In mid-October, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a Democrat, announced he would forgo the prosperity of his constituents and their descendants by refusing to vote for a climate measure billed as the nation’s last-ditch effort to secure a livable future. 

That measure is the Clean Electricity Payment Program, or CEPP, a $150 billion plan that would incentivize utilities to switch to clean energy sources like solar, wind, and nuclear and penalize those continuing to burn fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas. Experts say it’s the nation’s best chance to meet the Biden administration’s climate goal of 80 percent clean electricity sources by 2030. The popular program is cited as the pillar for the Build Back Better Agenda—a $3.5 trillion plan to help working families and create green energy. Paid for by a fairer distribution of the tax burden onto corporations and wealthy Americans, the plan could be a historic investment in tackling the climate crisis, if Manchin would vote for it. 

“I think the whole state is disappointed in Joe Manchin. Every Democrat I talk to is furious at Manchin, and I mean furious,” says Stewart Acuff, a retired labor organizer with the AFL-CIO who lives in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. “There is simply no rational explanation for what he’s doing on the Build Back Better plan than lining his own pockets.” 

Manchin, who chairs the Senate energy and natural resources committee, is a well-known coal baron, owning millions of dollars in coal company stocks through Enersystems, Inc., a business he founded and passed on to his son, which earned him about half a million in dividends just last year. He’s received tens of thousands of campaign dollars from Exxon lobbyists, and he’s the only Senate Democrat who’s also an alumnus of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, the notorious Koch brothers group of legislators dedicated to uplifting the worst elements of capitalism and destroying the climate with impunity. 

“It’s a measure of how amoral and corrupt Joe Manchin is that he is so open about his conflict of interest and so obviously in the pockets of the fossil fuel corporations,” says Acuff. He, like other West Virginia Democrats, door knocked for him in 2018, two years after Trump’s landslide victory in their state, to push for a Democratic Senate majority. “There are a lot of us in West Virginia who worked for Manchin in 2018 who can’t wait to work against him in 2024.” 

Polling shows a vast majority of Manchin’s constituents support the full package, clean energy and all, including 56 percent of Republican likely voters. Acuff believes Manchin won’t be able to win reelection, and though people outside the state opine over whether he’ll switch parties, Acuff says there’s no chance. “West Virginia’s Republicans hate Joe Manchin with a purple passion,” he says, “because he doesn’t do anything for working people at all. And the Trump base in West Virginia is working people.”  

Sean O’Leary, senior policy analyst for the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy, touts these polls, agreeing the full package is fairly popular among West Virginians. According to the center, one in six adults and one in five children experience poverty in West Virginia, because of a lack of well-paying jobs and investments in working families. These high poverty rates and a dearth of industrial jobs have pushed residents out: West Virginia is the only state to have consistently lost population since 1950.  

“There’s definitely a discrepancy between what people of West Virginia deserve and what our political leaders are fighting for,” says O’Leary. “The criticism coming from Manchin doesn’t reflect the reality of the bill or what West Virginia needs.” 

Even Republican governor Jim Justice supports the influx of funds to his state. He’s trying to lure new West Virginians in with his “Ascend West Virginia” plan to offer a cash incentive of $12,000 to those who relocate and work remotely from a state offering outdoor recreation (West Virginia has the nation’s newest national park) and a cheap cost of living. But in order to benefit, the state has to drastically expand its broadband network, in a region where roughly one in five go without it. Funds for that are tied up in the infrastructure bill, which is tethered to the Build Back Better legislation.

The benefits of the Build Back Better plan could re-create a level of economic prosperity that West Virginians haven’t seen since the New Deal, says Aileen Curfman, co-chair of the Sierra Club’s West Virginia Chapter. “As coal becomes defunct and gas continues in cycles of boom and bust, we need clean energy. We’ve got smart people who want to work, but we need to get them jobs,” she says. 

Curfman joined the Sierra Club five years ago, after her then eight-year-old grandson told her he worried the changing climate would be irreversible by the time he grew up. A lifelong gardener, she had already noticed the impacts of the climate crisis getting worse in her home state. While West Virginia’s steep and narrow valleys commonly flood, Curfman says the floods have become truly devastating in the last few years, and the devastation has become almost annual.  

According to new flood data from First Street Foundation, West Virginia faces the biggest climate change risks from flooding. The majority of its roads, fire stations, and police stations could soon become inoperable due to 100-year floods. Sixty-one percent of its power stations are at risk of flooding, representing the highest number in the US and more than twice the nationwide average.  

The funds from the Build Back Better Agenda could help mitigate these risks by investing in a clean energy infrastructure. Acuff wants to see West Virginia build more solar farms, put wind turbines on the mountaintops, manufacture steel for the wind turbines and glass for the solar panels in cities and small towns, and develop a new electric grid. All of this, he says, could provide thousands of union jobs, especially for former coal miners, who could be put back to work “cleaning up the disasters that coal corporations have left all over the state.” 

Luke Peters, the senior project coordinator for the Mid-Ohio Valley Regional Council, a regional planning organization based in Parkersburg, often talks to community representatives and state agencies about additional funding needed for infrastructure projects, many of which are on hold while they wait to receive an influx of federal funding. 

“A lot of our infrastructure is already aged and deteriorated to the point that it needs to be replaced,” Peters says. “Projects that are needed now are forced to sit on the shelves for six to seven years while the costs go up because there’s not enough available funding now.” 

Coal-fired power plants, for example, will require additional investment to meet emission-reduction requirements, but those costs will be passed along to ratepayers without offering much new employment. “There’s much more potential for employment with expansion of solar and wind than to put on the backs of everyday citizens the costs of keeping these antiquated coal plants open. It’ll take a large investment to get power from renewables, and it seems like a generational opportunity to turn that corner now.” 

O’Leary says the provisions in the bill to address carbon emissions should be seen as an opportunity for his state, not a problem. Take, for example, the Civilian Climate Corps, a scaled-up version of traditional conservation corps programs that would put people to work across federal agencies to address climate change and help the country transition to clean energy. “The Civilian Climate Corps would be really important in rural West Virginia because a lot of the work to be done in land restoration and cleaning up environmental damage could be leveraged for mine cleanup and remediation work.” 

But transitioning the energy grid will take resources that low-income states like West Virginia struggle to amass from an overburdened tax base. 

“People here have sacrificed a lot. Literally their homes when coal was underneath, their lives when they were mining, their loved ones lost underground. We provided a resource the country needed, and we deserve to be paid back,” says Curfman. “But if Manchin doesn’t see the light, West Virginia is going to suffer for generations.”