Democrat Senator Joe Manchin is slamming Joe Biden for the President’s promise to close down coal-fired power plants and rely completely on wind and solar energy in the future.
The Senator out of West Virginia said that Biden is ‘divorced from reality’ and his words “ignore the severe economic pain” being suffered by Americans from skyrocketing energy prices. He also said that remarks like these “are the reason the American people are losing trust in President Biden. … It seems his positions change daily depending on the audience and politics of the day.”
Manchin added,
“Let me be clear, this is something the president has never said to me. Being cavalier about the coal jobs for men and women in West Virginia and across the country who literally put their lives on the line to help build and power this country is offensive and disgusting,” Manchin. He added that “it is time he learn a lesson that his words matter and have consequences.”
Manchin’s harsh words for his party’s leader comes on the final weekend before Tuesday’s midterm elections that are expected to put Republicans back in power in congress.
The Biden White House claimed that Biden’s words had been “twisted to suggest a meaning that was not intended” and that the president “regrets it if anyone hearing these remarks took offense.”
However, the direct quote from Biden during a speech in Carlsbad, California shows otherwise,
“I was in Massachusetts about a month ago on the site of the largest old coal plant in America. Guess what? It cost them too much money,” Biden said. “No one is building new coal plants because they can’t rely on it, even if they have all the coal guaranteed for the rest of their existence of the plant. So it’s going to become a wind generation,” Biden added. “We’re going to be shutting these plants down all across America and having wind and solar.”
In much the same fashion, Manchin’s words don’t match his voting record as Manchin helped pass the $740 billion Inflation Reduction Act, which included the biggest investment in climate programs in U.S. history. In fact, it dedicated more to climate change than debt reduction investing approximately $300 billion in Deficit Reduction and $369 billion in Energy Security and Climate Change programs.
Manchin also reversed course this summer and voted with with his own party after slamming their $2 Trillion social and environmental bill.
