Joe Manchin: who gave you authority to decide the fate of the planet? | Daniel Sherrell

My rage against the senator might consume me if I couldn't set it down here

Late in the evening on Friday 15 October an alert appeared on my phone that seemed at last to portend the end of the world. Two weeks before the UN climate summit in Glasgow - a make-or-break moment for American leadership and international ambition - Senator Joe Manchin had decided to gut our country's best, and perhaps last, attempt to save itself. With three decades left to decarbonize the global economy, and a window of Democratic control unlikely to recur for years, Manchin's benefactors in the coal and gas industry had managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, killing the Clean Electricity Performance Program that would finally have brought their lucrative global arson spree under control.

It was hard not to feel like this was game over, a sensation I'd grown accustomed to after a decade working in the American climate movement. It was the same feeling I'd had after the collapse of the Copenhagen climate talks, and the defeat of the Waxman-Markey bill, and the election of a president willing to drown the world to buoy his ego. But though each of those moments felt crushing, the news on the 15th felt worse.