Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of the coal state of West Virginia warned the Trump administration against moving too fast, too soon on rolling back environmental rules or risk a similar backlash as the Obama administration.
“I’ve told this administration, I think the Obama administration was a far reach,” Manchin told an energy forum Wednesday. “If you retract, you’ll have as much pushback retracting too far as they did overreaching too far.”
Manchin is no fan of the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan or other rules targeting the coal industry, and he supports President Trump’s move to repeal the climate regulations and other rules seen by miners as job killers.
But Manchin opposes rolling back all regulations and supports abiding by laws that have strengthened the Environmental Protection Agency’s pollution authority over the last 20 years.
He thinks Trump needs to strike a balance.
“There is a balance,” he told the forum hosted by CQ Roll Call. “Can they find the balance? I hope so.”
Manchin added that he has struggled to find a balance during his time as a senator.
“There’s not much balance here. That’s an oxymoron in Washington,” he quipped.
“If there was balance, I would have found it by now,” Manchin said. “Common sense is not real common in Washington.”
His comments came as Trump administration officials are beginning talks with nations assembled in Bonn, Germany, this week to discuss the future of the Paris climate change agreement. One of the questions hanging over the United Nations conference is how climate funding will survive without the U.S.
Manchin tried to negotiate with the Obama administration a carveout for coal technologies that limit normal criteria pollutants, not just carbon dioxide, under the Paris deal. But he said the president didn’t bite on the idea.
“If you’re concerned about the global climate, you ought to do things that will help the rest of the world,” Manchin said Wednesday. “And make sure they are moving forward the same way we did back in the ’80s and ’90s with the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act.”
Trump had criticized the Paris deal as unfair to the United States in announcing June 1 that he would begin the process to leave the agreement. Manchin agrees that the agreement forces the U.S. to do more ahead of major emitters China and India, noting a new report that showed global climate emissions are increasing because of China.
A number of states, led by California and Washington, are seeking to fill the gap in emissions reductions left after Trump’s decision to withdraw. But the United Nations, ahead of the Bonn conference, issued a report saying the effort won’t be enough without a federal response. State officials who are at the talks conceded to that fact this week.
