Joe Manchin’s rise to prominence as a key player in Democratic policymaking in 2021 is the result of a perfect storm for the US Senator from West Virginia.

His position as the most conservative Democrat in the Senate means he often has the final say on what his party is capable of delivering, especially when it comes to Joe Biden’s ambitious national infrastructure, social policy agenda. far-reaching and a powerful attempt to combat the climate. crisis.

A walk through the West Virginia countryside – which is still enthusiastically Donald Trump’s home country – reveals a patchwork of communities battered by the climate crisis and barely held together by deteriorating infrastructure. Still, Manchin – balking at a $ 3.5 billion price tag of Biden’s reconciliation bill – is busy trying to suppress many of the policies that would attempt to tackle these crises that so severely affect so many of his people. compatriots of West Virginia.

West Virginia, a landlocked state, leads the country in the number of infrastructure – hospitals, fire stations, water treatment plants, power plants – located on land prone to severe flooding. It even beats Louisiana and Florida. Of course, the climate crisis sees flooding reaching record levels in the United States.

Beyond the inspiration for John Denver’s hit song, West Virginia’s back roads are actually a source of fear and frustration for residents. Almost half of the state’s roads are regularly damaged by severe flooding.

When power outages – among the longest and most frequent in the country – strike the state, they are often fatal, a reality that became clear when a single flood in 2016 cut power in more than half of homes in the state and killed 23 people within 12 hours.

Earlier this year, tens of thousands of people were without power for more than two weeks in freezing temperatures when ice storms knocked down trees on power lines across the state and closed roads.

But, for many West Virginia, the reality of flooding and infrastructure failures is more insidious than isolated events.

For Jill Hess, it’s about trying to get back to Fairmont, her hometown and Joe Manchin’s birthplace, whenever there is a storm. For the past five years, Hess has made it a priority to ensure that her mother, Sue Hess, who survived on oxygen concentrators, does not find herself helpless and alone.

“Every time it rained or snowed, she would really go into panic mode.”

Jill said that as she grew up, blackouts weren’t frequent. But as her mother got older and weaker, so did the power grid.

Despite spending more than $ 1 billion to prevent grid failure, the frequency and duration of outages has continued to increase as the Earth’s temperature rose, causing increased activity on the earth. storms in places like West Virginia.

“I can’t tell you how many times she would say, ‘I need you to be ready and available if something happens because we have a severe thunderstorm warning coming up. “”

Jill would jump in her car to walk over to her oxygen-dependent mother in Fairmont. But with storms in West Virginia, road closures come with the closure of the most direct route to a given location. Adding 15 minutes to be diverted around a mountain was like 15 hours for Jill knowing her mother was low on oxygen.

For Jill, there is a cruel irony in the way her mother spent her final years. Sue had been a home nurse, traveling across the county to help people who couldn’t get to the hospital. In 1968, she traveled to nearby Farmington, the town of 375 people, to care for injured survivors of the Farmington mining disaster. During the 1985 floods that killed 38 people statewide, Sue went house to house to help provide medical assistance and supplies to families whose livelihoods had been devastated by the floods.

Now, despite having retired to a beautiful house less than a mile from the same hospital where she completed her nursing program, Sue has found herself helpless. She was counting on a combination of asking her daughter to drive and calling 911 to get her to an ambulance to a place where she could breathe.

Before she died, Sue would rack up a four-figure ambulance bill almost every time the power went out.

“They would literally park her in the emergency waiting room, on oxygen until it was clear the power was on.” The average power outage in the state lasts 11.4 hours – the second highest in the country.

The five years of unnecessary suffering her mother endured before her death in December boils down to Jill’s infrastructure. What she finds particularly frustrating is that Manchin is not detached from this reality – it is the one he grew up in. Before he was a politician, the Hess family would get Christmas cards from the Manchins.

Jill has no doubts that Manchin knows exactly how much climate change is making the lives of the people he grew up around.

The national media were quick to connect the financial dots on Manchin. Clean energy initiatives could affect its results in several ways, as these results are linked to one of the biggest drivers of climate change in the world: the fossil fuel industry.

Put simply, the US senator is blocking legislation that would demand better of the dirty energy companies that make up his investment portfolio and list of contributors to the 2022 election cycle. And, he is doing so at the environmental, social and economic detriment of his state.

Climate change efforts such as the Green New Deal, which Manchin opposed, would create 10 million jobs across the country and introduce regulations that could clean up cities, according to a report by the West Virginia Climate Alliance. West Virginia’s notoriously polluted waterways – a byproduct of the state’s reliance on coal.

Manchin’s own coal company, which he formed before taking office, has paid him $ 5.2 million in dividends over the past 10 years. Manchin also received more money from oil and gas companies than any other senator in next year’s election.

As Manchin got richer, his condition warmed up. The decrease in cold snaps throughout the year could, according to the Climate Alliance report, lead to a proliferation of invasive plant species and a significant increase in ticks that transmit Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever.

But putting personal profits above his own party and his environmental initiatives is nothing new to Manchin. In fact, it’s a fundamental part of the story behind his rise to power.

Before being the biggest source of frustration for Democrats in America, he showed West Virginia that he would rather work with Republicans against his own party than support anything that looked like environmentalism.

In 1996, Charlotte Pritt defeated Manchin in the Democratic primary for governor – the only person to date to defeat him in an election. But Pritt presented himself as an environmentalist, urging West Virginia to develop industries that were not focused on polluting the earth and creating deplorable working conditions.

Shortly after losing to Pritt, Manchin sent 900 letters to the state’s top Democrats, saying he would not support Pritt because she was not “interested in the concerns of moderate and conservative Democrats.” Instead, Manchin’s letter added that he would support Republican candidate Cecil Underwood. Underwood won.

But, two decades later, economists and climate scientists have sided with Pritt, not Manchin, on what is best for the state.

A 2019 report from the West Virginia Center on Budget & Policy highlighted the dangers of the state continuing to depend on its “running out of rich, nonrenewable natural resources” because it made terrible financial sense. Failure to diversify the economy, the author wrote, only perpetuates the expanding and receding economies that have plagued the state and put it on a “collision course with the efforts of struggle. against climate change ”.

Nicolas Zégre, hydrologist at West Virginia University, agrees that there is a false dichotomy where economic progress is wrongly opposed to tackling climate change. Zégre, who studies flood risk vulnerability in West Virginia, actually said it was the opposite: the state and its already struggling economy cannot afford to continue to be hit by climate change. .

“What are our elected officials doing to protect West Virginia? The answer is very small.

For Zégre, the way forward for Manchin and all who claim to represent West Virginia interests is to invest in a sustainable, clean version of what this state could be, adding that “none of this is going to happen so much. that our decision-makers, first of all, recognize that climate change is happening ”.

An example of how Zégre sees the state positioning itself for both economic diversification and a transition to climate change mitigation is cleaning up its waterways – 70% of which are too dirty to “bear the brunt of water.” natural biological function ”.

According to Zégre, a shift to drinking water would allow West Virginia to provide even more water than it does to surrounding states, a practice that will only increase in value as climate change. causes unprecedented droughts.

Zégre urges politicians in West Virginia, especially Manchin, to realize how vulnerable their state is to the reality of climate change.

“We have so many opportunities, but many of our leaders are looking back for a model of what the future should be.”