Manchin gets it done but at what cost?
The West Virginia senator has agreed to support climate action, but only after ensuring his home state would remain a fossil fuel fiefdom. https://t.co/sSRmRd0Dnw
— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) August 4, 2022
Jeff Goodell explains:
As part of the price for getting on board with the climate deal, it’s now clear that Manchin wants a side deal to “streamline” the permitting process for big infrastructure projects like pipelines and coal mines and chemical plants in his home state. It’s not just a bad idea for the climate, it perpetuates the notion that Appalachia is a landscape that God created to be mined, blasted, and burned. For the last 30 years, since the age of mountaintop removal mining began, West Virginia activists have called the southern coal fields “a national sacrifice zone” to America’s insanely destructive appetite for coal and gas. And it’s true. The mountains have been blasted, the creeks filled in, arsenic poisons the soil, and big coal impoundments – man-made lakes the coal companies use to wash the coal after it is mined – loom above the narrow hollows. After 100 years of digging coal and fracking for gas, much of Appalachia remains poor and broken and vulnerable.
Similarly, from Mountain State Spotlight/ProPublica:
“It’s a hard pill to swallow,” said one long-time opponent of the Mountain Valley Pipeline “We’re once again a sacrifice zone.” https://t.co/2DANb2CBey
— Mountain State Spotlight (@mtnstspotlight) August 5, 2022
And:
Some residents along the pipeline route who support climate change action say they feel like chips in a negotiation they weren’t at the table for.
— ProPublica (@propublica) August 5, 2022
“[Manchin] could do so much more for Appalachia... but he’s chosen to only listen to industries." https://t.co/lhcMGkrpTZ
Okay (I tell myself), there will be many good things that come from this legislation. Still . . .
Finally, I take seriously this advice from author and video maker Don Winslow who has chronicled the senator's many twists and turns:
Do not EVER trust @Sen_JoeManchin.
— Don Winslow (@donwinslow) August 4, 2022
Like EVER. pic.twitter.com/QPjXlE6t3u
