More than a decade ago, Mr. Manchin released a campaign ad in which he took a shot at President Barack Obama’s climate plan, which ultimately failed. So when Mr. Biden took office, he knew that Mr. Manchin would be the biggest obstacle to passing an ambitious climate change bill. At every turn Mr. Manchin shaped the legislation. Many Democrats wanted a clean energy standard that would pay electric utilities to replace coal- and gas-fired power plants with renewables and penalize those who didn’t. But Mr. Manchin opposed the measure, so it was repealed. He vetoed a plan to provide greater tax credits for consumers who bought union-made electric vehicles, a measure opposed by Toyota Motor, which operates a non-union plant in West Virginia. And it ensured that tax credits for electric vehicles could not be used by the wealthiest Americans. Mr. Manchin reduced 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 to repeal, remained intact. As negotiations continued and war broke out in Ukraine, sending oil prices skyrocketing worldwide, Mr. Manchin spoke of the need to increase drilling to lower gasoline prices and reduce government spending. The price tag of what was once a $2.2 trillion bill has plummeted, and more than $200 billion worth of climate spending has been scrapped. 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 for drilling. At the same time, the bill would increase the royalties that energy companies must pay to extract fossil fuels in these areas.
