West Virginians To Blockade Sen. Manchin's Coal Plant: Coal Baron's Entanglements From Soup To Nuts

- Sen. Joe Manchin, pictured with the Grant Town Power Plant in Grant Town, West Virginia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Manchin
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- 'West Virginians Gear Up for “Coal Baron Blockade” at Joe Manchin’s Coal Plant,' Truthout, April 8, 2022. - Ed.

Since Sen. Joe Manchin has blockaded Democrats’ landmark Build Back Better climate & jobs legislation, at least 400 West Virginians & allied activists say they are planning to return the gesture in kind by blockading Senator Manchin’s family business at the Grant Town Power Plant on Saturday, April 9. Dozens of activists, working in coalition under the banner West Virginia Rising & with support from organizations like Rising Tide North America, are planning to risk arrest by blocking traffic to the 80-megawatt, coal-fired plant in Grant Town, WVa.

Sen. Manchin makes nearly $500,000 per year from his family business Enersystems, Inc., which sells coal gob to the Grant Town Power Plant. Senator Manchin’s son, Joseph Manchin IV, runs the company.

Manchin founded Enersystems, a Fairmont, West Virginia-based coal brokerage firm, in 1988. He reported making $5.6 million off company stock from 2010 to 2020 — all while working to protect the coal industry & gut critical environmental laws to increase his own revenues as part of the powerful Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee, which he has chaired since February 3, 2021. He even worked to keep the Grant Town plant in business when he was governor of West Virginia in 2006 by arranging for lobbyists from Mon Power, which purchases energy from the plant, to petition the West Virginia Public Service Commission (PSC) to raise rates on residents.

The West Virginia senator has denied that his coal interests influence his policymaking & has declined to divest his holdings, saying that because his ownership is held in a blind trust, which gives a separate trustee control of holdings, it doesn’t violate congressional ethics rules or the law. But documents filed by the senator show the blind trust is too small to account for all his reported earnings from Enersystems, and, the PSC, under then-Governor Manchin, effectively saved the company’s contract by agreeing to raise rates in 2006.

Moreover, the coal company is far from Manchin’s only fossil fuel entanglement. The senator remains the top recipient of campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry among Congress members, collecting nearly $743,000 in the current election cycle. In the Democrats’ narrowly controlled, 50-50 Senate, Manchin has gained almost total control over the future of the nation’s energy and climate policy amid the escalating planetary emergency and urgent need to achieve energy independence from Russia after its invasion of Ukraine...
-More, https://truthout.org/articles/west-virginians-gear-up-for-coal-baron-blockade-at-joe-manchins-coal-plant/
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- Rolling Stone, 'Manchin's Coal Corruption Is So Much Worse Than You Knew,' Jan. 10, 2022. The senator from West Virginia is bought and paid for by Big Coal. With his help the dying industry is pulling one final heist — and the entire planet may pay the price.

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