By AAMER MADHANI, Associated Press
JOLIET, Sick. (AP) — President Joe Biden on Saturday was criticized by West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democratic antagonist and ally, for being “cavalier” and “divorced from reality” after vowing to shutter coal-fired power plants and rely more heavily on wind and solar energy in the long run.
The powerful coal-state lawmaker said Biden’s words “ignore the severe economic pain” for people from higher energy prices and are why Americans “are losing trust” in Biden. Manchin’s stinging rebuke of his party’s leader comes at precarious time for Democrats on the ultimate weekend of campaigning before Tuesday’s elections that would put Republicans back in power in Congress.
Biden raised Manchin’s ire together with his reference to coal power during a speech Friday in Carlsbad, California, to highlight his $280 billion plan to spice up the semiconductor industry and scientific research.
“I used to be in Massachusetts a few month ago on the positioning of the biggest old coal plant in America. Guess what? It cost them an excessive amount of money,” Biden said. “Nobody is constructing recent coal plants because they’ll’t depend on it, even in the event that they have all of the coal guaranteed for the remaining of their existence of the plant. So it’s going to change into a wind generation,” Biden added. “We’re going to be shutting these plants down all across America and having wind and solar.”
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Biden had visited a former coal-fired power plant in Massachusetts in July. The previous Brayton Point power plant in Somerset is shifting to offshore wind power manufacturing, and Biden selected it because the embodiment of the transition to scrub energy that he’s in search of, including within the sweeping climate-and-health law he passed with Manchin’s assist in August.
Manchin, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said in a press release that Biden’s remarks were “not only outrageous and divorced from reality, they ignore the severe economic pain the American individuals are feeling due to rising energy costs.”
Such remarks, Manchin said, “are the explanation the American individuals are losing trust in President Biden. … It seems his positions change every day depending on the audience and politics of the day.”
Manchin, whose support was crucial to Biden winning passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which included the largest investment in climate programs in U.S. history, slammed Biden for “offensive and disgusting” words and said the president owed West Virginia coal staff “an instantaneous and public apology.”
“Let me be clear, that is something the president has never said to me. Being cavalier in regards to the coal jobs for men and ladies in West Virginia and across the country who literally put their lives on the road to assist construct and power this country is offensive and disgusting,” Manchin. He added that “it’s time he learn a lesson that his words matter and have consequences.”
In late 2021, Manchin torpedoed Biden’s big domestic policy bill, resulting in a hardball response from the White House to a lawmaker whose vote is crucial within the 50-50 Senate. Biden’s press secretary called Manchin’s opposition, first announced on a Sunday news show, as “a sudden and inexplicable reversal in his position” and “a breach of his commitments” to Biden and congressional Democrats.
Then, this past summer, Manchin suddenly reversed course and backed a revised bill that became law with only Democratic votes. ___
Associated Press author Matthew Daly in Washington contributed to this report.
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