Texas is boiling. Lahaina has been razed to the ground. For the first time ever, Category 5 hurricanes have formed in every ocean basin on earth – in a single year. The world stares into the abyss of an uninhabitable future. 

Meanwhile, the interests of fossil fuel corporations and politicians have become inseparable, undermining the government’s willingness to push back against the drivers of the climate crisis–those same corporations. Lobbying: it is perhaps the greatest obstacle in our fight against climate change. 

Since 1945, the history of the world has been defined by U.S. cultural, political, and economic influence – we are the one “indispensable nation” as Biden’s Democratic predecessor proclaimed. If the world is to effectively combat climate change, the United States has to play a leading role. Unfortunately, the U.S.’ record on climate policy is at best slapdash, and at worst, injurious.

The Trump Administration pursued rampant deregulation with the likes of Executive Order 13771 which mandated that for every new regulation introduced by a federal agency, two were to be repealed. President Trump weakened the authority of regulatory bodies like the Environmental Protection Agency, made federal land readily available for drilling, and generally disregarded the threats of climate change. Trump received $1,340,374 from the oil and gas industry during the 2016 election cycle.

By 2020, the Biden Administration had made lofty promises including (but not limited to) rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement, net-zero emissions by 2050, raising the social carbon tax to $51 (it had been reduced to $7 under Trump) and ending natural gas drilling on federal lands. In many ways, Biden delivered. 

The U.S. rejoined the Paris Climate Agreement. The social carbon tax was set back to $51 per ton. Biden took steps to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, including passing the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA): an industry focused, subsidize-rather-than-penalize approach to spur growth in the sustainable energy sector. And, at the last moment, President Biden had the IRA guarantee a decade of federally facilitated offshore drilling. 

If you’re thinking, “wait, that last ‘accomplishment’ isn’t an accomplishment at all!”, you’re correct! So why did Biden poison the IRA with a stipulation irreconcilable with his stated goals on climate change? 

Joe Manchin has a lot to do with it. He’ll be our case study on the phenomenon of corporate lobbying. A Democratic senator from West Virginia, in exchange for his support and the passing of the IRA, Manchin demanded the bill guarantee the auctioning of millions of acres of federal land for fossil fuel extraction. 

Manchin has deep ties to the coal and natural gas industry. He founded a slew of coal companies during the 1980s, including Enersystems (now run by his son), a waste coal business that has netted him upwards of $4.5 million dollars since 2010. As governor in 2009, he signed a “clean” energy bill aimed at boosting West Virginia’s renewable energy output to 25% by 2025. However, slipped into the bill was a provision that reclassified waste coal as an alternative energy source; corporations, including Manchin’s family business, were able to count waste coal towards their clean energy output. 

Predictably, the state has come nowhere near the 25% threshold. In fact, close to 90% of West Virginia’s energy is still sourced from coal. Though Manchin’s actions evince that his personal interests influence his policy making, his ties to the West Virginia coal industry don’t entirely explain his shaping of the IRA. 

Let’s look at a different metric. Between 2021 and 2022 Manchin received $778,109 in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry – the most of any politician, Democrat and Republican, during that period. It’s difficult to imagine that the oil and gas donors who contributed to that sum are benevolent actors simply showing good faith support to Manchin’s campaign. 

Keith McCoy, a former senior lobbyist for ExxonMobil, during an interview with an undercover reporter said he talks to Joe Manchin’s office “every week,” and that, “[t]he 2022 [class] is focused on re-election so [he knows he has] them… you can have those conversations with them because they’re a captive audience. They know they need you [to fund reelection campaigns].” In particular, McCoy says ExxonMobil is focused on removing the “negative stuff” from bills including limits on greenhouse gas emissions and carbon taxes. Ironically, Exxon’s stated goal (directly from their webpage) is “to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions in support of a net-zero future.” Comical.

We’ve strayed quite far from Carter and his peanut farm.

The solution is not revolutionary: make politicians and corporations adhere to stricter campaign finance rules and regulations. It will be difficult. Politicians will lose much more than they’d gain. The good news is that campaign finance reform has massive populist potential. Americans across the aisle despise corruption. And make no mistake, this is corruption at its most insidious. 

Manchin is bought and sold. What’s true of Manchin is true of many other Democrats and even more Republicans. What’s true of Exxon is true of ConocoPhillips, Shell, Chevron, and BP. Lobbying is the gasoline that fuels the fire of climate change. Nothing will fundamentally change as long as the likes of Exxon have the ears and the pockets of politicians.