Ryan Cooper, National correspondent
THE WEEK
Tue, October 19, 2021
Joe Manchin. Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) has demanded President Biden excise the core of his climate policy. Manchin says he won't vote for the $150 billion Clean Electricity Performance Program, which would pay energy suppliers to move away from carbon power and impose penalties on those that don't.
Manchin's move is a terrible disaster for many reasons. This program is the main mechanism of Biden's climate plan — removing it would mean no significant American action on climate until 2030 or later. Moreover, if Manchin gets his way, the president will go to upcoming climate talks in Scotland with nothing in hand, which would seriously harm the meeting's prospect of success.
But beyond all that, in his capacity as a senator, Manchin's demand is a grotesque betrayal of the people of West Virginia.
It may not look that way on the surface. Manchin is doing this because there are quite a few coal jobs in his state (and because he is personally heavily invested in coal business). But even on that ground, it's a wretched decision. As historian Adam Tooze demonstrates, while coal is still relatively important to the West Virginia economy, it's declining fast, and the state has no rising industry to replace coal as a core social and economic prop. West Virginia's health care industry is growing because so many people are on Medicaid or hooked on opioids, but it can't take coal's place in the state's economy. The jobs Manchin is trying to save are doomed, and he should be focused on bringing in new energy work, not saving what can't be saved.
The demise of the coal industry is long since obvious. In 2007, the American electrical system hit a peak of 2,016 terawatt-hours produced from coal power plants. Since then it has fallen by 62 percent to 774 terawatt-hours in 2020. Even before 2007, West Virginia had shed most of its coal jobs thanks to heavy automation and new techniques like blowing whole mountains up to get at the coal (which causes cataclysmic environmental contamination) instead of digging it out.
Now, the biggest reason for coal's decline is cheap natural gas (up from 897 terawatt-hours in 2007 to 1,617 terawatt-hours in 2020), but the second-biggest reason is cheap renewable power. Utility-scale solar and wind power production have skyrocketed from 35 terawatt-hours in 2007 to 429 terawatt-hours in 2020 — a twelve-fold increase. That's largely because the price of wind power fell by 70 percent over the last decade, while the price of solar fell by 89 percent — but that of coal power barely budged. Those trends are expected to continue, and sooner or later renewables will out-compete both coal and natural gas (though not soon enough to ward off catastrophic climate change without government action).
Neither will exports save coal. Globally, other countries are laying plans to move away from coal as well — partly from price movements but also because it's a dirty, dangerous power source whose pollution kills millions annually. Whether or not Manchin kills his own party's climate plan, West Virginia's coal industry has maybe a decade of life left, at the outside.
West Virginia today is a poor, unhealthy state. That's significantly because nobody in Washington did anything when slanted trade deals destroyed about a third of its manufacturing jobs and energy innovation destroyed most of its coal jobs and, soon, the entire coal industry. As Tooze writes, coal wasn't just a source of jobs; it was a source of meaning — an image of a rugged society where strong men and women did the tough jobs necessary to keep the country on its feet. Without that fund of social cohesion, the state is seeing an epidemic of "deaths of despair" similar to what Russia experienced after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Compounding all these problems, West Virginia is among the states most vulnerable to climate change. Its steep, narrow valleys create ideal conditions for floods in the biblical downpours becoming ever more common, and its generally rugged terrain leaves little room for residents of those valleys to relocate. No "state in the contiguous United States is more exposed to flood damage than West Virginia," reports Christopher Flavelle at The New York Times, citing an analysis from the First Street Foundation. "Sixty-one percent of West Virginia's power stations are at risk, the highest nationwide and more than twice the average. West Virginia also leads in the share of its roads at risk of inundation, at 46 percent," he writes. Beyond being dangerous to mine and deadly to burn, coal contributes to the climate change that produces extreme flooding. No longer a major source of money or meaning, it has become bad for West Virginia in every way.
Digging the West Virginian economy out of its collapsed coal pit would be no small task. But we could imagine a new model based on green energy (West Virginia is one of the windiest states east of the Mississippi), tourism (it is spectacularly beautiful), and perhaps even some cutting-edge manufacturing. Better infrastructure links and high-speed internet; regulations and subsidies to induce domestic economic production; and a stronger national welfare state to increase the incomes of the state's residents would be a good start.
In other words, we're talking about the Biden agenda. Half the point of the Build Back Better plan, for all its flaws, is to kick-start just this kind of forward-looking economy in places like West Virginia so that hopeless and destructive industries like coal are replaced with something rather than nothing.
Naturally, in addition to killing Biden's climate policy, Manchin is also demanding Biden slash the rest of his agenda to the bone. He recently demanded cuts to Biden's child allowance so the poorest parents without jobs — a disproportionate number of whom live in West Virginia — get nothing. Manchin is ruining his state's prospects coming and going.
West Virginia doesn't have to stay an impoverished, backward mess, in thrall to a dying, filthy industry. But if the state can be helped into a better future, Manchin won't have anything to do with it.
Tue, October 19, 2021
Joe Manchin. Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) has demanded President Biden excise the core of his climate policy. Manchin says he won't vote for the $150 billion Clean Electricity Performance Program, which would pay energy suppliers to move away from carbon power and impose penalties on those that don't.
Manchin's move is a terrible disaster for many reasons. This program is the main mechanism of Biden's climate plan — removing it would mean no significant American action on climate until 2030 or later. Moreover, if Manchin gets his way, the president will go to upcoming climate talks in Scotland with nothing in hand, which would seriously harm the meeting's prospect of success.
But beyond all that, in his capacity as a senator, Manchin's demand is a grotesque betrayal of the people of West Virginia.
It may not look that way on the surface. Manchin is doing this because there are quite a few coal jobs in his state (and because he is personally heavily invested in coal business). But even on that ground, it's a wretched decision. As historian Adam Tooze demonstrates, while coal is still relatively important to the West Virginia economy, it's declining fast, and the state has no rising industry to replace coal as a core social and economic prop. West Virginia's health care industry is growing because so many people are on Medicaid or hooked on opioids, but it can't take coal's place in the state's economy. The jobs Manchin is trying to save are doomed, and he should be focused on bringing in new energy work, not saving what can't be saved.
The demise of the coal industry is long since obvious. In 2007, the American electrical system hit a peak of 2,016 terawatt-hours produced from coal power plants. Since then it has fallen by 62 percent to 774 terawatt-hours in 2020. Even before 2007, West Virginia had shed most of its coal jobs thanks to heavy automation and new techniques like blowing whole mountains up to get at the coal (which causes cataclysmic environmental contamination) instead of digging it out.
Now, the biggest reason for coal's decline is cheap natural gas (up from 897 terawatt-hours in 2007 to 1,617 terawatt-hours in 2020), but the second-biggest reason is cheap renewable power. Utility-scale solar and wind power production have skyrocketed from 35 terawatt-hours in 2007 to 429 terawatt-hours in 2020 — a twelve-fold increase. That's largely because the price of wind power fell by 70 percent over the last decade, while the price of solar fell by 89 percent — but that of coal power barely budged. Those trends are expected to continue, and sooner or later renewables will out-compete both coal and natural gas (though not soon enough to ward off catastrophic climate change without government action).
Neither will exports save coal. Globally, other countries are laying plans to move away from coal as well — partly from price movements but also because it's a dirty, dangerous power source whose pollution kills millions annually. Whether or not Manchin kills his own party's climate plan, West Virginia's coal industry has maybe a decade of life left, at the outside.
West Virginia today is a poor, unhealthy state. That's significantly because nobody in Washington did anything when slanted trade deals destroyed about a third of its manufacturing jobs and energy innovation destroyed most of its coal jobs and, soon, the entire coal industry. As Tooze writes, coal wasn't just a source of jobs; it was a source of meaning — an image of a rugged society where strong men and women did the tough jobs necessary to keep the country on its feet. Without that fund of social cohesion, the state is seeing an epidemic of "deaths of despair" similar to what Russia experienced after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Compounding all these problems, West Virginia is among the states most vulnerable to climate change. Its steep, narrow valleys create ideal conditions for floods in the biblical downpours becoming ever more common, and its generally rugged terrain leaves little room for residents of those valleys to relocate. No "state in the contiguous United States is more exposed to flood damage than West Virginia," reports Christopher Flavelle at The New York Times, citing an analysis from the First Street Foundation. "Sixty-one percent of West Virginia's power stations are at risk, the highest nationwide and more than twice the average. West Virginia also leads in the share of its roads at risk of inundation, at 46 percent," he writes. Beyond being dangerous to mine and deadly to burn, coal contributes to the climate change that produces extreme flooding. No longer a major source of money or meaning, it has become bad for West Virginia in every way.
Digging the West Virginian economy out of its collapsed coal pit would be no small task. But we could imagine a new model based on green energy (West Virginia is one of the windiest states east of the Mississippi), tourism (it is spectacularly beautiful), and perhaps even some cutting-edge manufacturing. Better infrastructure links and high-speed internet; regulations and subsidies to induce domestic economic production; and a stronger national welfare state to increase the incomes of the state's residents would be a good start.
In other words, we're talking about the Biden agenda. Half the point of the Build Back Better plan, for all its flaws, is to kick-start just this kind of forward-looking economy in places like West Virginia so that hopeless and destructive industries like coal are replaced with something rather than nothing.
Naturally, in addition to killing Biden's climate policy, Manchin is also demanding Biden slash the rest of his agenda to the bone. He recently demanded cuts to Biden's child allowance so the poorest parents without jobs — a disproportionate number of whom live in West Virginia — get nothing. Manchin is ruining his state's prospects coming and going.
West Virginia doesn't have to stay an impoverished, backward mess, in thrall to a dying, filthy industry. But if the state can be helped into a better future, Manchin won't have anything to do with it.
Joe Manchin Hates Spending More Than He Loves Children
Max Burns
Mon, October 18, 2021
MICHAEL MATHES/AFP via Getty Images
The child tax credit represents one of the most effective youth anti-poverty efforts in modern history, a sweeping program that has fulfilled the too often made promise to lift all boats. Sen. Joe Manchin is trying to drown it in the Potomac.
For a few heady days last week, it looked like House Progressives and the Senate’s two conservative Democrats might actually find a consensus price tag for Joe Biden’s signature Build Back Better package.
But that was before Manchin tacked another hundred yards onto the football field Sunday with a new, GOP-approved demand that Democrats incorporate aggressive means testing and strict work requirements to keep a proposed expansion of the popular child tax credit as narrow as possible. While a broader credit would pay off children in West Virginia, the senator hates spending more than he cares about that.
McConnell Talks About Taking Down Biden’s Agenda—Manchin and the Moderates Are Doing It
The child tax credit itself isn’t new, but it has always been politically controversial even as it has proven its worth. Originally passed as part of the landmark Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, the same law that gave us Roth IRAs and education savings accounts, the child tax credit offered $400 per child under age 17. The law was and is popular: Nearly six-in-10 American families support it, including 41 percent of Republicans. That’s why lawmakers juiced the credit to $2,000 in 2020 and again to $3,600 under Biden’s American Rescue Plan a year later.
Part of the child tax credit’s popularity comes from how broadly it distributes tangible gains to families in need. According to research by Reuters, the 10 states with the biggest average monthly payments all went with Trump, and nine of them have Republican governors. Just missing out on the top 10, with an average credit received of $431: West Virginia.
The child tax credit isn’t some directionless handout, as Manchin seems to think. It’s had a measurable impact on our fight to reduce poverty, especially in Manchin’s home state. The Brookings Institution projected Biden’s expanded child tax credit will slash child poverty nearly in half across all racial groups, from 14 percent to just 7.5 percent. They weren’t far off. In July, the first of Biden’s expanded tax credit payments lifted some 3 million American kids out of poverty, a 25 percent reduction, and moved millions of struggling families away from total financial collapse.
Those real benefits shouldn’t be lost on Manchin, who serves a state with the sixth-highest poverty rate even before COVID-19. Since the pandemic, West Virginia has tumbled further. Yet Manchin is now dead set on ensuring as few people as possible benefit from a tax credit designed to be utilized as a broad brush—even if his demands kill the entire Build Back Better agenda in the process.
Our most recent congressional crisis stems from the ongoing battle within the Democratic party between the House Progressive Caucus led by Rep. Pramila Jayapal, which is fighting for the passage of Biden’s full Build Back Better agenda at its original $3.5 trillion price tag, and Senate conservatives Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who are pointedly not advocating anything that can be considered “the Biden agenda.”
Biden was clear: The child tax credit should be applied as broadly as possible to expand on Democrats’ landmark poverty reduction victories. Manchin, on the other hand, insists the child tax credit only go to families earning under $60,000. The median household income in America is only about $63,000, and plenty of families making the median income will tell you it feels an awful lot like poverty. In a dozen states, the household median income is functional poverty.
If progressives were angry before, the chance of Biden once again compromising to his right is likely to send the caucus into a fury. Biden promoted his expanded Child Tax Credit on Twitter just last week. Now Jayapal and progressives worry that Biden’s desire to come away with something ahead of the looming midterm election cycle will mean stripping out everything that makes the Build Back Better agenda such a powerful legislative package.
If the past is any indication, Jayapal and the Progressive Caucus have reason to be worried. In a presidency defined by its compromises, almost all of Biden’s concessions have gone to mollify conservative holdouts Manchin and Sinema. To satisfy the two senators, Jayapal’s Progressive Caucus, which represents 96 lawmakers and aligns much more closely with Democratic voter preferences, is being asked to take one for the team.
Now Jayapal and the left are wondering: which team? Biden sacrificed $800 billion in progressive priorities to pass his bipartisan infrastructure deal. Last week, he cleared the way for nearly $2 trillion in possible compromise cuts for the Build Back Better package—all to gut core progressive spending policies Biden himself vocally supported. Meanwhile, centrist priorities are protected by presidential decree even when they run directly counter to Democratic Party values and run counter to the will of 66 percent of American voters
Manchin claims his position is “moderate,” but it risks leading Biden down a fraught and ultimately losing path built on the delusion that a single West Virginia senator knows the needs of an entire nation better than its own people. House progressives are right to protect the American people from Manchin’s hyper-partisan grasping, even if that means slamming the door on Manchin’s emaciated shadow of a spending package.
Chris Wallace Nails GOP Senator: Wouldn't Your State ‘Benefit From’ Biden’s Spending Bill?
Manchin’s demand would drop millions of families from the program and right back into financial peril, including tens of thousands in West Virginia. For Manchin, who holds forth on the Sunday talk shows about the importance of “moderate” governance, stripping millions of Americans off a popular and effective program represents a demand as radical and out-of-touch as any on the right. And in the case of neutering the child tax credit, Manchin goes even further than most Senate Republicans.
Manchin also thinks Americans have gotten lazier over the past year. Despite supporting Biden’s child tax credit in March with no work requirement, Manchin now demands any extension come with a firm rule that all recipients look for work. There’s just one problem: Work requirements have never actually worked. What’s lazy here isn’t families who could use the help, but Manchin’s thinking.
“Agencies that administer public benefit programs are ill-equipped to identify people who should not be subject to work requirements,” CBPP’s LaDonna Pavetti, Ph.D., wrote in 2018. “A study by Tennessee’s TANF agency, for example, found that about 30 percent of sanctions in the state were imposed in error.”
It should be no surprise that “work requirements” originated as a GOP attack on the "welfare state" in the 1990s, and The Century Foundation notes that work requirements have never actually been proven to work. At all. As Century Foundation Senior Fellow Jeff Madrick notes, that’s because most federal aid recipients are already likely to return to work within a year. There’s simply no proof a work requirement improves motivation—but it does prevent a lot of eligible people from seeking the help they need.
By pushing the Build Back Better plan ever further to the right, Manchin hopes to pin the package’s failure on progressives who refuse to support any plan hollowed out by GOP poison pills like means testing and work requirements.
But Manchin has picked a fight with one of the most popular elements of Biden’s American Rescue Plan. If Biden compromises now, he’ll be undercutting his single most significant domestic policy achievement, and possibly sink the whole deal. The public and the party are behind a robust child tax credit.
It’s time the White House learned that the better part of diplomacy is being able to reject a damaging, unserious offer. Manchin’s ego will recover. Struggling American families will not.
Read more at The Daily Beast.
Max Burns
Mon, October 18, 2021
MICHAEL MATHES/AFP via Getty Images
The child tax credit represents one of the most effective youth anti-poverty efforts in modern history, a sweeping program that has fulfilled the too often made promise to lift all boats. Sen. Joe Manchin is trying to drown it in the Potomac.
For a few heady days last week, it looked like House Progressives and the Senate’s two conservative Democrats might actually find a consensus price tag for Joe Biden’s signature Build Back Better package.
But that was before Manchin tacked another hundred yards onto the football field Sunday with a new, GOP-approved demand that Democrats incorporate aggressive means testing and strict work requirements to keep a proposed expansion of the popular child tax credit as narrow as possible. While a broader credit would pay off children in West Virginia, the senator hates spending more than he cares about that.
McConnell Talks About Taking Down Biden’s Agenda—Manchin and the Moderates Are Doing It
The child tax credit itself isn’t new, but it has always been politically controversial even as it has proven its worth. Originally passed as part of the landmark Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, the same law that gave us Roth IRAs and education savings accounts, the child tax credit offered $400 per child under age 17. The law was and is popular: Nearly six-in-10 American families support it, including 41 percent of Republicans. That’s why lawmakers juiced the credit to $2,000 in 2020 and again to $3,600 under Biden’s American Rescue Plan a year later.
Part of the child tax credit’s popularity comes from how broadly it distributes tangible gains to families in need. According to research by Reuters, the 10 states with the biggest average monthly payments all went with Trump, and nine of them have Republican governors. Just missing out on the top 10, with an average credit received of $431: West Virginia.
The child tax credit isn’t some directionless handout, as Manchin seems to think. It’s had a measurable impact on our fight to reduce poverty, especially in Manchin’s home state. The Brookings Institution projected Biden’s expanded child tax credit will slash child poverty nearly in half across all racial groups, from 14 percent to just 7.5 percent. They weren’t far off. In July, the first of Biden’s expanded tax credit payments lifted some 3 million American kids out of poverty, a 25 percent reduction, and moved millions of struggling families away from total financial collapse.
Those real benefits shouldn’t be lost on Manchin, who serves a state with the sixth-highest poverty rate even before COVID-19. Since the pandemic, West Virginia has tumbled further. Yet Manchin is now dead set on ensuring as few people as possible benefit from a tax credit designed to be utilized as a broad brush—even if his demands kill the entire Build Back Better agenda in the process.
Our most recent congressional crisis stems from the ongoing battle within the Democratic party between the House Progressive Caucus led by Rep. Pramila Jayapal, which is fighting for the passage of Biden’s full Build Back Better agenda at its original $3.5 trillion price tag, and Senate conservatives Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who are pointedly not advocating anything that can be considered “the Biden agenda.”
Biden was clear: The child tax credit should be applied as broadly as possible to expand on Democrats’ landmark poverty reduction victories. Manchin, on the other hand, insists the child tax credit only go to families earning under $60,000. The median household income in America is only about $63,000, and plenty of families making the median income will tell you it feels an awful lot like poverty. In a dozen states, the household median income is functional poverty.
If progressives were angry before, the chance of Biden once again compromising to his right is likely to send the caucus into a fury. Biden promoted his expanded Child Tax Credit on Twitter just last week. Now Jayapal and progressives worry that Biden’s desire to come away with something ahead of the looming midterm election cycle will mean stripping out everything that makes the Build Back Better agenda such a powerful legislative package.
If the past is any indication, Jayapal and the Progressive Caucus have reason to be worried. In a presidency defined by its compromises, almost all of Biden’s concessions have gone to mollify conservative holdouts Manchin and Sinema. To satisfy the two senators, Jayapal’s Progressive Caucus, which represents 96 lawmakers and aligns much more closely with Democratic voter preferences, is being asked to take one for the team.
Now Jayapal and the left are wondering: which team? Biden sacrificed $800 billion in progressive priorities to pass his bipartisan infrastructure deal. Last week, he cleared the way for nearly $2 trillion in possible compromise cuts for the Build Back Better package—all to gut core progressive spending policies Biden himself vocally supported. Meanwhile, centrist priorities are protected by presidential decree even when they run directly counter to Democratic Party values and run counter to the will of 66 percent of American voters
Manchin claims his position is “moderate,” but it risks leading Biden down a fraught and ultimately losing path built on the delusion that a single West Virginia senator knows the needs of an entire nation better than its own people. House progressives are right to protect the American people from Manchin’s hyper-partisan grasping, even if that means slamming the door on Manchin’s emaciated shadow of a spending package.
Chris Wallace Nails GOP Senator: Wouldn't Your State ‘Benefit From’ Biden’s Spending Bill?
Manchin’s demand would drop millions of families from the program and right back into financial peril, including tens of thousands in West Virginia. For Manchin, who holds forth on the Sunday talk shows about the importance of “moderate” governance, stripping millions of Americans off a popular and effective program represents a demand as radical and out-of-touch as any on the right. And in the case of neutering the child tax credit, Manchin goes even further than most Senate Republicans.
Manchin also thinks Americans have gotten lazier over the past year. Despite supporting Biden’s child tax credit in March with no work requirement, Manchin now demands any extension come with a firm rule that all recipients look for work. There’s just one problem: Work requirements have never actually worked. What’s lazy here isn’t families who could use the help, but Manchin’s thinking.
“Agencies that administer public benefit programs are ill-equipped to identify people who should not be subject to work requirements,” CBPP’s LaDonna Pavetti, Ph.D., wrote in 2018. “A study by Tennessee’s TANF agency, for example, found that about 30 percent of sanctions in the state were imposed in error.”
It should be no surprise that “work requirements” originated as a GOP attack on the "welfare state" in the 1990s, and The Century Foundation notes that work requirements have never actually been proven to work. At all. As Century Foundation Senior Fellow Jeff Madrick notes, that’s because most federal aid recipients are already likely to return to work within a year. There’s simply no proof a work requirement improves motivation—but it does prevent a lot of eligible people from seeking the help they need.
By pushing the Build Back Better plan ever further to the right, Manchin hopes to pin the package’s failure on progressives who refuse to support any plan hollowed out by GOP poison pills like means testing and work requirements.
But Manchin has picked a fight with one of the most popular elements of Biden’s American Rescue Plan. If Biden compromises now, he’ll be undercutting his single most significant domestic policy achievement, and possibly sink the whole deal. The public and the party are behind a robust child tax credit.
It’s time the White House learned that the better part of diplomacy is being able to reject a damaging, unserious offer. Manchin’s ego will recover. Struggling American families will not.
Read more at The Daily Beast.
West Virginia Leads U.S. in Flood Risk, Adding to Manchin's Climate Dilemma
Christopher Flavelle
Mon, October 18, 2021,
Mary Anne and Bob Marner in their basement of their Morgantown, W.Va. home on Oct. 5, 2021, which flooded twice recently, sending raw sewage into their house both times. (Erin Schaff/The New York Times)
FARMINGTON, W.Va. — In U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin’s hometown, a flood-prone hamlet of about 200 homes that hugs a curve on a shallow creek, the rain is getting worse.
Those storms swell the river, Buffalo Creek, inundating homes along its banks. They burst the streams that spill down the hills on either side of this former coal-mining town, pushing water into basements. They saturate the ground, seeping into Farmington’s aging pipes and overwhelming its sewage-treatment system.
Climate change is warming the air, allowing it to hold more moisture, which causes more frequent and intense rainfall. And no state in the contiguous United States is more exposed to flood damage than West Virginia, according to data released last week.
From the porch of his riverfront house, Jim Hall, who is married to Manchin’s cousin, recounted how rescue workers got him and his wife out of their house with a rope during a flood in 2017. He described helping his neighbors, Manchin’s sister and brother-in-law, clear out their basement when a storm would come. He calls local officials when he smells raw sewage in the river.
“These last few years here in West Virginia, we’ve had unbelievable amounts of rain,” Hall said. “We’ve seriously considered not staying.”
Manchin, a Democrat whose vote is crucial to passing his party’s climate legislation, is opposed to its most important provision that would compel utilities to stop burning oil, coal and gas and instead use solar, wind and nuclear energy, which do not emit the carbon dioxide that is heating the planet. Last week, the senator made his opposition clear to the Biden administration, which is now scrambling to come up with alternatives he would accept.
Manchin has rejected any plan to move the country away from fossil fuels because he said it would harm West Virginia, a top producer of coal and gas. Manchin’s own finances are tied to coal: He founded a family coal brokerage that paid him a half-million dollars in dividends last year.
But when it comes to climate, there’s also an economic toll from inaction.
The new data shows that Manchin’s constituents stand to suffer disproportionately as climate change intensifies. Unlike those in other flood-exposed states, most residents in mountainous West Virginia have little room to relocate from the waterways that increasingly threaten their safety.
Adding to the problem, West Virginia officials have struggled to better protect residents, despite a surge of federal money, experts say. They point to a reluctance among state officials to even talk about climate change and to housing that is not built for the challenge, leaving West Virginia less able than other parts of the country to adapt.
The measure that Manchin opposes, a clean electricity program, may be the last chance for Congress to reduce planet-warming emissions before the effects of climate change become catastrophic.
A clean electricity program would reward utilities that switch from burning oil, gas and coal to using wind, solar and nuclear energy, and penalize those that don’t. It is designed to get 80% of the country’s electricity from clean sources by 2030, up from 40% now.
A spokesperson for Manchin, Sam Runyon, said the senator “has long acknowledged the impacts of climate change in West Virginia. That is why he’s worked hard to find a path forward on important climate legislation that maintains American leadership in energy innovation and critical energy reliability.”
Others say that by blocking efforts to reduce coal and gas use, Manchin risks hurting his state.
“Not having a credible policy in the U.S. makes it nearly impossible to negotiate real change at a global scale,” said Evan Hansen, a Democratic state representative. “What that means is that West Virginians are going to continue to face greater and greater impacts from climate change.”
Schools, Power Stations and Businesses at Risk
The new flood data comes from the First Street Foundation, a nonprofit that uses more granular techniques to gauge flood risk than the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
First Street measures risk not only from rivers but also from smaller creeks and streams — the sort of waterways that expose towns such as Farmington to so much flooding yet are generally left off FEMA’s flood maps.
First Street calculated the portion of all kinds of infrastructure at risk of becoming inoperable because of a so-called 100-year flood — a flood that statistically has a 1% chance of happening in any given year. The group compared the results for every state except Alaska and Hawaii. In many cases, West Virginia topped the list.
Sixty-one percent of West Virginia’s power stations are at risk, the highest nationwide and more than twice the average. West Virginia also leads in the share of its roads at risk of inundation, at 46%.
The state also ranks highest for the share of fire stations (57%) and police stations (50%) exposed to a 100-year flood.
And West Virginia ties with Louisiana for the greatest share of schools (38%) and commercial properties (37%) at risk.
“The geography and topography of the state results in many homes, roads and pieces of critical infrastructure being built along rivers, around which we show extensive flooding,” said Michael Lopes, a spokesperson for First Street.
But topography isn’t all that raises West Virginia’s flood risk. Surface mining for coal has removed soil and vegetation that once absorbed rain before it reached creeks and rivers, and has pushed rocks and dirt into those waterways, making them less able to contain large volumes of water.
“As the stream corridors fill up with sediment and debris, there’s simply less storage capacity,” said Nicolas Zegre, director of the West Virginia University Mountain Hydrology Laboratory. “It takes less water to spill over.”
Flood, Repair, Repeat
The effects of increased flooding can be seen where Manchin built his political career.
Just northeast of Farmington is Morgantown, where houses perch on narrow streets that wiggle down hillsides, intersecting at erratic angles. Manchin represented the city in the state Senate; it’s also home to West Virginia University, his alma mater.
In June, Morgantown got more than 2 inches of rain in less than an hour, according to Damien Davis, city director of engineering and public works. It turned a main thoroughfare, Patteson Drive, into a river and reversed the flow of sewers, pushing waste into basements.
In July, it happened again: The city got more than 3 inches of rain in an hour, Patteson became a river, and raw sewage rushed into basements.
“We had never experienced anything like that,” Davis said.
Muhammet Ariturk owns a small restaurant, Istanbul, on Patteson Drive. He blocked his doors, but his restaurant flooded both times. “We started trying to stop the water coming here, but we couldn’t,” he said.
A mile north, Mary Anne Marner lives in a white bungalow near a creek. The first flood sent sewage into her basement, ruining her husband’s recliner, among other damage.
“The sewage came up out of the bathtub and out of the toilet,” she said. Marner and her husband replaced the recliner. Then the basement flooded again, and out went the new recliner.
State climatologist Kevin Law said research showed “an increase in extreme precipitation across West Virginia,” the result of a changing climate.
‘It Puts Nothing but Fear in You’
Twenty miles southeast is Tunnelton, where Dave Biggins owns a convenience store in a building constructed on top of an underground creek. Until recently, the creek rarely rose high enough to damage the foundation — maybe once a decade, Biggins guessed.
Then, two years ago, the equipment space under his store flooded three times in a single year. That was nothing compared with last month, when the remnants of Hurricane Ida left his store in knee-deep water, causing as much as $80,000 in damage.
“After this, every time it says it’s going to rain pretty hard, it puts nothing but fear in you,” said Biggins, who lacks flood insurance.
East of Tunnelton is Terra Alta, one of the highest towns in Preston County. In September, heavy rains put 3 inches of water inside Terra Alta’s town hall and flooded a handful of basements in town, according to Mayor James Tasker.
“It comes through the wall,” Tasker said. “It’s our drainage system, which we can’t afford to update.”
Half an hour south, Rowlesburg Mayor Eric Bautista is trying to find money to rebuild the town’s outdated stormwater system, which releases raw sewage into the Cheat River during downpours. “It’s a lousy system that is extra lousy when there’s any rain,” Bautista said.
The consequences reach beyond the county, according to Amanda Pitzer, executive director of Friends of the Cheat, an environmental nonprofit.
“This water goes to Pittsburgh,” Pitzer said, standing at the Cheat’s edge recently. “You have to think downstream.”
‘That’s The Risk We’re Willing to Take’
After West Virginia was hit by particularly severe flooding in June 2016, it created a state resiliency office to help protect against future flooding.
But this year, the head of that office left. He was replaced by his deputy, Robert Martin Jr., who during a hearing before state lawmakers last month compared the role to drinking from a fire hose.
He wants to update the state’s flood-protection plan. “It hadn’t been looked at in around 20 years,” Martin said. “A lot of the things were really antiquated in it.”
Martin didn’t respond to requests for comment. The state declined to make any officials involved with disaster recovery or resilience work available for an interview.
Stephen Baldwin, a Democratic state senator whose district was devastated by the 2016 floods, said the state has moved too slowly. The sluggishness reflects the political taint attached to global warming, he said.
“Nobody wants to talk about the real driving factor here, which is the climate,” Baldwin said.
As flooding gets worse, West Virginia’s leaders, including Manchin, should stop viewing the state’s identity as tied to coal, said Jamie Shinn, a geography professor at West Virginia University who focuses on adapting to climate change.
“I don’t think he’s defending the future economy and viability of this state,” Shinn said. “The state has so much potential beyond fossil fuels.”
That point of view remains a tough sell for many West Virginians, despite repeated disasters.
“I’m a big advocate for using the natural resources that we have,” said Hall, the Farmington resident and cousin-in-law of Manchin’s.
Forced to choose between burning less coal or suffering through worsening floods, he said worsening floods were the lesser danger.
“You can replace a house,” Hall said. “That’s the risk we’re willing to take.”
© 2021 The New York Times Company
Christopher Flavelle
Mon, October 18, 2021,
Mary Anne and Bob Marner in their basement of their Morgantown, W.Va. home on Oct. 5, 2021, which flooded twice recently, sending raw sewage into their house both times. (Erin Schaff/The New York Times)
FARMINGTON, W.Va. — In U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin’s hometown, a flood-prone hamlet of about 200 homes that hugs a curve on a shallow creek, the rain is getting worse.
Those storms swell the river, Buffalo Creek, inundating homes along its banks. They burst the streams that spill down the hills on either side of this former coal-mining town, pushing water into basements. They saturate the ground, seeping into Farmington’s aging pipes and overwhelming its sewage-treatment system.
Climate change is warming the air, allowing it to hold more moisture, which causes more frequent and intense rainfall. And no state in the contiguous United States is more exposed to flood damage than West Virginia, according to data released last week.
From the porch of his riverfront house, Jim Hall, who is married to Manchin’s cousin, recounted how rescue workers got him and his wife out of their house with a rope during a flood in 2017. He described helping his neighbors, Manchin’s sister and brother-in-law, clear out their basement when a storm would come. He calls local officials when he smells raw sewage in the river.
“These last few years here in West Virginia, we’ve had unbelievable amounts of rain,” Hall said. “We’ve seriously considered not staying.”
Manchin, a Democrat whose vote is crucial to passing his party’s climate legislation, is opposed to its most important provision that would compel utilities to stop burning oil, coal and gas and instead use solar, wind and nuclear energy, which do not emit the carbon dioxide that is heating the planet. Last week, the senator made his opposition clear to the Biden administration, which is now scrambling to come up with alternatives he would accept.
Manchin has rejected any plan to move the country away from fossil fuels because he said it would harm West Virginia, a top producer of coal and gas. Manchin’s own finances are tied to coal: He founded a family coal brokerage that paid him a half-million dollars in dividends last year.
But when it comes to climate, there’s also an economic toll from inaction.
The new data shows that Manchin’s constituents stand to suffer disproportionately as climate change intensifies. Unlike those in other flood-exposed states, most residents in mountainous West Virginia have little room to relocate from the waterways that increasingly threaten their safety.
Adding to the problem, West Virginia officials have struggled to better protect residents, despite a surge of federal money, experts say. They point to a reluctance among state officials to even talk about climate change and to housing that is not built for the challenge, leaving West Virginia less able than other parts of the country to adapt.
The measure that Manchin opposes, a clean electricity program, may be the last chance for Congress to reduce planet-warming emissions before the effects of climate change become catastrophic.
A clean electricity program would reward utilities that switch from burning oil, gas and coal to using wind, solar and nuclear energy, and penalize those that don’t. It is designed to get 80% of the country’s electricity from clean sources by 2030, up from 40% now.
A spokesperson for Manchin, Sam Runyon, said the senator “has long acknowledged the impacts of climate change in West Virginia. That is why he’s worked hard to find a path forward on important climate legislation that maintains American leadership in energy innovation and critical energy reliability.”
Others say that by blocking efforts to reduce coal and gas use, Manchin risks hurting his state.
“Not having a credible policy in the U.S. makes it nearly impossible to negotiate real change at a global scale,” said Evan Hansen, a Democratic state representative. “What that means is that West Virginians are going to continue to face greater and greater impacts from climate change.”
Schools, Power Stations and Businesses at Risk
The new flood data comes from the First Street Foundation, a nonprofit that uses more granular techniques to gauge flood risk than the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
First Street measures risk not only from rivers but also from smaller creeks and streams — the sort of waterways that expose towns such as Farmington to so much flooding yet are generally left off FEMA’s flood maps.
First Street calculated the portion of all kinds of infrastructure at risk of becoming inoperable because of a so-called 100-year flood — a flood that statistically has a 1% chance of happening in any given year. The group compared the results for every state except Alaska and Hawaii. In many cases, West Virginia topped the list.
Sixty-one percent of West Virginia’s power stations are at risk, the highest nationwide and more than twice the average. West Virginia also leads in the share of its roads at risk of inundation, at 46%.
The state also ranks highest for the share of fire stations (57%) and police stations (50%) exposed to a 100-year flood.
And West Virginia ties with Louisiana for the greatest share of schools (38%) and commercial properties (37%) at risk.
“The geography and topography of the state results in many homes, roads and pieces of critical infrastructure being built along rivers, around which we show extensive flooding,” said Michael Lopes, a spokesperson for First Street.
But topography isn’t all that raises West Virginia’s flood risk. Surface mining for coal has removed soil and vegetation that once absorbed rain before it reached creeks and rivers, and has pushed rocks and dirt into those waterways, making them less able to contain large volumes of water.
“As the stream corridors fill up with sediment and debris, there’s simply less storage capacity,” said Nicolas Zegre, director of the West Virginia University Mountain Hydrology Laboratory. “It takes less water to spill over.”
Flood, Repair, Repeat
The effects of increased flooding can be seen where Manchin built his political career.
Just northeast of Farmington is Morgantown, where houses perch on narrow streets that wiggle down hillsides, intersecting at erratic angles. Manchin represented the city in the state Senate; it’s also home to West Virginia University, his alma mater.
In June, Morgantown got more than 2 inches of rain in less than an hour, according to Damien Davis, city director of engineering and public works. It turned a main thoroughfare, Patteson Drive, into a river and reversed the flow of sewers, pushing waste into basements.
In July, it happened again: The city got more than 3 inches of rain in an hour, Patteson became a river, and raw sewage rushed into basements.
“We had never experienced anything like that,” Davis said.
Muhammet Ariturk owns a small restaurant, Istanbul, on Patteson Drive. He blocked his doors, but his restaurant flooded both times. “We started trying to stop the water coming here, but we couldn’t,” he said.
A mile north, Mary Anne Marner lives in a white bungalow near a creek. The first flood sent sewage into her basement, ruining her husband’s recliner, among other damage.
“The sewage came up out of the bathtub and out of the toilet,” she said. Marner and her husband replaced the recliner. Then the basement flooded again, and out went the new recliner.
State climatologist Kevin Law said research showed “an increase in extreme precipitation across West Virginia,” the result of a changing climate.
‘It Puts Nothing but Fear in You’
Twenty miles southeast is Tunnelton, where Dave Biggins owns a convenience store in a building constructed on top of an underground creek. Until recently, the creek rarely rose high enough to damage the foundation — maybe once a decade, Biggins guessed.
Then, two years ago, the equipment space under his store flooded three times in a single year. That was nothing compared with last month, when the remnants of Hurricane Ida left his store in knee-deep water, causing as much as $80,000 in damage.
“After this, every time it says it’s going to rain pretty hard, it puts nothing but fear in you,” said Biggins, who lacks flood insurance.
East of Tunnelton is Terra Alta, one of the highest towns in Preston County. In September, heavy rains put 3 inches of water inside Terra Alta’s town hall and flooded a handful of basements in town, according to Mayor James Tasker.
“It comes through the wall,” Tasker said. “It’s our drainage system, which we can’t afford to update.”
Half an hour south, Rowlesburg Mayor Eric Bautista is trying to find money to rebuild the town’s outdated stormwater system, which releases raw sewage into the Cheat River during downpours. “It’s a lousy system that is extra lousy when there’s any rain,” Bautista said.
The consequences reach beyond the county, according to Amanda Pitzer, executive director of Friends of the Cheat, an environmental nonprofit.
“This water goes to Pittsburgh,” Pitzer said, standing at the Cheat’s edge recently. “You have to think downstream.”
‘That’s The Risk We’re Willing to Take’
After West Virginia was hit by particularly severe flooding in June 2016, it created a state resiliency office to help protect against future flooding.
But this year, the head of that office left. He was replaced by his deputy, Robert Martin Jr., who during a hearing before state lawmakers last month compared the role to drinking from a fire hose.
He wants to update the state’s flood-protection plan. “It hadn’t been looked at in around 20 years,” Martin said. “A lot of the things were really antiquated in it.”
Martin didn’t respond to requests for comment. The state declined to make any officials involved with disaster recovery or resilience work available for an interview.
Stephen Baldwin, a Democratic state senator whose district was devastated by the 2016 floods, said the state has moved too slowly. The sluggishness reflects the political taint attached to global warming, he said.
“Nobody wants to talk about the real driving factor here, which is the climate,” Baldwin said.
As flooding gets worse, West Virginia’s leaders, including Manchin, should stop viewing the state’s identity as tied to coal, said Jamie Shinn, a geography professor at West Virginia University who focuses on adapting to climate change.
“I don’t think he’s defending the future economy and viability of this state,” Shinn said. “The state has so much potential beyond fossil fuels.”
That point of view remains a tough sell for many West Virginians, despite repeated disasters.
“I’m a big advocate for using the natural resources that we have,” said Hall, the Farmington resident and cousin-in-law of Manchin’s.
Forced to choose between burning less coal or suffering through worsening floods, he said worsening floods were the lesser danger.
“You can replace a house,” Hall said. “That’s the risk we’re willing to take.”
© 2021 The New York Times Company
