Joe Manchin says he's unsure about supporting electric vehicles since he doesn't want to be 'standing in line waiting for a battery'

• Manchin doesn't seem to be onboard with encouraging the development of electric vehicles.
• "I'm old enough to remember standing in line in 1974 trying to buy gas," he said last week.

Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia expressed skepticism around encouraging development of electric vehicles on Friday. The conservative Democrat said he doesn't want the US to rely too much on parts made overseas as he recalled past shortages due to America's dependency on foreign oil.

"I'm very reluctant to go down the path of electric vehicles," Manchin said Friday at CERAWeek, a global energy conference hosted by S&P Global. "I'm old enough to remember standing in line in 1974 trying to buy gas – I remember those days. I don't want to have to be standing in line waiting for a battery for my vehicle, because we're now dependent on a foreign supply chain – mostly China."

At the conference, he reiterated that the House-approved Build Back Better plan as Democrats originally envisioned it is dead. The package contained over $550 billion in climate-related tax credits designed to transition the US onto cleaner energy sources like wind and solar power.

Some Democrats tried directly addressing his concerns. "There are a bunch of incentives in the package to produce chips and batteries domestically so we don't trade dependence on foreign oil for dependence on foreign batteries," Ashley Schapitl, a spokesperson for the Senate Finance Committee, wrote on Twitter.

Manchin also argued that Democrats should restrain themselves from enacting sweeping policy measures on their own.

"The reason I had concerns from day one is that we shouldn't be doing that much policy. Reconciliation was never designed for us to do policy," he said, referring to the party-line process that Democrats are employing to pass the bill on their own without GOP support.

Without Manchin's support of the reconciliation process, Democrats can't get around the filibuster and its 60-vote threshold to approve the bill. Manchin's remarks come as dozens of House Democrats urged President Joe Biden to restart negotiations on a new spending bill geared toward climate.

"Given the widespread agreement in the U.S. Senate for House passed climate provisions, we have an opportunity to recommence negotiations with climate serving as a key starting point," the 89 Democratic lawmakers said in a letter to Biden. Signatories included Rep. Jamaal Bowman of New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Nakeema Williams of Georgia and Sean Casten of Illinois.

Manchin has expressed some willingness to renegotiate a smaller spending bill focused on prescription drug savings, tax reform, and climate spending. But plenty of Democrats are skeptical after he tanked the spending bill late last year.

"Another week, another Manchin," Ocasio-Cortez recently told Insider.

On Wednesday, the conservative Democrat joined Republicans in their opposition to Sarah Bloom Raskin, one of Biden's picks for the Federal Reserve Board. Raskin's past criticism about the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department's pandemic emergency lending programs aiding fossil fuel companies landed her in hot water with Republicans.

Manchin argued she also didn't appear committed enough to dealing with rising inflation.

"Her previous public statements have failed to satisfactorily address my concerns about the critical importance of financing an all-of-the-above energy policy to meet our nation's critical energy needs," Manchin said.