When asked for comment, the spokeswoman for Mr. Manchin, Sam Runyon, pointed to those provisions, as well as another $5 billion in the package that would allow existing coal-fired power plants to improve their efficiency and adopt environmental controls such as scrubbers, which remove pollutants from smokestacks. . These measures to help the coal industry, he noted, are on top of the $8.5 billion for carbon capture and storage that Mr. Manchin secured it as part of a bipartisan infrastructure bill last year.
More than a decade ago, Mr. Manchin released a campaign ad blasting President Barack Obama’s climate plan, which ultimately failed. So when Mr. Biden took office, he knew that Mr. Manchin would be his biggest obstacle to passing an ambitious climate change bill.
At every step of the way, Mr. Manchin shaped the legislation.
Many Democrats wanted a clean energy standard that would pay electric companies to replace coal and gas-fired power plants with renewable energy and penalize those that don’t. But Mr. Manchin opposed the measure, so it was scrapped. He vetoed a plan to offer larger tax credits to consumers who bought union-made electric vehicles, a move opposed by Toyota Motor, which operates a non-union plant in West Virginia. And he ensured that tax credits for electric vehicles could not be used by the wealthiest Americans.
Mr. Manchin scaled back but did not eliminate a fee imposed on oil and gas operators for leaking methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from wells, pipelines and other infrastructure. He rejected an early Democratic plan to permanently ban oil drilling in the Atlantic and Pacific and ensured that longstanding tax breaks for the fossil fuel industry, which many Democrats wanted repealed, were not touched.
As negotiations continued and war broke out in Ukraine, sending oil prices soaring around the world, Mr. Manchin talked about the need to increase drilling to lower gas prices and reduce government spending. The price of what was once a $2.2 trillion bill plummeted, and more than $200 billion in climate spending was rejected.
In the end, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic majority leader, was willing to include several provisions that would require the federal government to open more public lands to drilling. At the same time, the bill would increase the royalty rates that energy companies must pay to extract fossil fuels in these areas.