has weekly contact with Manchin’s office — hardly surprising. Knowledge of these kinds of conflicts of interest weaken the technocratic inflation and deficit rhetoric wielded in opposition to major investments that the country desperately needs.
Unfortunately, Manchin’s agenda is the only one that matters when it comes to crafting this infrastructure bill and he has worked hard to compromise with Republican senators who claimed to be unwilling to invest the initial amount due to concerns over inflation, increasing the deficit, and stalling economic growth by raising corporate taxes. These priorities are shared by private sector elites outside of the fossil fuel industry who also hold Manchin in their pockets. This was made clear after the Intercept’s Lee Fang and Ryan Grim received audio of a private donor call with Manchin, various hedge fund managers, CEOs, and the outwardly bipartisan think tank, No Labels, during which Manchin was more candid about his policy views than he cares to share in the any of the op-eds he writes for the public. These dealings reveal the sad irony that proposals to stimulate major, productive economic activity are stymied by the threat of stalling economic activity, and that corruption can be covered up by claims of trying to save democracy.
Uncovering the incestual relationship between fossil fuel interest and politicians also helps explain the potentially $25 billion-worth of fossil fuel subsidies embedded in the bill, such as investments in carbon capture technology (which has yet to become technologically and commercially viable, but is earnestly supported by Manchin) and property tax waivers for pipelines carrying that captured carbon. In the package’s second iteration in July, the only area that received increased funding was the cleanup of abandoned oil wells, coal mines, and Superfund sites (hazardous waste dumps). These initiatives may at first glance appear to be a climate win, but in reality they illuminate the extent of fossil fuel giants’ leverage over policymaking, as the federal government is effectively agreeing to pay for the cleanup work owed to people by the polluters themselves. Rather than heavily subsidizing renewable energy sources like solar and wind, the development and implementation of which would create between 500,000 to 600,000 jobs that Joe Biden desperately and anachronistically wants to revive through EV production, the bill subsidizes the technology that the giants of the energy industry already publicly support and which perpetuate their pollution.
CHALLENGE 2: NO FUNDING FOR THE CCC
Neither the infrastructure package nor the reconciliation bill is complete without a fully funded Civilian Climate Corps. The biggest concern with such an ambitious undertaking is not the money that will be spent, but the reality that there may not be enough people with the skills to do the actual work. Already, the country faces a housing shortage in part because of an ever dwindling construction trade in many cities and towns. The only way we can develop a workforce capable of carrying out the prerogatives of the $1.2 trillion bill alone is by funding a sweeping Civilian Climate Corps modeled off the Civilian Conservation Corps of the New Deal that put over 3 million Americans, or about 300,000 per year, back to work during the Great Depression. That was back when most everyone besides white men were excluded from the program and the US was only 40% of its current population. Yet, Biden’s current proposal for the CCC would only create 10,000 to 20,000 jobs per year, which is not nearly ambitious enough. And already, provisions to the tune of $100 billion for job training in Biden’s original package have been removed from the bipartisan plan.
This is a lost opportunity in more ways than one. As Harry Holzer points out in The Hill, “the creation of so many well-paying jobs by the infrastructure bill provides us with the best opportunity in years to lift the pay of American workers without college degrees — including women, people of color and the current disadvantaged — if we can successfully train them for the opportunities now at hand.” This is one of the main reasons the CCC is a top priority in our Good Jobs for All campaign: to ensure that the work of rebuilding our country comes with adequate training not only to get the work done, but to offer opportunities for working class people, good pay, and union protections.
One place that would benefit deeply from the CCC is Manchin’s very own state of West Virginia. Currently, West Virginia is deeply embedded in the fossil fuel economy — more so than any other state. In 2019 alone, coal production accounted for $9.1 billion in economic activity, nearly 30,000 jobs, over $2 billion in wages, and $514 million in state and local taxes. Overall, the state produces about 15% of the United States’ total fossil fuel energy. Perhaps understandably then, Manchin’s constituents are counting on him to block any potential disruption to the industry that provides their lifeline. If Manchin had any political courage, however, he would be pushing for policies like the CCC to prepare West Virginians for a fossil-free economy and protect their future now before it is too late. Right now, the majority of investments in renewable energy come from private capital. Leading the transition through the public sphere through a federal jobs program would guarantee that workers are not left to the mercy of profit-sucking private investors with little paid training and no union protections.
A full-fledged CCC would train people to work not only in renewable energy jobs, but also areas such as ecosystem restoration, urban resilience, disaster mitigation, and electrical work. It would boost the care economy by including already low-carbon, crucial jobs in education and the arts. People want meaningful work. Many of us already spend countless unpaid hours carrying out the laborious task of pushing politicians to act on climate change. If Manchin and others in Washington truly cared about protecting democracy, they would see the vast, untapped potential for unity in fighting the collective existential threat of climate change through opportunity and hard work — those fabled cornerstones of the US. Until that happens, we must keep pushing to ensure these bills live up to their potential.
