Natural gas will soon be flowing through the Mountain Valley Pipeline, 10 years after it was first proposed and six years after its initial anticipated completion date.
This is a profound disappointment for opponents, who warned that the pipeline will produce 89 million metric tons of greenhouse gasses each year, the equivalent of 24 coal-fired power plants at a time when we’re phasing out coal-fired power plants.
Opponents managed to delay the pipeline through years of legal action and for a while held out hope that they might simply bankrupt the pipeline operators. They didn’t.
In the end, the pipeline triumphed through politics — specifically, a deal that the pipeline’s biggest cheerleader in Congress, Sen. Joe Manchin, then D-West Virginia, cut with Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, D-New York, that led to authorization for the pipeline being written into the debt ceiling bill that Congress passed and the president signed last June.
Looking back, is there a way that opponents could have won? Given the way the pipeline eventually won, no — at least not under those specific circumstances. Democrats needed Manchin’s vote in August 2022 to pass what some called “the climate bill” but which was officially called the Inflation Reduction Act. The price for Manchin’s vote was the Mountain Valley Pipeline, although it took him until spring 2023 to redeem that chit.
Nothing could beat that. Not the lawsuits. Not the regulatory delays. Not the occasional protesters who chained themselves to bulldozers. It really did take an act of Congress to get the pipeline built, and what some might consider a backroom deal — although it was really all out in the open.
Manchin’s vote only mattered because the Senate at the time was split 50-50 and Manchin, a most unreliable Democrat, was one of those 50. (He now says he’s an independent.) That opens the door to the obvious political hypotheticals: What if the Senate hadn’t been tied? Then Manchin’s vote wouldn’t have been so decisive. The Inflation Reduction Act would have passed without his vote and Congress wouldn’t have later passed legislation shutting down legal cases against the pipeline, and those legal cases would likely still be going on today.
That would have required Democrats in 2020 to win one more Senate seat than they did. Let’s keep in mind that Democrats barely won that 50th seat in 2020 — it took Jon Ossoff winning a runoff election in Georgia with just 50.6% of the vote to do that, and Raphael Warnock winning a Georgia runoff with 51.0% of the vote. The 2020 Senate elections were, as the Duke of Wellington famously said of the Battle of Waterloo, “the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life.”
For Democrats to have won one more seat, and avoid putting Manchin in a position to cut that Mountain Valley Pipeline deal, they’d have needed to have won one more seat.
That could have been in Maine, a state that Democrat Joe Biden carried for the presidency but where voters delivered a split decision, returning Republican Susan Collins to the Senate over a Democratic challenger in a race that wasn’t nearly as close as predicted. (Collins took almost 51% of the vote to 42% for Sara Gideon.) If Maine voters had not been so independent-minded, maybe they’d have voted a straight ticket and given Democrats an extra seat.
That deciding seat could also have been in North Carolina. The closest Senate race that Democrats lost that year was in the Tar Heel state, where Republican Thom Tillis was reelected over Democrat Cal Cunningham by a margin of 48.69% to 46.94%. Although Donald Trump carried North Carolina that year, Tillis’ victory was something of a surprise. Tillis was unpopular with some Republicans because he hadn’t consistently backed Trump. Cunningham seemed the perfect Democratic candidate in the Senate — an ordained elder in his church, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserves, a veteran of service in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the very model of an upright community leader. Cunningham had led in most of the polls, but then in October of that year it was revealed that Cunningham had sent sexually suggestive texts to a woman who was not his wife. Cunningham admitted to the texts and wouldn’t comment on whether he’d had an affair (the woman who received the texts said they had been physically involved). Cunningham was done for.
It’s fair to say that if it hadn’t been for an ordained church elder in North Carolina getting caught up in a sex scandal, then the Mountain Valley Pipeline might still be in dispute today.
Of course, if we’re looking at “what ifs” there are other elections that might have made a difference, too. Here are some:
What if Bernie Sanders had been elected president in 2016 — or 2020?
Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden all share one thing in common: All supported natural gas. They supported it differently — Trump was enthusiastic about fossil fuels, Clinton saw natural gas as a “bridge fuel” to get us through a transition to renewables and Biden, well, Biden has made only limited efforts to curtail natural gas and none to stop this particular pipeline. Indeed, his energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, sent federal regulators a letter backing the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which from a distance sure looks like part of the deal with Manchin.
Sanders, though, was adamantly against natural gas. “We will ensure fossil fuels stay in the ground by stopping the permitting and building of new fossil fuel extraction, transportation, and refining infrastructure,” his campaign website vowed. Had he been elected in either year, Sanders likely could have stopped the pipeline. He certainly would have appointed differently people to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the panel that approves pipelines, than either Trump or Biden has.
Sanders came close to Clinton in a lot of the early states in 2016, but close doesn’t count. In the end, he took just 43% of the votes in the Democratic primaries that year. In 2020, there were multiple Democratic candidates who might have taken a “no natural gas” approach, but they didn’t win, either — and Sanders’ vote totals declined.
What if Tom Perriello had been elected governor in 2017?
The Mountain Valley Pipeline was first proposed when Democrat Terry McAuliffe was governor in 2014, and McAuliffe was an enthusiastic supporter of natural gas. When Dominion Energy and Duke Energy proposed their Atlantic Coast Pipeline, he stood with Dominion executives — literally. (Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.) Dominion later abandoned that pipeline project, but Mountain Valley Pipeline persevered, and McAuliffe — an eager deal-maker — often talked about how economic development prospects asked about whether natural gas was available.
Perriello, a former 5th District congressman from Albemarle County, mounted a gubernatorial campaign in 2017 that emphasized his opposition to pipelines. His initial campaign ad featured him standing on a mountaintop in Highland County in the path of that later-abandoned Atlantic Coast Pipeline. “I will use the authorities available to me to prevent these pipelines,” Perriello vowed. Then Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam made no such vow, saying only that he would let “science” drive the decision. Northam won the primary 56% to 44%, although Perriello won every locality that the Mountain Valley Pipeline would eventually pass through. Whether that was the reason or some other is hard to say; Perriello won a lot of other western localities not touched by the pipeline. The irony: Perriello was considered the most liberal candidate in the race but got blown out in the most liberal parts of the state. He took just 36% in Falls Church, 38% in Arlington, 39% in Alexandria and just under 40% in Fairfax County.
Given the ultimate outcome of the 2017 election — an anti-Trump backlash lifted Democratic candidates statewide — it seems likely that if Perriello had been the nominee, he might well have won the governorship. Could he have stopped the pipeline? I was skeptical at the time, although I’m less so now. He’d have certainly appointed different people to state regulatory boards. It’s hard to say definitely that he’d have stopped the pipeline — that takes us into a morass of legal questions — but he could have certainly complicated the pipeline more than the Northam administration did. Might that have run up the costs more and discouraged investors? That’s hard to say. There’s so much money to be made, maybe they’d have held out, but a Gov. Perriello could have certainly delayed things even more than they already were.
One important addendum: While Perriello won those Mountain Valley Pipeline counties in a Democratic primary, let’s remember that was just a small part of the overall electorate in those Republican-leaning counties. In the general election in 2017, the pro-pipeline Republican candidate for governor, Ed Gillespie, racked up big majorities in all but one of them, even as he was losing statewide (and that lone exception was Montgomery County, long a swing county). If voters in Giles County or Roanoke County or Franklin County or Pittsylvania County were against the pipeline, they didn’t let that stop them from voting from Gillespie by wide margin; he topped 70% or more in some of those Mountain Valley Pipeline localities. Granted, given Northam’s stand, voters didn’t have a clear-cut choice between a pro-pipeline candidate and an anti-pipeline one in the governor’s race, but they did in the lieutenant governor’s race where Democrat Justin Fairfax was far more critical, but Republican Jill Vogel defeated him in all the MVP counties anyway.
What if Russia hadn’t invaded Ukraine?
Vladimir Putin’s attempt to reconstitute much of the old Soviet empire changed some energy calculations. Much of Europe has been dependent on Russian natural gas. To help rally support for Ukraine, and to ease the concerns of skittish European allies, Biden called on the United States to increase natural gas exports. American exports had been rising sharply anyway as the price came out and energy consumers turned to gas instead of coal, but the war in Ukraine drove up natural gas exports even more — from 316,766 million cubic feet in February 2022 to 422,935 million in December 2023. (Whenever you hear someone bemoan a lack of energy independence, remind them that the U.S. is now the biggest natural gas exporter in the world.)
It’s hard to draw a straight line from the battle of Bakhmut to the Mountain Valley Pipeline crossing Bent Mountain, but the invasion certainly changed the political and economic climate for the natural gas.
What if Democrats hadn’t lost the U.S. House in the 2022 midterms?
In 2022, Republicans won control of the House of Representatives while Democrats defied trends by picking up a seat in the Senate, for a 51-49 advantage.
The Republican wins in the House weren’t a surprise; the president’s party often does poorly in midterms. However, the Republican takeover in 2022 augured well for the Mountain Valley Pipeline. In 2023, when Congress had to deal with the debt ceiling (yet again), it meant there had to be a three-way deal, between a Republican House, a Democratic Senate and a Democratic president. That deal that was finally agreed to included Manchin’s beloved Mountain Valley Pipeline.
Republicans in the House were naturally well-disposed toward natural gas and Democrats, with their tenuous hold on the Senate, weren’t in a position to tell Manchin he couldn’t have it. If Democrats still controlled the House, there might have been a debt ceiling deal that didn’t include the pipeline, but that’s not the world we live in.
We also need to remember this: While some Democrats very much don’t like natural gas, not all feel that way. Biden certainly doesn’t seem to mind it. Schumer hasn’t been an anti-natural gas crusader. For them, the importance of getting a debt ceiling deal (and before that, the Inflation Reduction Act) outweighed whatever local pipeline Manchin wanted. When Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Virginia, tried to strip the Mountain Valley Pipeline provision from the debt ceiling legislation, his move was voted down 69-30. Every Republican voted against it (and in favor of the pipeline), as did 21 Democrats. To change that outcome of that vote would have meant changing the votes (or identities) of an awful lot of senators, from Maine to Hawaii. That’s a lot of “what ifs.”
In this week’s West of the Capital:
I write a free weekly political newsletter, West of the Capital, that goes out every Friday afternoon at 3 p.m. You can sign up here:
here’s some of what will be in this week’s newsletter:
- A final look at the latest early voting numbers.
- Another way that Staunton isn’t “podunk” as one Senate candidate implied.
- The implications of the NAACP lawsuit against Shenandoah County for restoring Confederate names to some schools.
- I’ll also share more information on who’s speaking at the cannabis conference that Cardinal News is hosting Oct. 15 at Roanoke College. The conference is expected to attract participants from across Virginia, but space is limited. More information about the program, sponsorships and early bird registrations are available now. To take advantage of a $25 discount off the $150 ticket, use the promo code “early bird” before Aug. 1.
