Last week, The New York Times continued its ongoing breakdown over Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia for scuttling President Biden’s “climate change” agenda and dooming mankind to perdition with “Manchin Pulls Plug on Climate and Tax Talks, Shrinking Domestic Plan” courtesy of Times reporters Emily Cochrane and Lisa Friedman letting climate-change activists have emotional breakdowns in print (and using Manchin as a scapegoat for a doomed planet):
Tiernan Sittenfeld, the senior vice president for government affairs at the League of Conservation Voters, a nonprofit group, said Mr. Manchin had condemned future generations.
“There truly aren’t words, at least words that are suitable for printing in The New York Times, for how appalled and outraged we are,” she said.
The paper’s hysterical vituperation against the centrist Democratic senator continued Saturday in Coral Davenport and Lisa Friedman’s “How Joe Manchin Doomed the Democrats’ Climate Plan,” insisting Manchin was bought and paid for (and thus seemingly had malicious intentions):
First, he killed a plan that would have forced power plants to clean up their climate-warming pollution. Then, he shattered an effort to help consumers pay for electric vehicles. And, finally, he said he could not support government incentives for solar and wind companies or any of the other provisions that the rest of his party and his president say are vital to ensure a livable planet.
Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, who took more campaign cash from the oil and gas industry than any other senator, and who became a millionaire from his family coal business, independently blew up the Democratic Party’s legislative plans to fight climate change. The swing Democratic vote in an evenly divided Senate, Mr. Manchin led his party through months of tortured negotiations that collapsed on Thursday night, a yearlong wild goose chase that produced nothing as the Earth warms to dangerous levels.
“It seems odd that Manchin would choose as his legacy to be the one man who single-handedly doomed humanity,” said John Podesta, a former senior counselor to President Barack Obama and founder of the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank.
While Americans are clamoring for relief in an era of 9.1 percent inflation, the paper underplayed Manchin’s concerns over gas prices and the need for more fossil fuel production.
Saturday’s front page featured Cochrane’s “Manchin Again Has Democrats Fuming,” portraying the senator as putting his party in a “familiar, if excruciating position,” characterizing Manchin as a party-wrecker who was using his swing vote position to leave “Democrats at his mercy.”
In a story posted Sunday, “Climate Change Legislation Stalls Amid Growing Inflation Concerns,” Jonathan Weisman and Jazmine Ulloa admitted Americans were more concerned about inflation than “climate change,” blaming Covid and the overturn of Roe v. Wade for distracting them.
The reporters wished for the good old days, when a Swedish teenager was driving international environmental policy:
Two years ago, millions of high school students were leaving school early on “climate strikes.” Greta Thunberg, the teenage Swedish activist, was a hero as she sailed across the Atlantic Ocean for United Nations climate talks and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York was preaching a Green New Deal[.]
Surprisingly, they conceded high gas prices hadn’t turned Americans into environmentalists overnight:
Even the soaring cost of gasoline seems to have undermined a central belief of the climate movement: that higher prices for fossil fuels would naturally spark a rush toward more efficient vehicles and alternate energy sources. Instead, gas prices over $5 a gallon produced a bipartisan call for more oil production.
