A block of coal in Joe Biden’s shoe. Democratic Senator Joe Manchin has managed, on his own, to derail the flagship reform of the US president. By refusing, Sunday, December 19, to support in Congress the mega-text of the “Build Back Better” law, which encompassed social, economic and environmental measures, this elected representative of West Virginia, a rural state in the eastern United States, consumed the hopes of his party to establish an ambitious policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, essential to the global effort to fight against global warming.
Because Democrats hold a majority with one vote in the Senate, Joe Manchin has become America’s most powerful politician under President Biden: a screeching kingmaker “the other president *” in the corridors of the Capitol. Coal baron in a former “black mouth” region that has become a Trumpist breeding ground and ardent defender of bipartisan cooperation, Joe Manchin is happy to shoot against his camp to defend the interests of the fossil fuel sector. And for good reason, coal – the most polluting fuel ever used – flows in his veins and in his wallet.
“Where you grow up, by whom and how you were brought up, that’s what makes you who you are”, declared Joe Manchin in June at New Yorker*. “If I haven’t changed, it’s because I’m from Farmington.” This tiny city of a few hundred souls, nestled in a corner of the Appalachians pierced by coal mines, saw him be born in 1947. The Manchin family had one foot in the mine, the heart in business and their head in politics. After a transition to 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 at the town hall. One of his uncles was an influential local elected official, while another, a trade unionist, was among the 78 victims of a mining disaster which mourned Farmington in 1968.
Joe Manchin embraced local politics in 1982 and, in 1988, abandoned the carpet business to invest in coal, or rather what remains of it: the waste from abandoned mines, which his company, Enersystems Inc., processes and sells as fuel to local power stations. In the early 2000s, politics prevailed over entrepreneurs. Joe Manchin installs his son at the head of the family business and becomes, four years later, governor of West Virginia and, 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 charcoal, the lighting would be much lower.”
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West Virginia is no longer that of its childhood. The state, which had more than 140,000 minors in the 1950s, has only 13,000 in 2019. It is aging, emptying and changing political sides. Joe Manchin becomes the last Democratic representative of a strong Republican stronghold – in 2020, 68.6% of voters voted for Donald Trump. Self-proclaimed “conservative democrat”, an admirer of Kennedy, he claims a pragmatism guided by the sole interest of his constituents. “The people of West Virginia sent me here [à Washington] to help solve our budgetary 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 aid paid to people made unemployed by the Covid-19 epidemic … Joe Manchin would not detonate 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 chamber, the senator uses his skills as a mediator to inject his conservatism into the very progressive “Build Back Better” plan. Newly elected president of the commission on energy and natural resources in the Senate, he thus redraws the contours of this titanic text. He made more phone calls to both camps and received at his home, on a luxury barge moored on the Potomac River, both elected Democrats and Republicans. “The hottest club in Washington is Joe Manchin’s houseboat,” noticed in August the Washington Post *.
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In November, his bipartisan efforts bore fruit: Joe Manchin obtained a halving of the amount of funding for the law, which went from $ 3.5 trillion over 10 years to $ 1.7 trillion. It torpedoed an entire component of the plan, the Clean Electricity Performance Program, which provided for a system of financial incentives and fines for electricity 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 against the fossil fuel industry. Literally. In a 2010 campaign clip, the Democrat fired live bullets at legislation promoted by the Obama administration to fight global warming, “because it’s not good for West Virginia”.
The first bill he brings to the Senate seeks to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from revoking surface 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 which deregulates the management of mining waste, and more precisely, ash – one of the by-products of the activity of his company Enersystems – on the grounds that a more stringent framework “would threaten vital industries and unnecessarily cost West Virginia and the nation more jobs”. If he writes the rules with one hand and plays with the other, is there a conflict of interest? “Absolutely not”, answers the senator to journalists who regularly question him on the subject, such as 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 passed the hand 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. Its shares in the company are also estimated at between one and five million dollars. And this blind fund which he so often serves as a joker would shelter 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 filmed on a hidden camera by Unearthed, an investigative 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 attentive in the arcana of power: Joe Manchin. “I speak to his office every week”, he boasts.
After his refusal to support Joe Biden’s infrastructure law, the progressives, stunned, hammered home 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, Monday, December 20, to reconsider his position. Because its pro-coal fight is costing the inhabitants of this state, among the poorest in the United States. While the share of electricity produced by coal has increased from 52% in 1990 to 19% in the United States as a whole, this rate remains at 89% in the state of Joe Manchin, explains CNN *. Power plants, many of them 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 skyrocketed, as in West Virginia.
As a senator, however, he was not always opposed to renewable energies, which create jobs which he knows to be invaluable for his State. Nor does he deny the reality of climate change, nor the responsibility for human activities. Figure of climato-procrastination, Joe Manchin plays the watch. “We are not in a hurry”, he declared in November *. It is the outright destruction of coal that poses a problem for him, explains Gregory Wetstone, president of an NGO which campaigns in favor of renewable energy 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 agrees to push for clean energy.”, he confirmed to New York Times *.
Likewise, the senator prefers to bet on the emergence of new technologies, such as “clean coal”, chimera stirred by Donald Trump, or carbon capture, a still experimental process. In this context, Joe Manchin’s action on the policy of the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, could put the entire planet behind on its climate objectives. A butterfly wing flap in Farmington, West Virginia, which contributes to floods, storms and other fires around the world.
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