The bill has support for renewables, but it also adds on and offshore leases for oil and gas. That’s the compromise. And Manchin and his supporters may have decided it was +EV if they weren’t going to get those leases otherwise. And Manchin isn’t just a recipient of fossil fuel campaign contributions. His family business is fossil fuels. He’s a mine owner too, you know which side he’s on.
The way he stays the center of attention is by getting re-elected, so he’s going to do whatever keeps him a viable candidate for 2024. He can be persuaded on a lot of things that he thinks won’t cost him too many votes.
All of the largest renewables projects today are being funded and coordinated by those same oil and gas companies.
It’s not a compromise to allow leases and renewables. It’s the same entity doing both. They realize the end of carbon is coming and are positioning to be the provider of non carbon energy as well.
On the one had the oil companies have already twice sort of entered the renewable market and left. ARCO and Shell were among the biggest solar manufactures in the 90s and BP was a big player until just a few years ago.
On the other hand, not really.
Biggest solar projects in the US from last year
#1 Eunice Solar Project - built by Orsted (with a funny O) a Danish renewable energy company, founded in 2006, they did own some oil and gas, but have divested
#2 Greasewood Solar Project - built by Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners - big Denmark again. It’s a little harder to get info on them as they are more of an investment fund, but a major player on offshore wind.
#3 Taygete Energy Project - Built by 7x Energy and Nestle. 7x energy describes themselves as a solar company, but I don’t know. I thought they sounded fishy and found its CEO used to be the Electric Utility Commissioner from a city that is a likely customer of this project, so maybe it is fishy. Nestle makes water and chocolate.
#4 Cooper Mountain Solar V - Built by Sempra, which primarily is a fossil fuel company.
So, yeah, oil and gas companies are in the sector, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say all of the largest renewable projects are funded and coordinated by them.
(Not that I’m troubled by Exxon or Sempra doing renewables. Expanding leases for more oil is bad for humans and other animals, but if oil companies get part of the incentives to do wind, solar and storage I just hope the build a lot of it.)
There should also be hidden EV in these decisions as climate awareness continues to rise. IE future drilling that never happens as the politics change.
Lots of fox news escapists obsess over their white washed lawns and will eventually believe their lying eyes.
I read this article without reading the headline and thought it seemed like it was written by the Dept of Education. “Yeah, we’re ready to go, waiting on Uncle Joe.”
It sounds like they’re prepared for wide-reaching forgiveness/relief
Education Department officials, the documents show, are prepared to provide debt relief automatically, within several months, to several million borrowers for whom the agency already has income information. Most other borrowers, according to the documents, would apply through a form on StudentAid.gov by self-certifying they qualify for relief.
The department’s plan contemplates that all types of federal student loans would be eligible for loan forgiveness, including Grad and Parent PLUS loans as well as federal loans owned by private entities. And it also suggests that borrowers who ever received a Pell grant, financial assistance for low-income families, could receive an additional amount of loan forgiveness.
It’s always seemed weird to me that they have such an issue getting income information considering they get that in detail every fucking year, but that’s govt I guess.
A check in on Biden’s high-level strategy:
Biden is considering using executive action to provide $10,000 of debt relief per borrower, but White House deliberations over the issue have stretched on for months without resolution. After initially promising in April a decision on the issue within a “couple of weeks,” Biden has since said he plans to decide by the end of August when the moratorium on loan payments is set to expire.
Great strategy if the top priorities of surveyed student loan holders are: “opacity,” “complete confusion soaking my entire financial situation,” and “I give up, what the fuck?” I still think the front-running strategy is to forgive $10K per borrower once they can prove they make less than $125K/yr through some clusterfuck system, then get mad at voters when they assert that relief is not enough.
I haven’t seen this mentioned and it seems pretty important when you consider that HBCU’s only got 2 billion instead of the originally promised 45.
The $10k part is bad, but is there really a problem with means-testing for families making more than $250k AGI?
I think I said this about six months ago.
The near universal response was that the US bureaucracy sucks at means testing and the result of such a policy will be that plenty of people who should get aid will be blocked from it.
I am not 100% sure if that’s true, but it’s the prevailing opinion and it is highly plausible.
Means testing costs a lot of money and instead of wasting it on bureaucracy it’s better to give it to people who might not 100% “deserve” it. If necessary claw it back by raising taxes.
Why can’t they just base it on MAGI? We can already be assured that people are reporting as little income as possible. If you can’t get under the MAGI threshold, then too bad I guess.
Of course, I don’t care if it’s means tested at all. Give the break to everybody imo.
New York has the WOAT policy on this. Family makes less than $125,000? College is free at any SUNY school. Family makes $125,000.01? College is full price at any SUNY School.
I wonder how many families make a lot more than $125K then magically make $124.9K for four years? I mean, shit, it makes sense to ask for a 4-year paycut if you’re close lol…
You have to consider the possibility that not means testing will cost you a vote from someone like Manchin, who might vote against future spending to compensate for what he would probably consider a deficit increase.
Yeah, your’e right, but it demonstrates how stupid it is. It should phase out, and the phase out shoudl be slow and mild. One of the problems with the democrats has always been that they fuck over hte middle class. They have noble intentions to help the poor, but they always fuck over the middle, and it costs them dearly.
Can you just make charitable contributions to reduce your taxable income to below the threshold?
Yeah not phasing it out gradually is massively stupid.
