I n 1987, the man who is now the senior senator from West Virginia chose his hometown as the fulcrum for his enterprise. Manchin did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Over the decades, whether feeding tens of thousands of tons of dirty waste coal into the power plants in northern West Virginia or subjecting workers to unsafe conditions, Manchin’s family coal business has almost entirely avoided public scrutiny. Enersystems purchases low-quality waste coal from mines and resells it to power plants as fuel, while Farmington Resources provides “support activities for mining ” and holds coal reserves in the Fairmont area. Those two companies are Enersystems Inc. and Farmington Resources Inc., the latter of which was created by the rapid merging of two other firms, Manchin’s Transcon and Farmington Energy in 2005. He also holds stock options in Enersystems Inc., the larger of the two firms, valued between $1 and $5 million. Yet between the time he joined the Senate and today, Manchin has personally grossed more than $4.5 million from those firms, according to financial disclosures. His son, Joe Manchin IV, has since assumed leadership roles in the firms, and the senator says his ownership is held in a blind trust.
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Though Manchin’s motivations are often ascribed to the conservative, coal-friendly politics of West Virginia, it is also the case that the state’s senior senator is heavily invested in the industry - and owes much of his considerable fortune to it.įor decades, Manchin has profited from a series of coal companies that he founded during the 1980s.
What would unquestionably be impacted, however, is Manchin’s own personal wealth. Manchin’s claim that climate pollution would be worsened by the elimination of fossil fuels - or by the resolution’s actual, more incremental climate provisions - is highly dubious, if not outright false. “If you’re sticking your head in the sand, and saying that fossil has to be eliminated in America, and they want to get rid of it, and thinking that’s going to clean up the global climate, it won’t clean it up all,” Manchin told CNN after a private meeting with President Joe Biden and his fellow Senate Democrats.
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