Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
Joe Manchin makes a lot of money from the fossil fuel industry. In this current 2021-2022 election season, he’s been the top recipient of campaign contributions from the following industries:
Coal mining
Natural gas transmission and distribution
Oil & Gas
The New York Times has reported that Manchin is planning to “throw a lifeline” to the fossil fuel industry just as scientists are warning of cataclysmic consequences should we fail to address climate change in a serious way.
How is this even possible?
Well, he’s the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. As I’ve written before, committee appointments in DC are all about money. The current system rewards people who can bring in the bucks for their party’s campaign funds. The more coveted the appointment, the more money they need to raise. Manchin has that position because he knows how to raise money—never mind that it comes from the industry he’s supposed to be legislating.
According to Peter Schweizer, author of Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets, whatever a politician does not give directly to the party can be used for personal expenses and a variety of other things, including the rampant practice of nepotism.
In reality, according to Schweizer, it is not uncommon for a mere 10% of PAC funds raised by a Senator to go to their party. Most PAC funds are used for appointments to various high-paying staff positions for friends and family. In Manchin’s case, the specifics are even more egregious than this sounds.
In 1988, Manchin founded Enersytems, Inc., a coal brokerage firm. In the last year, he cleared almost half a million in dividends alone from his Enersystems stock. To be fair, he is no longer in control of the company—he transferred that to his son, Joseph.
When the Times questioned Sam Runyon, Joe Manchin’s spokesperson, she insisted the Senator is in “full compliance with Senate ethics and financial disclosure rules.”
If that’s true, the rules need to change.
Manchin already had a hand in crafting the bi-partisan infrastructure bill Democrats say is “woefully inadequate” to the task of dealing with climate change. Now he’s going to ensure the same for the bigger plan we’re still waiting for Manchin and Sinema to sign on to.
Even if Manchin and Sinema can be persuaded to vote for that bill, the language of the bill has yet to be crafted. With Joe at the helm, it won’t be good. (Well, for us it won’t be good. For him it will likely be a guarantee of continued PAC money from the industries responsible for destroying our planet, not to mention more hefty stock dividends.)
Michael Oppenheimer, Professor of Geosciences disagrees with Joe Manchin. He believes the Manchin approach “would keep fossil fuels as a major engine of the economy for longer than the climate can bear it.” And he ought to know.
We need to face the reality that government will never address climate change effectively if the people writing our legislation are getting rich by taking money from industries that contribute to global warming.
If we want to change this it will require a larger majority of Democrats in Congress and a Democrat in the White House to make it happen.
We’d also need to somehow modify the result of Citizens United. Ideally, we’d stop pretending corporations are people too. They’re not. They’re groups of people. A corporate donation is just a way for a concentration of money controlled by an elite group of Board members to obtain undue influence over politicians. Why do they get more power to influence our government that the rest of us?
As for the 1st Amendment argument, that giving money to politicians is “free speech”—I don’t see how that works.
For one thing, it’s not speech. For another, it’s not free.
Perhaps we could insist that if corporations wish to contribute, they need to donate to a political party, not a politician. This would do two things: it would make it impossible for them to influence specific legislation that benefits the corporation, and it would remove the conflicts of interest that motivate politicians to lobby industries for their own personal benefit.
A second change, not quite as helpful as the above, but also worth considering, would be to change the laws on what politicians may do with the PAC money they receive. If they can’t use it for personal gain, or to finance jobs for close friends and family, their ability to rake in the Benjamins by extorting from corporations would still exist, but the personal payoff would be reduced.
Members of Congress already make significantly more than the average middle-class family. Rank and file members of the House and Senate make $174k annually. The median household income in the U.S. is $67,521—well under half what each person in Congress is making.
If you’ve ever wondered why politicians are so out of touch with the concerns of the American people, it’s because they don’t have the same concerns as the American people.
The system is designed that way.
Whatever we do, the Democratic party needs to pave the way for climate change legislation to be effective. While we can’t kick Joe Manchin out of the Democratic party, we ought to be able to strip him of his role as Chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. The conflicts of interest alone should make that possible.
Liz Cheney lost her committee assignments for doing nothing more than telling the truth. Surely blocking the most important legislation in our lifetimes deserves nothing less.
We need to do something. As it stands, there is little chance that anything we do this year, or next, or any year thereafter will be enough—and we’re out of time.
A rapid transition remains doable – but it’s bigger than the slice of the $3.5 trillion now proposed for dealing with climate change. It will require federal mandates, incentives and disincentives to move a lot of private investment away from fossil fuels and into renewables. Mostly, it will require political will and determination – commodities that seem to be the scarcest of all resources
—The Conversation, Michael Oppenheimer