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Overnight News Digest July 27, 2022: We have a climate bill! [1]
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Date: 2022-07-27
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After months and months of prevarication and goal-post-moving, Joe Manchin and Chuck Schumer announced this evening that we DO have a climate bill. This comes as a bit of a shock, since only two weeks ago Manchin announced there would absolutely NOT be a climate bill. So there are…. questions.
… ire turned into jubilation within the Democratic Party by Wednesday night after Manchin and Schumer announced what they dubbed “the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022,” which is slated for the Senate floor next week. There’s still significant concerns to be dealt with over whether it can meet chamber rules for avoiding a filibuster, and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) hasn’t signed off yet — but Manchin’s deal with Schumer amounts to the best news for Democrats in weeks.
On July 18, four days after Manchin and Schumer’s talks seemed to fizzle out with only a limited health care deal, Manchin reached out to Schumer to see if he was amenable to picking things back up. By Wednesday afternoon, they had a deal on a bill that includes energy and tax policy, a turnaround after the two deadlocked on Democrats’ marquee party-line agenda.
Joe Manchin and Chuck Schumer looked at loggerheads after their talks on a sweeping climate, tax and health care bill ran aground nearly two weeks ago. In fact, they were working on Washington’s best-kept secret.
x This is big news.
Our legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, will put the U.S. on a path to roughly 40% emissions reductions by 2030. — Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) July 28, 2022
Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a key centrist Democrat, announced on Wednesday that he had agreed to include hundreds of billions of dollars for climate and energy programs and tax increases in a package to subsidize health care and lower the cost of prescription drugs, less than two weeks after abruptly upending hopes for such an agreement this summer. The package would set aside $369 billion for climate and energy proposals, the most ambitious climate action ever taken by Congress, and raise an estimated $451 billion in new tax revenue over a decade, while cutting federal spending on prescription drugs by $288 billion ...One possible clue to Mr. Manchin’s change of heart came in a line of his joint announcement with Mr. Schumer that they had secured a commitment from both Mr. Biden and Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California that Congress would approve a separate measure to address the permitting of energy infrastructure, potentially including natural gas pipelines, before the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30. That could ease the way for a project in which Mr. Manchin has taken a personal interest, the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which would transport Appalachian shale gas from West Virginia to Virginia.
x We must be honest about the economic reality America now faces. That's why I'm proud to support the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which will address record inflation by paying down our national debt, and by lowering energy & healthcare costs. MORE:
https://t.co/oPZF1gilEh — Senator Joe Manchin (@Sen_JoeManchin) July 27, 2022
… The timing of the announcement, and the secrecy with which the talks were being kept, is raising some eyebrows about whether Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, well, got played. McConnell had tried to take a hostage earlier in the summer by saying that a long-simmering bipartisan industrial policy bill wouldn’t pass if Democrats went ahead with sweeping, partisan reconciliation bill. This was not, in our minds, McConnell’s deftest threat; much of corporate America wanted the “CHIPS” bill, as it’s informally known, to go through regardless of whether Democrats were also able to pass a bill making prescription drugs cheaper. But with a broad reconciliation bill seemingly off the table after Manchin nixed it a couple of weeks ago, the Senate passed a version of CHIPS earlier Wednesday afternoon. A few hours later, Manchin and Schumer announced they had a reconciliation deal after all. … Then there are House concerns. A group of mostly Northeastern Democrats, led by New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer, have repeatedly insisted they won’t vote for a reconciliation bill unless it raises or eliminates the cap on state-and-local tax (SALT) deductions. Manchin, in his own statement Wednesday, was pointed that the deal does not include such accommodations to the Gott Gang (forgive us).
x Huge development, but we'll need to see the details...
https://t.co/oGQ4I40qjR — Prof Michael E. Mann (@MichaelEMann) July 27, 2022
In other news… I, along with half the country, it seems, am just getting over an infection with the BA.5 variant of Covid-19. (It sucks, in case you’re one of the morons who still believes “It’s just like a bad cold”). This ain’t over, folks…
Omicron subvariant BA.5 now accounts for an estimated 82% of COVID cases in the CDC's New York region. It is more than four times as vaccine-resistant as its predecessor and has been linked to a heightened risk of reinfection and breakthrough cases and hospitalizations, state and national data show
New York state COVID hospitalizations are at their highest total since mid-February; NYC's rate has surged 70% in just the last month, according to state data, though Long Island's still tops the charts
[NYC and Long Island] also recently notched half-year highs in reinfection rates as the so-called "worst version" of omicron yet -- one shown not only to be more transmissible but more than four times as vaccine-evasive as its most vaccine-evasive predecessor -- maintains its stranglehold on America.
BA.5 could spread even more aggressively in the fall, as vaccine immunity wanes and people spend more time indoors — and booster shots specifically formulated to fight the subvariant may serve as an added layer of protection. Last month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recommended that drugmakers like Pfizer and Moderna develop bivalent booster shots by the fall. Those are shots designed to bring greater immunity because they target two strains: the original Covid strain and BA.5. ...Now, at the FDA’s request, drugmakers are scrambling to develop those boosters. Both Pfizer and Moderna have indicated that their updated shots could be available in October, but federal health officials reportedly told the Washington Post last week that they’re hoping for early- to mid-September instead.
x This new commercial from Mothers Against Greg Abbott is one of the best political ads I’ve ever seen. pic.twitter.com/Eva1A8kTJG — No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) July 25, 2022
New cars are as much about software as they are about hardware. But drivers don’t own the software. They subscribe to it. Manufacturers have decided that their customers may own the wheels, seats, and windows in their new cars, but they do not own the software that operates them. They have figured out there are oceans of profits just waiting to be harvested by controlling access to software features. The most recent example may seem like a small thing, but it is a harbinger of things to come. BMW is offering customers in South Korea the opportunity to activate their seat heaters, heated steering wheel, and other features via a subscription. ...While this may sound like nickel and dime stuff to most of us, the sums involved are huge. According to CNBC, at a Software Day event by Stellantis last year, the company told investors it plans to rake in up to $22.5 billion by selling software subscriptions. That’s in line with what other automakers are expecting as well. I have searched my memory banks to come up with the right word to describe this situation and have decided rapacious is about as accurate a description as one is likely to find.
x BREAKING: Few know that the largest oil spill in the US — 30 million gallons — threatens the health of thousands of families in Brooklyn. @Exxon and @Chevron among the culprits.
Speaking with @NomikiKonst and @joshfoxfilm to demand action. @NewtownCreek
https://t.co/FzN1cp9Pfz pic.twitter.com/8e9Tk3nB5S — Steven Donziger (@SDonziger) July 26, 2022
Since 2011, enforcement budget has declined by nearly 30 percent. ...For the past decade, Congress has steadily chipped away at the enforcement division’s funding and staffing levels. Since 2011, enforcement funding has fallen by nearly 30 percent once adjusted for inflation. The division currently has 713 fewer staffers than it did back then — a decrease of about 28 percent. As a result, the number of inspections, investigations, and civil and criminal cases the division initiates each year has plummeted, too. There’s a backlog of violations that the EPA hasn’t taken enforcement action on, and there are likely many more that the agency doesn’t even know about because investigators aren’t examining the data companies report or getting out into the field as often. That has real-world consequences for neighborhoods inundated with industrial pollution, which tend to be communities of color or low-income communities. When it comes to enforcing the law, “if our state’s not going to do it and our EPA can’t because they don’t have the capacity, then now there’s nobody left, right? There’s nobody who can hold polluters accountable,” said Jennifer Hadayia, executive director of the environmental justice non-profit Air Alliance Houston.
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