How Joe Manchin Aided Coal, and Earned Millions

[demmiblue]

At every step of his political career, Joe Manchin helped a West Virginia power plant that is the sole customer of his private coal business. Along the way, he blocked ambitious climate action.

GRANT TOWN, W.Va. — On a hilltop overlooking Paw Paw Creek, 15 miles south of the Pennsylvania border, looms a fortresslike structure with a single smokestack, the only viable business in a dying Appalachian town.

The Grant Town power plant is also the link between the coal industry and the personal finances of Joe Manchin III, the Democrat who rose through state politics to reach the United States Senate, where, through the vagaries of electoral politics, he is now the single most important figure shaping the nation’s energy and climate policy.

Mr. Manchin’s ties to the Grant Town plant date to 1987, when he had just been elected to the West Virginia Senate, a part-time job with base pay of $6,500. His family’s carpet business was struggling.

Opportunity arrived in the form of two developers who wanted to build a power plant in Grant Town, just outside Mr. Manchin’s district. Mr. Manchin, whose grandfather went to work in the mines at age 9 and whose uncle died in a mining accident, helped the developers clear bureaucratic hurdles.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/27/climate/manchin-coal-climate-conflicts.html

[Peregrine Took]

1. We should dog his every step for the damage he's done to the planet. n/t

[Botany]

2. So Joe has a stake in the only power plant in WV that burns the left over ("gob") coal from deep ...

... mines that were closed long ago and Joe and his family own that gob coal too. The Grant Town
power plant is less efficient so Joe & friends got a rate hike on the electricity produced by that plant*
(of which the Manchins get a cut of), the plant produces more mercury air pollution then other coal
plants, more SO2 then other coal power plants, Joe got the air pollution limits waved on the Grant
Town plant, the plant should have been closed a few years ago because it costs more than other ways
to produce electricity along with killing the planet but Joe stopped that, and all the while Joe has been
working to kill green energy to protect the fossil fuel industry.

And all the time Joe's son, Joe Manchin the 4th sits in his office in Fairview W.V. and counts the millions.

BTW W.V.'s other senator is the daughter of former governor Arch Moore. And she is dirty too.


* forcing the people of W.V. to pay more for their electricity.

[Blue Owl]

3. Joe Manchin's in this thing for Joe Manchin and Joe Manchin only

Fuck everyone else and the environment...

[Botany]

4. Wrong it is all about Joe and his family too.

And Joe knows he is fucking the environment too.

one of the hardest things to grasp about the climate crisis is the connectedness of all things. One recent drizzly afternoon, I drove from Charleston, West Virginia, to the John Amos coal-fired power plant on the banks of the Kanawha River, near the town of Nitro. In the rain, the plant looked like one of the dark satanic mills that poet William Blake wrote about, with three enormous cooling towers that steamed like giant witches’ cauldrons. Across the river from the plant, mobile homes cluttered the bank of the Kanawha, streaked black with pollution that rained down on them 24/7.

I had visited the plant 20 years ago, on my first reporting trip to West Virginia. Back then, the plant seemed like an indomitable monument to the power of Big Coal. The facility, owned by Ohio-based utility giant American Electric Power, is capable of generating 3,000 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 2 million homes. It is also one of the biggest carbon polluters on the planet, emitting 13 million tons of CO2 each year, which is equal to the annual emissions of about 3 million cars.

When I look at John Amos today, I see fire and rising seas, disease and hunger. I see a rusting industrial contraption that takes CO2 captured by trees 300 million years ago and rereleases it into the sky, bringing the heat of the past to our future. Coal plants are one of the primary reasons why shopping malls were burning in Colorado this winter and reservoirs in the West are dry. They are why Antarctica is cracking up, threatening the future of virtually every low-lying city in the world, from Boston to Bangkok. They are why infectious-disease patterns are changing in Nepal and crops are failing in Kenya and roads are washing out in Appalachia.



https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/joe-manchin-big-coal-west-virginia-1280922/

[CrispyQ]

5. I'm sure his grandchildren will appreciate grandpa's millions more than a livable planet.

His great-grandchildren, though? IDK.

Apparently the (mostly) men in charge lack the imagination to visualize the drastic changes about to happen to our environment. Visiting your million dollar bunker for the weekend is not the same as living in it.