Alongside your irregularly-scheduled Green Tape programming, we will also be posting Right of Way episodes and transcripts here. If you prefer to listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, click the links here or here.
In this episode, we discuss:
The urgency of permitting reform, and what it might look like this time
How political fights over energy infrastructure have evolved
What Senator Manchin would do differently if he worked on the IRA again
Critical minerals, the national debt, and more
Thomas Hochman: Welcome back to Right of Way, a podcast about energy policy, energy politics, and above all the ongoing permitting reform negotiations. I’m Thomas Hochman, director of energy and infrastructure policy at the Foundation for American Innovation, and I’m joined by Pavan Venkatakrishnan, a policy adviser here at FAI.
Today, we’re bringing you something a little bit different. Earlier this month, FAI co-hosted the Energy Imperatives Summit. As you might imagine, many of the summit’s panels were dedicated to discussing permitting reform, with a number of great speakers from Congress, industry, and beyond.
Perhaps no current or former elected official, though, has more experience with the politics and policies of permitting reform than former Senator Joe Manchin. He introduced, to our knowledge, the first ever “permitting certainty” bill — a move that came in response to the Obama administration pulling a permit for a West Virginia coal mine. He’s watched, from his vantage point as the Senate’s most moderate Democrat — and then eventually as an independent — as energy production has become increasingly politicized. And of course, he introduced the Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024, a sweeping permitting reform bill that passed easily out of committee before dying on the Senate calendar at the end of last Congress.
Pavan and I were lucky enough to speak with the former Senator at the summit, and we discussed all these things and more — including what he’s looking for out of the current negotiations. We’re sharing the audio here — hope you enjoy.
Senator Manchin: Good morning.
Thomas Hochman: We filled in a bit — people were having a hard time braving the rain and the early wake-up, but I know there are a lot of people thrilled to hear you speak, so thanks for being here.
Senator Manchin: Good to be here. You just had two great speakers with you, Scott and Alan — they’re good people. They know what to do, and they’re going to get it done. I believe that.
Pavan Venkatakrishnan: You recently left a big job, as some people in the audience might have heard. You’ve been traveling the country, retelling a lot of the lessons you learned during your time in office. So, first: how’s retirement from public office treating you? And second — would you recommend your old job to a friend or not?
Senator Manchin: I’d recommend public service to anybody who has service in their heart. If you want to do something to help people, if you want to move society forward, if you want to keep this great country in the shape we received it from our parents and grandparents — because right now we’re the first generation that’s going to leave it in worse shape than we received it — then yes, get involved. As John Kennedy said, public service is the noblest of all professions.
But some people now get involved because of fame and fortune. It’s not “my country before my party.” Whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, you should be an American first. Being a Democrat or Republican just tells you that you might have a different idea about how to fix a problem. And right now they can’t even agree on what the problem is. So they’re all against each other, and it’s a horrible situation.
For that reason, you have to make a commitment that you’re not going to get caught up in that — you have to be able to stand apart.
I told people I was a spear-catcher. I was willing to catch the spears because I was willing to work with anybody and everybody who wanted to do something helpful and make changes.
A representative form of government works this way: I go to a basketball game and I’d like to see a long three-pointer win it, but I’ll take some foul shots to win the game. I go to a football game and I want to see a Hail Mary, but I’ll take some first downs. You take what you can get. If you can move the ball from here to here in a form of government that requires compromise — take it. If you’re going to be against something because it isn’t perfect, you’ll always let perfect be the enemy of the good. Politicians will tell you, “Well, it just wasn’t good enough.” Okay — then ask the question: was it better than what we had? Take what you can get, when you can get it. That’s the problem we’re running into. They’re using it as a crutch: “It just didn’t do exactly what we wanted.” No — it’s not going to. A more perfect union doesn’t mean it’s perfect. We’re trying to make it better. Take what you’ve got and go.
Thomas Hochman: You’re teeing us up well. We’ve been talking a lot about permitting reform today. During your time in the Senate you worked on a number of permitting reform efforts — the Energy Independence and Security Act, the Building American Energy Security Act, and, maybe best known to this audience, the Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024. Some of those were wider in scope than others, but all of them tried to address the biggest barriers to building things in this country — frivolous litigation, long timelines, and so on.
The bill on the table in negotiations today is likely to pull from a lot of the work you did. To what extent do you feel the urgency for permitting reform today is similar to a couple of years ago, and to what extent has it changed?
Senator Manchin: We have so many challenges. I kept thinking — if we’d had the restrictions we have today back in 1940 and 1941, with World War II pressing down on us, would we have been able to build the arsenal to defend the world and beat fascism? Could we have done it? No. We couldn’t do it today because of the restrictions. We’ve got to get to a balance.
On permitting, I’d say: all the things we want to do, we can’t do. What’s the biggest impediment? The two I knew best in my life were the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Mountain Valley Pipeline. Atlantic Coast spent three, four, five billion dollars before they went defunct — they just quit. Mountain Valley went from an estimated cost of about $3.3 billion up to about seven or eight billion to get completed, and it took an act of Congress and the President supporting me to get it done.
We didn’t have judicial reform. We were going through the Fourth Circuit, and the same three people sat on that circuit and wouldn’t rotate off the way they were supposed to. They just kept killing it, every time. And then you’ve got people making a living doing this. There are also people who are really sincere about climate — and we should all be sincere about it. But technology is going to fix the climate; it’s not going to be elimination. You have to innovate with more technology. You can clean up the environment, you can find new ways.
I’d say to the younger people — you two — that fusion is probably going to be the energy of the future, to some extent, in terms of how we power the world. And it’ll be available to anybody on earth, so it’ll be an equalizer in the next 20 or 30 years. I’ve been to Provence, France, and seen the ITER operation. It’s unbelievable what they’re trying to do — capturing the energy of the sun. When you can do that and it becomes commercialized, you’ll have something. You’ve got SMRs, you’ve got micros, all the things that should be done. But without permitting reform, nothing’s going to happen — we’re just going to spin our wheels.
The bill that John Barrasso and I did — we worked on it for over a year, and I’d been working for five years on the different pieces you mentioned. John and I are friends. I was the chairman; he was the ranking member. We made our staffs work together and gave everybody a specific job. First we figured out what we couldn’t get done because we couldn’t agree, and we set that aside. Then we got what we could.
Transmission was one. My staff and John’s staff worked on it, and we met their conditions. What they wanted was state rights — and I’m a former governor, so the Tenth Amendment and states’ rights are a big thing to me. But if we’re going to produce energy in one part of the country and have to cross three states to get it to an end user, FERC makes a decision: is there a customer that meets the need? If yes — how do you get through the states without violating their rights? We landed on giving them one year. Every utility’s biggest cash cow is transmission; whether it’s pipelines or transmission lines, that’s where the money is, and it’s a monopoly. So I said: you get one chance. Every one of you works with your public service commission. You’ve got one year to sit down and decide whether you want to bring that line into your portfolio or not. That’s a fair position for a CEO — a one-year look to see if it’s beneficial to the company. We came to that agreement, and we came to a lot of agreements, and we passed the bill 15 to 4. That’s never been done — passing a bill out of our committee with that kind of overwhelming majority.
Pavan Venkatakrishnan: The Trump administration has weaponized a number of statutes — even previously routine ones — to block and impede the build-out of renewables. But as you remember, the Biden administration embraced many of those same tactics: the LNG pause, slow-walking court orders on leasing, even the offshore oil and gas leasing deadlines in the IRA. All of this has spurred efforts to get at the problem through Congress. You were, I think, the first member to introduce a bill on this. In 2013, President Obama pulled a Clean Water Act permit for the Spruce No. 1 coal mine, and you and David Vitter introduced legislation to prevent a president from pulling those dredge-and-fill permits. How are you thinking about this issue now, and what lessons do you draw?
Senator Manchin: Through all those experiences — I understand the executive mindset, because I was a governor and you think you can do this and that. But I was a legislator first: house of delegates member, state senator, secretary of state, and then governor. I knew there’s a certain decorum you go through. If you can’t get enough of your legislators or senators to agree there’s a better way, you’ve got a problem.
What happened there was that the Obama administration had basically targeted fossil energy, and he and I went toe-to-toe. I said, “Mr. President, you cannot eliminate what you don’t like. You come from a coal area — Illinois. We worked together on coal projects. We had scrubbers, low-NOx boilers, bag houses. We did everything.” But carbon capture and sequestration was the big bugaboo. When he said, “Go ahead and build a coal-fired plant — I’ll break you,” he knew what he was saying. Our state took the Mountaineer plant, a 900-megawatt coal-fired plant, and we showed we could commercially capture the carbon, liquefy it, and pressurize it into the ground. But the economics weren’t there. Out of 900 megawatts, it took 300 megawatts just to run the capture. You can’t amortize a debt on a 900-megawatt plant costing billions and then only have 600 megawatts of revenue because 300 is going to your environmental requirements. That makes no sense.
And the government has never solved the other half. Every administration talks about sequestration, but no one’s done it — no one wants to find a permanent home for it, because once you do, you give these projects a longer life. The Trump administration thinks coal is going to be revitalized. No one’s going to build a new coal-fired plant, because it doesn’t have a long life — there are cheaper ways to heat water and make steam to run turbines, and that’s where things are going. You’re not going back. Natural gas is a tremendous transition fuel. Nuclear is coming — everyone’s waiting on it.
But here’s the big thing. You want to know how the IRA came about? I was the one vote that wouldn’t support Build Back Better, the Biden bill, because it was so expensive and so far-reaching it would have changed the social support systems in our country to the point of being overwhelming. It would have been a $10 trillion bill if it was a dollar. After eight months, I just couldn’t get there. When I said I couldn’t and they dropped it, everyone got very upset.
Three months later, the Ukraine war started — and it started over one thing: energy. Putin weaponized energy. Our allies were hurting, we were supposed to be there to help them, and we couldn’t, because we weren’t producing what we should have been. They’d shut down all the permits. You couldn’t get a permit, you couldn’t get a lease, you couldn’t get anything on BLM lands or offshore. So I told Schumer, “You’ve got an energy problem.” He said, “You’re the chairman — you ought to write something.” I said, “Chuck, I just went through eight months of hell. I’m not jumping back into the fire.”
So I didn’t say a word to anybody — I don’t think anybody knew we were writing a bill. I took my committee and said, we’re going to see if we can put together legislation that gives us superiority in producing the energy this country needs today, and lets us invest in the energy we want for tomorrow. That’s all. And we took only proven technology — no pie-in-the-sky, no hypotheticals. Things already proven under commercial load. So: wind and solar, then geothermal, then nuclear, then hydrogen — everything we knew we could mature further and bring in line to be competitive.
And we had to do one more thing, because I knew where they’d come at us. They’d say, “Sure, we’ll agree to all that,” and then refuse to issue any permits on BLM land. Since our committee had jurisdiction over BLM and all offshore waters, I tied it together: there will be no wind or solar built on BLM land or offshore unless we’re also extracting the resources underneath — the oil and gas. You separate one, you kill the whole thing, and they couldn’t separate them. But then the administration went and advanced EVs and threw caution to the wind, and that caused a lot of problems.
Thomas Hochman: Every time we go through a major permitting negotiation, the partisan politics of individual statutes and processes have shifted from the time before. There’s an increasing number of Democrats comfortable with NEPA reform; the politics of transmission are always changing. From your vantage point, how have Democratic and Republican positions changed on these issues?
Senator Manchin: Here’s what I would have said before: I knew the NEPA concerns. I knew the Section 401 water permits, all the obstacles. But I thought if we could get a major overhaul of the judicial process — how you bring suits, when you can intervene, what shot clocks apply, what happens when something gets sent back to the agencies and starts over — that would be the thing. We think we cured most of that in the bill John and I did.
So I figured: if we can just get this done, it’ll highlight what’s still wrong with NEPA, and then reasonable people can sit down. We all want to protect the water. I don’t want to drink dirty water; I don’t want anyone without clean, potable water. If we can clean it up with technology and not make it worse, we should. And I’ve always said this: if there’s proven technology in the energy sector that works, and you don’t use it because you don’t think it gives you the profit returns you want — I’m sorry. I’ll give you a shot clock: 90 days, a year, whatever’s reasonable, to implement it. If you don’t, you’re in violation, and we’ll shut you down. That’s reasonable. It lets everyone play on a level field. The technology is there, it works, here’s how long you have.
Perfect example is methane. We flared it for years. Then we had technology to capture the methane coming off the wellhead — but the small producers’ wells don’t produce enough to offset the cost. So you have to take everything into consideration before you decide how to go forward.
Pavan Venkatakrishnan: From your experience, is litigation reform the core of any permitting reform effort?
Senator Manchin: It’s got to get at the litigation. We already passed it out of the Energy Committee 15-4. If we passed it out of committee 15-4, that’s something Democrats agreed on and Republicans agreed on. Take it.
I’ll never forget some of my friends in the House who were having challenges — they needed more. I said, “I agree with you. You need more. The whole system needs more. I’ve given you all I can get right now. I’ve tried for years. Can’t you just take this?” And here’s the mindset: “Well, as a Republican, we just won — Trump’s coming back, we won the House and the Senate, we’ve got the trifecta.” You’ve got the trifecta, but you still have a branch of government called the Senate that operates like no other body in the world, where the minority has the right to participate and you need their votes. That’s the filibuster. We’re the only country that lets the minority participate.
Honestly, as a senator, I wasn’t all that bothered whether I was in the minority or the majority. The only people who really cared were the majority leaders — they got a bigger office and a bigger war chest. Other than that, we had committees. You got chairmanships if you were hell-bent on a chairmanship. I was a ranking member on Energy before I became chairman, and I worked closely with both sides, so it didn’t bother me. That’s the problem we have.
The bottom line is: take it. I told my friends — Scott and Alan, both here — take it as far as you can. When you have an agreement, shake hands, and get it priority status on the floor so it comes right up and gets voted on quickly.
Pavan Venkatakrishnan: Do you think this year is the year?
Senator Manchin: I think we have a good roadmap. We’ve done an awful lot of work. It’s a matter of how close they are — whether there are other things they can work out with Democrats and progressives. Because no matter what you do, people will say NEPA is preventing this, and use that as a tactic to hold up multi-billion-dollar projects. If you don’t like a project, look at the shot clock we put in the judicial reform — you had to bring your challenge within six months. You couldn’t wait two years until after I’d spent $2 billion and then sue me. We stopped all that. The roadmap is there. Take it and run with it. See what you can get done.
Thomas Hochman: Even the most ardent critics of the Inflation Reduction Act would probably concede there’s an energy politics before that bill and a different one after it. It became a lightning rod during last year’s Republican reconciliation package. Looking back, would you do anything differently?
Senator Manchin: Absolutely. The biggest mistake I made — me and my staff wrote the energy portion of that bill — was naming it the Inflation Reduction Act. That was my biggest mistake. I got caught up in the moment. Inflation was at 9% when the bill came, gas was at $5, and Joe Biden’s approval rating was in the 20s. Everything was in chaos. I knew inflation would come down if we passed it, because we were going to produce more energy than ever — you put more product in the market, supply and demand does what it does. But I should have just called it the Energy Security Act of 2022. That’s what it was. That’s exactly what it did.
From the minute we passed it, the Biden team started calling it the greatest environmental bill ever. They never said a word about it being the greatest energy bill — and we produced more energy in 2023 than anybody in the world ever has. The Democrats couldn’t even talk about it. I kept saying, we’re producing more than ever — 4.7 billion barrels of oil, 38 trillion cubic feet of gas. That bill was just gushing; it made things happen. And Joe Biden didn’t talk about it. Kamala Harris didn’t talk about it. One month before the election, they finally said, “Well, we’re producing energy.” Yeah — reluctantly. You didn’t want to do it. You were forced to, because we needed it. We had no LNG in 2016. Look where we are today, supplying the rest of the world. If we can supply America too and work out the shipping, we’ll be a lot better off.
Thomas Hochman: We were joking backstage that calling it the “Energy Security Act” or the “ESA” would have really thrown off the environmentalists who came after the bill.
Senator Manchin: You can imagine. I had the whole energy community, pretty much all over the world, after me. President Macron of France and Chancellor Scholz of Germany came at me one day — I was in Paris for a climate event, making a presentation, and they came at me like a scud missile, like a banty rooster, just going at me: “You’re going to kill our country. You’re taking all our investments.”
I said, wait a minute. First, our friends and allies in France and Germany — not one word was ever said by us about doing this to harm our allies. We never thought about that. We were focused on producing what our country needs and finding answers to our energy problems through technology. And here’s the difference between your countries and what we’re trying to do. I’ve been beaten up for 12, 15 years — “Manchin, you’ve got to get on board with cap and trade, you’ve got to have a carbon tax.” Let me tell you why I’m against that. None of you will commit every penny of carbon-tax revenue to fixing the problem through technology — letting industry invest in better technology to reduce carbon output. You used it for all your social reforms instead of incentivizing industry to find better ways to produce energy. That’s the difference. You used a stick. We used a carrot. We gave incentives — and that’s exactly why we had so much investment.
Pavan Venkatakrishnan: I want to take us in a slightly different direction. You recently testified before the House on critical minerals, and one of your core messages was that permitting matters but isn’t enough. What else do we need to be doing?
Senator Manchin: Permitting matters because once you get it, you still have to process the material — refineries, the whole chain. We have to look at the whole picture. With all the oil we produce, we mostly produce crude. Our refineries were largely built back in the ‘70s. I lived through the ‘74 embargo; I waited in line for gasoline to get to work. I remember those days, and they weren’t pleasant. Our refineries were set up for a blend of sweet and heavy crude, and we haven’t built any new refineries, so we’re still working off that same blend ratio. That’s why the Canadian crude was a tremendous input for us, and not building the line was a big mistake — because the crude was still coming, just the most dangerous and expensive way, by rail and over the highways. And in Venezuela it was cheap, and you saw what happened. So here we are, still relying on imports to make our refineries work the way they should. It’s a crazy situation.
Pavan Venkatakrishnan: So how do you think about critical minerals?
Senator Manchin: When I first got to the Senate, the first thing I learned in Armed Services was that there are four countries of concern we can never depend on: China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. They’re never going to have our back. Anything you depend on from those four countries should never be something you actually rely on. Well, look what we did. Our enriched uranium comes from Russia. Our critical minerals are largely capped by China. We got ourselves into a hell of a conundrum, and we let it happen. We turned a blind eye, because we’re capitalists and we let the market go where it would go — and it went where the products were cheapest, with the best returns. We weren’t thinking strategically about defending our country.
Critical minerals are a building block. You should do everything you can to protect that and make sure you can produce within your own country, or with countries you have free-trade agreements and long-standing relationships with. The first thing this administration did was sever a lot of those relationships, especially with Canada. Canada has a cadre of resources. Australia is a tremendous supplier and could be bigger and better.
And tariffs should be used to protect against countries encroaching — China, whether it’s vehicles, steel, or critical minerals — until we can compete. Communist-backed countries like China can undercut you whenever they want. If they want to take a market over tomorrow, they can, no matter how efficient you are, because the government picks up the difference. That’s what you have to protect against. That’s the purpose of tariffs — not just beating people over the head and saying, “You’re not my friend anymore, so I’ll charge you 50% today.”
Thomas Hochman: You’ve talked about trade instruments; earlier we talked about incentives and financing in the IRA. At the same time, you looked at Build Back Better and said this is too much. A lot of folks are thinking about the right role for industrial policy right now.
Senator Manchin: Let me tell you, on the finances — I don’t know how we as a society aren’t talking about the finances of our country. I don’t know how anyone, your generation or mine, isn’t asking the people who want to serve in government about this. No one asks presidential candidates, “What are you going to do about the debt?”
When Ross Perot got into it, we were two or three trillion dollars in debt, and he thought that was horrible — and he made a heck of a run making noise about it. Then in 1997 you had John Kasich, Erskine Bowles, and President Clinton put together a tax policy that immediately started producing balanced budgets and surpluses. We’d have been debt-free as a nation by 2006 if we’d kept going. What happened? 9/11. We declared two wars and never paid for them, and we had two Bush tax cuts, and that put us on a trajectory straight up to $10 trillion, and we never looked back. Both sides are to blame. Democrats and Republicans have both piled on debt.
When I got to the Senate, it was $13 trillion. My first Armed Services meeting, all the Joint Chiefs were there, and I thought, I’ve just heard about all this geopolitical unrest — let me ask the experts. So we asked Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs: what’s the greatest threat the United States faces? He never hesitated, never blinked. I’m thinking he’s going to say Russia, China, some combination. He said, “Everyone in this room — there will never be another military might that overtakes us in our lifetime. But they won’t have to. We’ll take ourselves down first. The weight of the debt, the interest on the debt, and the pushback from people as that pressure lands on them — that’s what brings us down.” It’s brought down every dynasty, every regime — the Roman Empire, the British Empire. They’ve all fallen because of debt.
And here we are with unsustainable debt in peacetime — $39 trillion, heading to $40 trillion before you blink. It’s not sustainable. We’ll hit the wall, and we’ll hit it hard. If we thought 2008 and 2009 were a wake-up call, this one’s going to hit a lot harder. Does that make you feel good?
Pavan Venkatakrishnan: It makes me feel great. Our generation has a lot to look forward to.
Sen. Manchin: But am I right — has anybody heard anybody talk about the debt? No one cares. They think it’s all funny money. You know why? We had 0% rates for so long. That’s why.
Pavan Venkatakrishnan: I want your thoughts on an issue of real relevance to energy right now: AI and data centers. They’re dominating the energy conversation, with huge demand attached. You’ve got people who want to ban them or impose a moratorium, and people who want permissionless development — build them all. Where are you on that spectrum, and are you optimistic about what data centers can do for re-industrialization or for lowering prices?
Senator Manchin: Let me talk about the hyperscalers — the big boys, the Metas and Amazons of the world. They all first came out and said they wanted to be hooked to the grid. Well, the grid can’t handle it; it doesn’t have the capacity for what you want. At first they did a lot of that — Loudoun County here in Virginia, close to the grid — and people are competing, prices are going up. The fastest-rising cost in a household right now is energy. It’s rising faster than almost anything. Food prices are up, gas is up and down with oil, but the energy line in your home just hasn’t dipped at all.
So there’s not a place in America today that’s saying, “Come on, build it here, we want you.” Nobody. They’re pushing back because in their minds they’re in direct competition with these hyperscalers, these billion-dollar companies, and they don’t think they’re in the same league — yet they’re all fighting for the same energy. About a year ago — and I think President Trump even mentioned it — the model started shifting toward direct-source generation, where the data centers are responsible for their own power.
So here’s what I tell my friends in that industry. Most of it’s being done with natural gas, because it’s plentiful, affordable, and a transition fuel. They’d all like to get to SMRs or micros eventually, but that’s a little ways off; they need to get in now, and we’ve got to win the AI race. So I say: if you’ve projected you need a 300-megawatt natural gas combined-cycle plant, why not build 20% extra — go to 360 or 400 megawatts? Go into the community and say, “We’re going to build our own source, with the best technology for emissions and the environment, and we’re going to net-meter back into the system to support it, at no more than five cents a kilowatt-hour.” Put a cap at five cents. Now you’re giving me reliability, you’re giving me the lowest prices, you’re supporting my way of life. I don’t have to compete with you — you’re helping me. And on top of that, your backup power is clean technology.
There’s a lot of battery storage coming, a lot of options for backup. What upsets people now is a combined-cycle plant with a diesel generator sitting behind it for backup — even if it only runs a month or two a year, they’re bent out of shape about it. They’ll have to work that out. But if a developer can come in and show, “I’m not competing with you — in fact, I’m giving you a reliability factor you don’t have now,” that’s the way to break into these markets. And you’re competing for water, too, so you’d better go where there’s plenty of it. Now I’m giving an advertisement for West Virginia, because we’ve got it all — oceans of water under us, oceans of gas under our feet. And yet I don’t have one community that isn’t fighting them right now. Not one.
Thomas Hochman: I was in Tucker County, West Virginia not so long ago, and they’ve got those “No power plant, no data center” signs up. Pavan and I have been talking about this a lot — wondering to what extent the backlash to data centers is really a broader backlash to building things, versus a backlash to this technology in particular. What do you see?
Senator Manchin: I don’t think it’s the technology at all. It’s basically: “My backyard, my costs are high, and I don’t see myself benefiting from you coming here.” That’s it in a nutshell. They don’t see much benefit, they don’t see long-term jobs, and there are fights over the tax base. A lot of states are trying to treat this as a new industry and keep the revenue. In West Virginia I think they made a big mistake: the governor and the legislature set it up so the tax revenue comes to the state first and gets divided up a little. That’s not how it works. Every county has a tax base, and if you’re in that county, you’re responsible for it — you pay something up to the state, but not the majority. That’s what they’re fighting over now.
All they had to do was sit down. You’ve got the Mount Storm power plant — 1,600 megawatts, coal-fired — and that plant’s going to be converted to natural gas at 1,600 megawatts. It’s going to be big. So why not tie into that power stream and build the data center right next to the plant? It’s already an industrial site. Instead, they just threw it out there and thought people would embrace it, and they didn’t. Now there’s a head of steam against it. To fix it, they’re going to have to sit down with the reasonable people who oppose it — because it was sited in an area of the state people didn’t want, and it was going to compete for power. Change the site, tie into the existing plant, and neither of those problems exists anymore. The hyperscalers should build in Almost Heaven. That’s what they should do — if they do it right.
Pavan Venkatakrishnan: To close: what’s something people are getting wrong or missing about energy policy? Could be 30,000 feet, could be conceptual, could be super niche.
Senator Manchin: We don’t do a good job of explaining history to people. Every war has been fought over energy. Every developed nation, every superpower, has had affordable, dependable, reliable energy. It’s all about energy. If you don’t have access to it, you’re in trouble — you’re not going to live a good life, and you’re not going to have an economy with any real growth potential.
On one of my first trips as a senator, I went to India, out into the hinterlands, the rural areas. All I saw was families — mostly women and children — picking up animal waste, drying it in the sun to create fuel to heat their homes or cook at night. And I thought: if they’re able to get energy, do you think they’re going to care what’s coming out of a smokestack, after what they’ve had to do just to get any energy at all? The difference is that we went through all those iterations a century or more ago. We can help others benefit from the growing pains we already had.
You’ve got a lot of countries right now putting in first-generation coal plants. My gosh — we’ve moved on from that. We should be sharing what we can do. You’re not going to tell someone in a sovereign country that they can’t use the energy lying in their own backyard. You can’t tell them that — but you can show them how to use it better. And if you’re a good steward and a good leader, and you’ve done it yourself, they’ll pay attention. So when India expands its coal-fired plants, they should be doing it with scrubbers, low-NOx boilers, bag houses — all the technology we’ve developed over the last 40 years. And if they do that, we’ll give them access to trade into our market. That’s the caveat of any trade policy — we’re the greatest consuming market in the world. We just have to be smarter about how we get people there.
There’s a balance to be had. We wouldn’t have the energy under the Biden or Obama approach, and we wouldn’t have the technology under the Trump approach. Can you find that balance and move forward? We need the resources. We extract natural gas and oil from the Gulf cleaner than anywhere in the world. We’ve gone through some tough lessons, but we’ve gotten better — and that’s the beauty of America. Our system improves; those are the checks and balances of a democracy. That’s what we’re looking for.
My friend Brian Schweitzer and I were governors together, and we went to a climate meeting one time. I said, “Brian, I’m not sure we should be here.” He said, “It’ll be fun, Joe.” So we’re on the panel and they’re just beating the living crap out of us — “Your state uses coal, you’ve got gas, you don’t care about the climate.” I said, wait a minute, I don’t want to breathe dirty air, I don’t want to drink dirty water — I’m the same as you. I want clean. But I also want to work; that’s part of my environment. If I’m not working, hell, I’m dead anyway. Can’t we work this out? And it just kept getting more and more rancorous. Finally Brian — if you know Brian — looked out at the audience and said, “Listen. Unless you’re naked, eating nuts, living in a tree, by God, you use energy. Get over it, would you?” And I said, “Brian, time to go. Time to go.”
Thomas Hochman: I think that’s the perfect way to end this panel. Senator Manchin, thank you so much.
Senator Manchin: Thank you all. Appreciate it.
