Manchin Questions Republicans' Change of Heart After They Praised IRA in Amicus Brief

Press Release

"As a result of the Inflation Reduction Act, we are now producing more energy than ever before in our nation's history. Our natural gas annual production hit a record 36 trillion cubic feet in 2022 and is expected to exceed 37 trillion in 2023. We're expected to produce 4.6 billion barrels of oil annually in 2023 which would be the highest annual production ever. We exported nearly zero liquefied natural gas in 2016; today our LNG export capacity is more than 13 billion cubic feet per day and by the end of this decade, we'll be approaching 25 bcf/d. And, we're projected to add more than twice as much solar and battery storage capacity this year than last year. My Republican friends even cited the IRA favorably in an Amicus Brief to win a case that would have altered the terms of offshore oil and gas Lease Sale 261. My Republican friends wrote, "The IRA was the result of considerable deliberation concerning the economic, energy, environmental, and strategic interests of the United States,' and "The IRA balances diverse, complex, and overlapping considerations including growth and conservation, domestic needs and global positioning, and security and diplomacy.' It makes no sense just one month later that my Republican colleagues no longer realize that the IRA provides us with an all-of-the-above energy policy with everything we need to be energy independent and secure. I will continue to work, as always, in a bipartisan way with my colleagues while I continue to push back on this Administration's efforts to implement the IRA as a radical climate agenda, but I will also push back on my Republican colleagues who refuse to see the benefits this law is already bringing to each and every state in the United States of America.

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