On the 18th of May, Beyond Extreme Energy and 3ed Act backed up frontline activists, descending on the monthly meeting of FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Protesters blocked the driveway with rocking chairs and protrayed the Commissioners as puppets of W Va Senator Joe Manchin. Manchin is still promoting coal, fracking, and the infamous Mountain Valley Pipeline or MVP.

Cops managed to force the elders in rocking chairs blocking FERC’s driveway to move, only to effectively do their job for them by blocking the driveway themselves afterwards.

FERC for many years has had a reputation as the gas/fracking industry’s rubber stamp for eminent domain. Recently there were hopeful signs of change, only for these hopes to be squashed by the greed of Senator Joe Manchin, who never met a fossil fuel project he didn’t like.

Manchin’s behavior may bear more bitter fruit than even he expected. He has blocked expanding the Supreme Court, and has protected the filibuster so the GOP can abolish it on their own watch for a strategic advantage. If the wave of violent hate wracking the South unleashed by SCOTUS’s anti-abortion Dobbs decision leads to civil war, Manchin’s choices will harvest a fruit as bitter as juice from a citrus-rust damaged, shrunken and mottled Florida orange.