Joe Manchin Just Cooked the Planet

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

62% : With the leverage he has in the negotiations, he could have demanded massive investments in clean energy and social programs for West Virginia.
55% : The $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill includes a long list of programs and tax reforms that will help reduce poverty and improve the social safety net, such as universal child tax credit, universal pre-K, free community college, and an expansion of Medicare.
55% : Coal is in freefall.
55% : Coal mining put food on the table for generations of workers.
54% : Many West Virginians are done with coal and want a different future.
52% : There are more florists in America than coal miners today.
52% : You hear jokes about how people have overtaken coal as West Virginia's top export.
51% : In 2012, 90,000 people were employed in coal mines; today, it's only 40,000.
49% : Mountaintop removal, a mining practice that involves deforesting mountain peaks and then blasting them apart to get at coal underneath, has turned large parts of the state into a moonscape.
46% : In 2020, 543 million tons of coal were mined in the U.S., about half as much as a decade earlier.
38% : Third, the coal industry that Manchin is working so hard to protect is already a dead man walking.
35% : In the past 150 years or so, billions of tons of coal have been mined and blasted out of West Virginia.
33% : The policy specifics of the reconciliation bill are not yet clear, but what is clear is that Manchin won't go along with anything that hurts the coal industry, including a reduction of the massive fossil fuel subsidies lavished on Big Oil and Big Coal.

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