Joe Biden's climate protection agenda is on the brink.

With his “Build-Back-Better” economic package, he actually wants to create comprehensive incentives so that companies and citizens get out of coal and gas.

But the conservatives of his own still stand in his way.

And in two weeks the United Nations Climate Change Conference is due in Scotland.

The President and John Kerry, his special envoy for climate protection, actually wanted to report initial successes there.

After all, it is also about limiting the political damage that predecessor Donald Trump caused by withdrawing from the Paris climate protection agreement.

Biden had declared that he wanted to cut US CO2 emissions in half by 2030, based on the status of 2005. The fact that the project is stalling also makes it more difficult to advance climate protection measures on the international stage, Kerry said in an interview last week.

Conservative Democrats stand across

With the $ 3.5 trillion "Build-Back-Better" plan, Biden wants to keep many of his election promises. The budgetary maneuver of “budget reconciliation” is intended to achieve this. To do this, the Democrats need all of their 50 senators and the vote of Vice President Kamala Harris. But the conservative Democrats around Senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia are still against it. Manchin has explicitly spoken out against the "Clean Electricity Performance Program", which is a core part of the package and is supposed to cost 150 billion dollars. The plan would reward companies who switch to so-called "clean" fuels and financially punish those who do not.

According to experts, this could drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions from energy production.

According to the current state of science, all nations would have to phase out fossil fuels in the coming years in order to curb global warming.

In order to contain rising sea levels, periods of drought and increasingly catastrophic storms, the global temperature rise would have to be stopped at at least the 1.5 degrees Celsius predicted for 2030.

The United States has a central role to play in this.

After China, they are the second largest cause of global CO2 emissions, with around 15 percent of the total volume.

Where Obama failed

The Democrats had so far assured that there would be no agreement on the spending package without a climate protection component.

The left in the party in particular want to prevent the energy policy agenda from being weakened.

This time they want to do what the last Democrat in the White House, Barack Obama, failed.

In the first two years of his term in office, when he had the majority in Congress behind him, he had not pushed national climate protection legislation far enough.

Critics point out, however, that the Democrats still mean nuclear power when they say “clean energy”.

The Nuclear Information and Resources Center (NIRS) said they found subsidies of around $ 50 billion for nuclear power operators in Biden's package.

A senator from a conservative coal state

Joe Manchin, on whom the whole project can still fail, heads the Senate Committee on Energy and Raw Materials. Its state of West Virginia was the second largest coal location in the country in 2019 and more than 90 percent of the regional energy needs come from coal. Manchin's voters are conservative - 69 percent of West Virginia citizens voted for Donald Trump as president last November.

And the senator has his own financial interests in power generation.

In 1988 he founded the coal trading company Enersystems.

When he first became Secretary of the Interior and later Governor of West Virginia, responsibility for the company passed to his son.

Manchin holds between $ 1 million and $ 5 million in company shares, according to the American media, and makes nearly half a million dollars a year from his stake.

The Senator spoke out several times against tough regulatory measures for climate protection.

Some people said in interviews that the industry was already voluntarily switching to climate-friendly energy sources.

It makes no sense to subsidize companies with billions in taxes for something they are already doing.

Because the democrat has repeatedly reiterated his blockade stance in the past few days, some party colleagues are already discussing whether the climate protection plan could be separated from the “Build Back Better” package and later passed as a separate law.

The time window for such considerations is getting smaller, since the congressional elections are already scheduled for the end of next year.

And Manchin is unlikely to change its position on a separate law.