The New York Times reports:

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.

Then he did something beyond routine constituent services. He went into business with the Grant Town power plant.

Mr. Manchin supplied a type of low-grade coal mixed with rock and clay known as “gob” that is typically cast aside as junk by mining companies but can be burned to produce electricity. In addition, he arranged to receive a slice of the revenue from electricity generated by the plant — electric bills paid by his constituents.

The deal inked decades ago has made Mr. Manchin, now 74, a rich man.

While the fact that Mr. Manchin owns a coal business is well-known, an examination by The New York Times offers a more detailed portrait of the degree to which Mr. Manchin’s business has been interwoven with his official actions. He created his business while a state lawmaker in anticipation of the Grant Town plant, which has been the sole customer for his gob for the past 20 years, according to federal data. At key moments over the years, Mr. Manchin used his political influence to benefit the plant. He urged a state official to approve its air pollution permit, pushed fellow lawmakers to support a tax credit that helped the plant, and worked behind the scenes to facilitate a rate increase that drove up revenue for the plant — and electricity costs for West Virginians. [Continue reading…]

Bill McKibben writes:

Manchin’s old-school corruption has collided with the politics of the last year—and the last month—in such a way as to potentially wreck the last real chance at climate progress in a timeframe that jibes with the science.

Let us review. The last Democratic primaries saw the breakthrough of climate as an issue—indeed, by some polls the issue. Biden was not its strongest champion, but he understood it to be key to consolidating support after his primary win; he negotiated with Bernie’s team (AOC, the Sunrise Movement) on a version of the Green New Deal that became Build Back Better, and he appointed an all-star cast of climate leaders, from Gina McCarthy to John Kerry, to make the issue a central part of his presidency.

And then they ran into Manchin, who is not only a coal baron (a gob baron) but who has taken more fossil fuel money than anyone else in DC, and who, as a result, an Exxon executive who didn’t know he was being taped described as their “kingmaker.” Manchin has dangled his possible support for Build Back Better for more than a year now, which meant that the administration pulled all their climate punches for fear of offending him and losing that vote: they’ve granted more oil and gas leases than Trump, they let the Line 3 pipeline proceed though it is identical in size and function to the KXL pipeline the Obama Biden adminsitration blocked on cliamt gorunds almsot a decade ago, and so on. And in return, so far, they’ve got…next to nothing.

Now, Putin’s vicious war in Ukraine has given them another opening. Since it’s funded by fossil fuels (in this case Exxon was one of Putin’s kingmakers), and since there’s powerful emotional anger, it could have been the moment to finally make the breach with fossil fuels: imagine a President Biden announcing an all out effort to get us and Europe off gas and oil as fast as possible. But instead Secretary of Energy Granholm has been touring Europe with…Captain Corruption. And he’s back to dangling his possible support for clean energy tax credits, provided he gets all kinds of commitments to an “all of the above” energy policy. [Continue reading…]