The new Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources met Wednesday for its first hearing with Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia at the helm. The stated purpose of the hearing, as described by Manchin in his opening remarks, was to establish a “baseline of global climate facts” for the committee to build on to advance climate solutions. “As we look for ways to heal the division in our own country,” Manchin said, “I believe that one way for us to overcome our differences of opinion is by first grounding ourselves in the facts.” But by the end of the more than two-hour hearing, the only facts the assembled senators appeared to agree on were that climate change is real and “largely” caused by humans. The discussion came nowhere close to touching on a clean energy standard, one of the key climate policies President Biden campaigned on. Instead, […]