The combination of green moralism with green corporatism (an unlovely and destructive feature of European politics, particularly in Germany) is defective for several reasons: It is fundamentally corrupt, as all similar corporatist enterprises are; it transforms a question of roughly quantifiable tradeoffs into an absolutist moral contest in which compromise is difficult or impossible; and — perhaps this still counts for something! — it prevents making any meaningful positive reform to environmental policy. We know what a serious climate-change policy would look like: It would account for externalities and minimize market distortions in such a way as to enable the switch to very low-emissions energy sources (nuclear power) and relatively low-emissions energy sources (natural gas) in the sector where doing so would be relatively easy (electric utilities), and thus mitigate the pain of the same transition in the less tractable sectors (transportation and agriculture), creating a large, economically and politically sustainable improvement in total emissions. In Germany, they are restarting coal-fired electricity generation because Vladimir Putin is threatening to hold Western Europe’s gas supply hostage — and because a generation of bad policy blocking the development of the necessary import-export infrastructure in the United States and in Europe has left the rich U.S. gas industry unable to replace that Russian supply in a practical and bearably affordable way…

The Democrats’ climate agenda is not on ice because of Joe Manchin — it is on ice because it is not a very good agenda. The Democrats don’t need a program that can command the support of one coal-state Democrat but one that can win the cooperation of ten or twelve Republicans — Republicans who may not share progressive views on climate change but who might like to see gas-producing U.S. states increase their export markets, and might also like to see their constituents’ energy prices and energy-grid reliability brought to a more desirable condition by clean, reliable, safe, modern nuclear energy — which is, if we are being honest about it, the only practical and sufficient source of electricity that is in fact operationally zero-emissions.