Joe Manchin Rejects Democratic Plan to Ban New Drilling in Atlantic and Pacific

WASHINGTON — A provision to permanently ban new offshore drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts has been stripped from a draft version of a $2.2 trillion climate change and social spending bill after objections by Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia.

Draft language of the bill circulated by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee, which is led by Mr. Manchin, does not include the drilling ban. According to people who were briefed on Mr. Manchin’s position, he rejected the coastal drilling plan and also raised concerns about a provision that would cancel drilling leases and block future oil and gas extraction in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, although that part remains in the section of the bill that he handled, according to a draft.

The drilling ban was the latest in a string of climate provisions that have been dropped from the pending legislation because of objections from Mr. Manchin. As the swing Democratic vote in an evenly split Senate, Mr. Manchin enjoys an outsize role and has been able to single-handedly set the limits for the president’s climate agenda.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Manchin declined to comment. With direct negotiations with President Biden over the legislation souring in recent days, Mr. Manchin has largely brushed off questions about the bill, known as the Build Back Better Act.

While Democratic leaders have been pushing to pass the legislation by Christmas, a Senate vote is set to slip into 2022 in part because of Mr. Manchin’s concerns with the details and costs of the package.

Ali Zaidi, the White House deputy national climate adviser, declined on Thursday to comment on what he called “the minutia of the negotiations.”

But environmentalists said Mr. Manchin was systematically weakening what was designed to be a robust response to the climate crisis.

“This is a tragic milestone in the seemingly inevitable dismantling of the Build Back Better Act,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Why Senator Manchin wants to poison our coasts while he lives the good life in his landlocked state only shows just how out of touch he is with the overwhelming public support for ending offshore drilling.”

Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Independent and chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, called his Democratic colleague “dead wrong.”

“Scientists are telling us we have to move progressively, not only as a nation, but as a world to cut carbon emissions,” Mr. Sanders said.

In May, the world’s leading energy agency warned that governments around the globe must stop approving fossil fuel projects now if they want to prevent the pollution they produce from driving average global temperatures more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. That’s the threshold beyond which scientists say the Earth will experience irreversible damage.

Representative Frank Pallone, Democrat of New Jersey who has sponsored legislation to ban offshore drilling along the Atlantic seaboard, called pulling the provision “absurd” and said he would fight to reinstate the measure.

A version of the bill that passed the House last month would permanently ban new offshore oil and gas leasing along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts as well as in the eastern Gulf of Mexico. It would not have halted existing offshore drilling activity.

The House version would also revoke a program that opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, following a 2017 vote by Congress to allow drilling in one of the last remaining pristine wilderness areas in the country.

Home to migrating waterfowl, caribou and polar bears, the refuge could lie over as much as 11 billion barrels of oil. Democrats and Republicans have fought over whether to allow drilling there for more than four decades.

Mr. Manchin has not called for eliminating the drilling ban in the Arctic but does have concerns about the provision, according to three people who have been briefed on his thinking. Lifting the Arctic ban is a priority for a key friend and ally, Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska.

Alaska’s economy relies heavily on oil and gas extraction. The state’s other senator, Dan Sullivan, also a Republican, said Thursday that a ban on drilling in the refuge posed problems for Alaska. Mr. Sullivan called Democrats and the Biden administration “very anti-energy.”

The debate over whether to expand drilling along America’s coasts was heightened after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, the largest oil spill in United States history, which resulted in the deaths of 11 workers and the discharge of four million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico over the course of 87 days.

In addition to becoming a priority for Democrats, an offshore drilling ban drew support from many coastal Republicans concerned about the potential for oil spills that could damage their tourism and fishing industries.

When President Donald J. Trump moved to open nearly all offshore waters in the nation to drilling in 2017, he received swift pushback from many in his own party, particularly Florida lawmakers. In response, he approved a 10-year moratorium on offshore oil and gas drilling from Florida to South Carolina, all Republican-controlled states.

On Thursday, Senators Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, both Florida Republicans, said they wanted drilling permanently banned off the coast of their state.

“It’s very important to me that we have a moratorium on drilling off the Gulf,” Mr. Scott said. “That’s something I’ve been fighting for since I’ve been up here.”

Meanwhile, oil and gas industry executives said they were pleased to see the drilling bans eliminated in the version written by Mr. Manchin’s committee.

“Senators on both sides of the aisle understand the importance of strong domestic natural gas and oil production as energy demand continues to grow, and we are encouraged by bipartisan efforts to avoid offshore energy restrictions,” Kevin O’Scannlain, a vice president at the American Petroleum Industry, an oil and gas trade group, said in a statement.

Some analysts said that banning offshore drilling was always going to be a challenge. In January, Mr. Biden signed an executive order to end new oil and gas leasing in federal lands and waters, which was immediately challenged by Republican attorneys general from 13 states. A district court judge blocked Mr. Biden’s moratorium from taking effect; the administration is appealing.

Asked about the removal of the drilling ban, Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, acknowledged the package was “not the bill I would have written,” but “we’re still going to enact enormously important climate legislation.”

Mr. Manchin, who personally profits from investments in a family coal brokerage that he founded, has resisted entreaties from his Senate colleagues and from the president to support the provisions that advocates say are vital to reducing the burning of coal, oil and gas that is driving climate change.

Mr. Manchin rejected part of the bill that would have been the single most effective tool to greenhouse gases, a clean electricity program that would have rewarded power plants that switched from burning fossil fuels to solar, wind and other clean sources, and punished those that did not. He has pushed to remove a provision that would impose a fee on emissions of methane, a powerful planet-warming pollutant that leaks from oil and gas wells. And he has objected to a provision that would give tax credits to consumers who purchase electric vehicles produced by union labor.

A number of other programs also remain in limbo, including the details of a methane emissions reduction program, as Democratic leaders and the Biden administration seek to secure Mr. Manchin’s vote.