LEFT HOOK — As President Joe Biden returns from his tense summit with Vladimir Putin to try to cobble together a bipartisan infrastructure agreement, progressive Democrats will greet him with a frustrated message: No Climate, No Deal. These Democrats in Congress see climate change as an emergency for humanity, and while they cheered the clean energy investments in Biden's $2.5 trillion American Jobs Plan, they're pressuring him not to sacrifice those climate priorities to secure Republican support for a more modest bricks-and-mortar bill. "There is little appetite in our caucus for an infrastructure plan that ignores the greatest crisis, the most existential crisis that we face," Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) said last week. This is the headache that awaits the president after he gets back from Europe, and there's no simple political Excedrin that can relieve it. The climate crisis may be urgent, but like the Covid crisis and the democracy crisis and the border crisis and anything else that politicians deem a crisis, addressing it through legislation requires rounding up the votes. That's not so easy to do when Democrats have such tiny majorities in Congress. The all-powerful centrist Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia has been just as adamant about a bipartisan process as Heinrich and other liberals have been about a climate-conscious outcome. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) has demanded "an absolute unbreakable guarantee that climate has to be at the center of any infrastructure deal that we cut," but if Manchin doesn't want to give that guarantee, there isn't much that Markey or Biden or anyone else can do about it. The problem, of course, is that climate change is a real crisis. Atmospheric carbon levels just hit the highest level in recorded human history, and the International Energy Agency just warned that humans need to end oil and gas exploration now, sales of fossil-fueled boilers by 2025 and sales of internal combustion engines by 2035 to reach the emissions targets of the Paris accord. The climate didn't care about congressional gridlock when President Barack Obama failed to pass a climate bill in 2009, and it doesn't care now. Crises do not have the power to force politicians to solve them. But they do have the power to force politicians to reveal their priorities. President Donald Trump often talked about America's infrastructure crisis, but it clearly wasn't a top priority for him or his party, because Republicans never did anything about it when they were in power, despite the Trump administration's series of comically overhyped "Infrastructure Weeks." By contrast, Trump really did care about his border wall, so much so that when Congress refused to fund it, he diverted billions of dollars from the Pentagon to the wall. Climate is clearly a priority for Biden. He's set far-reaching climate targets, hired a Dream Team of climate hawks, and made a series of aggressive climate announcements. But it's not yet clear whether it's as urgent a priority for him as restoring bipartisanship, or fixing more traditional infrastructure, or indulging Joe Manchin. And no matter how loud the left screams, he might not have a path to a climate bill that doesn't require him to let the elaborate Washington choreography of bipartisan negotiations play out until Republicans find an excuse to drop out. Then Manchin and other jittery Democrats might agree to pass something green — or at least greenish. Progressives talk a lot these days about learning the lessons of 2009, by which they mean Biden shouldn't compromise his ambitions the way they think Obama did. But when I interviewed Biden a decade ago about the lessons of 2009, he said the left was crazy to blame Obama for failing to get a bigger stimulus or a more generous health care bill. He thought he and Obama had moved the ball down the field, taking what the defense had given them. He believed they had made things better, and better was better than worse. Perfect wasn't on the menu, so they had tried for good. "Give me a break," he told me. "I've been doing this my whole career. I'm going to say something outrageous: I don't know anybody who counts votes better than me in the Senate. I love the left saying, Oh, you could've done better. Come on. You tell me how you get the votes!" When Biden comes home from Switzerland, he'll have to try to get the votes again. Whether the bipartisan negotiations on the Hill produce a deal, whether Democrats pursue their own bill that requires only 50 votes, the president won't get everything he wants for the climate. But it's quite likely that he'll get something. And then the left will have to decide whether that's better than nothing. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. If you're opening this the second it hits your inbox (and we know you are), go here to tune into the second half of the NYC Democratic Mayoral Debate, co-moderated by POLITICO's own Sally Goldenberg . We'll have analysis from our New York team running alongside. Reach out with news, tips and ideas for us at mgrunwald@politico.com, or on Twitter at @MikeGrunwald. Programming note: Nightly won't be publishing Friday, June 18. We'll be back and better than ever on Monday, June 21.
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