A block of coal in Joe Biden’s shoe. Democratic Senator Joe Manchin single-handedly derailed the US president’s flagship reform. By refusing, on Sunday December 19, to support in Congress the megatext of the “Build Back Better” law, which encompassed social, economic and environmental measures, this elected official from West Virginia, a rural state in the East of the United States, consumed his party’s hopes of establishing an ambitious policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, essential to the global effort to combat global warming.
Because the Democrats hold a one-vote majority in the Senate, Joe Manchin has become America’s most powerful politician under President Biden: a so-called kingmaker. “the other president*” in the halls of the Capitol. Coal baron in a former region of “black mouths” that has become a Trumpist breeding ground and an ardent defender of bipartisan cooperation, Joe Manchin willingly shoots against his camp to defend the interests of the fossil fuel sector. And for good reason, coal – the most polluting fuel ever used – runs through his veins and in his wallet.
“Where you grow up, by whom and how you are brought up, is what makes you who you are”, said Joe Manchin in June at the New Yorker*. “If I haven’t changed, it’s because I’m from Farmington.” This tiny town of a few hundred souls, nestled in a corner of Appalachia pierced with coal mines, saw him born in 1947. The Manchin family has one foot in the mine, the heart in business and the head in politics. After a spell in coal, “Papa Joe”, the grandfather, divides his time between the local grocery store and the function of mayor. The father, John Manchin, owner of a furniture store, takes over as mayor. One of his uncles is an influential local elected official, while another, a trade unionist, is among the 78 victims of a mining disaster that mourns Farmington in 1968.
Joe Manchin embraced local politics in 1982 and, in 1988, abandoned the carpet trade to invest in coal, or rather what was left of it: waste from abandoned mines, which his company, Enersystems Inc., treated and sells as fuel to local power plants. At the beginning of the 2000s, the political prevailed over the entrepreneur. Joe Manchin installs his son at the head of the family business and becomes, four years later, governor of West Virginia then, in 2010, senator. “I am very proud of the role the people of West Virginia have played in providing energy to the nation,” he says during his very first speech in the Upper House*. “Without the Virginia coal, the lighting would be much dimmer.”
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West Virginia is already no longer that of his childhood. The state, which had more than 140,000 minors in the 1950s, has only 13,000 left in 2019. It is aging, emptying and changing political sides. Joe Manchin becomes the last Democratic representative from a strong Republican stronghold – in 2020, 68.6% of voters voted for Donald Trump there. self-proclaimed “conservative democrat”, admirer of Kennedy, he claims a pragmatism guided by the sole interest of his constituents. “People from West Virginia sent me here [à Washington] to help solve our budget problems with common-sense bipartisan solutions”, he summed up in 2012*.
Against the increase in the federal minimum wage to 15 dollars an hour, against restrictions on the sale of firearms, against the increase in the assistance paid to people made unemployed by the Covid-19 epidemic… Joe Manchin would not clash in the opposing camp. “Technically, he is a Democrat. But in reality, he is a man without a party”, wrote Politico in 2018 *, recalling that Manchin was briefly approached, in 2017, to join the government of Donald Trump, as Secretary of State for Energy. He presents himself as an ardent defender of compromise and discussion.
By becoming, after the election of Joe Biden, the arbiter of the Upper House, the senator uses his talents as a mediator to inject his conservatism into the very progressive “Build Back Better” plan. Recently elected chairman of the commission on energy and natural resources in the Senate, he redraws the contours of this titanic text. He multiplies the phone calls to both camps and receives at his home, on a luxurious barge moored on the Potomac River, both elected Democrats and Republicans. “Washington’s hottest club is Joe Manchin’s houseboat”, noted in August the Washington Post*.
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In November, his bipartisan efforts bear fruit: Joe Manchin obtains the right to halve the amount of funding for the law, which goes from 3,500 billion dollars over 10 years, to 1,750 billion. It torpedoes in passing a whole section of the plan, the Clean Electricity Performance Program, which provided for a system of financial incentives and fines for electric operators to gradually abandon fossil fuels in favor of carbon-free energies.
This is not the first time that Joe Manchin has opened fire on a law unfavorable to the fossil fuel industry. Literally. In 2010, in a campaign clip, the Democrat fired live ammunition at a bill promoted by the Obama administration to fight global warming, “because it’s not good for West Virginia”.
The first bill he brought to the Senate aims to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from reversing open-pit mining permits. In Washington, he fights for pensions and health insurance for former miners, defending the industry like the men and women downgraded by its collapse. But also, his own financial interests.
In 2016, he thus promoted a law that deregulates the management of mining waste, and more specifically, ashes – one of the derivatives of the activity of his company Enersystems – on the grounds that a stricter framework “would threaten vital industries and cost West Virginia and the nation more jobs unnecessarily”. If he writes the rules with one hand and plays with the other, is there a conflict of interest? “Absolutely not”, replies the senator to journalists who regularly question him on the subject, such as the New York Times* in 2011. The Democrat repeats, as proof of his good faith, that his assets were placed in a blind pension fund.
However, if he handed over to his son when he became governor of West Virginia, Joe Manchin continues to benefit from the activity of Enersystems. According to Washington Post*, in 2020 alone, the company paid him at least $492,000. His shares in the company are also estimated at between one and five million dollars. And this blind fund which so often serves as a joker would house between 500,000 and one million dollars, according to the daily.
According to OpenSecrets*, which tracks political funding, Joe Manchin is also the Democratic senator who has received the most donations from the coal sector. In an interview shot with a hidden camera by Unearthed, an investigation unit of the NGO Greenpeace, and broadcast in July, the chief lobbyist of the oil group Exxon Mobil, Keith McCoy, claims to have “a guy” particularly attuned to the mysteries of power: Joe Manchin. “I talk to his office every week”, he boasts.
After his refusal to support Joe Biden’s infrastructure law, the progressives, stunned, hammered that “Build Back Better” and in particular its important social component would have benefited the inhabitants of West Virginia. Even the miners’ union called on Joe Manchin on Monday, December 20, to reconsider his position. Because his pro-coal fight is expensive for the inhabitants of this state, among the poorest in the United States. While the share of electricity produced by coal has fallen from 52% in 1990 to 19% for the whole of the United States, this rate remains at 89% in the State of Joe Manchin, explains CNN*. Power plants, many of which are dilapidated and unable to meet new environmental standards, need investment, which destroys the competitiveness of coal and mining waste sold by Enersystems. Over the years, the electricity bill of Americans connected to this type of plant has exploded, as in West Virginia.
As a senator, however, he was not always opposed to renewable energies, which create jobs that he knows are precious for his state. Nor does it deny the reality of climate change, nor the responsibility of human activities. A figure of climato-procrastination, Joe Manchin plays the watch. “We are not in a hurry”, he declared in November*. It is the pure and simple annihilation of coal that poses a problem for him, explains Gregory Wetstone, president of an NGO which campaigns in favor of renewables and regular interlocutor of Joe Manchin. “In all of our conversations so far, his line is that he doesn’t want to penalize fossil fuels, but he is fine with incentivizing clean energy”, he confirmed to New York Times*.
Similarly, the senator prefers to bet on the emergence of new technologies, such as the “clean coal”, chimera agitated by Donald Trump, or carbon capture, a process still experimental. In this context, the action of Joe Manchin on the policy of the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, could put the whole planet behind on its climate objectives. A butterfly flapping in Farmington, West Virginia, which contributes to floods, storms and other fires, around the world.
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