Joe Manchin's 'Good Friend,' Union Leader Cecil Roberts, Says Eliminating Fossil Fuels Is a Deal-Breaker

Should the CEPP be implemented, Roberts said he fears thousands of coal miners and coal power plant workers could lose their jobs.

When it comes to the issue of carbon emissions, Manchin has long advocated "innovation, not elimination." He has spoken favorably toward the development of carbon capture and sequestration to make energy sources like coal clean.

Like Roberts, Manchin has had a long relationship with West Virginia's coal mining industry.

Manchin, whose grandfather and father were mayors of the coal mining town of Farmington and whose uncle worked and died in the mines, earned the bulk of his $7.6 million net worth through the business of coal.

Roberts leads nearly 60,000 coal miners, manufacturing workers and clean-coal technicians.

Roberts said many of these miners made $75,000 to $100,000 and paid "almost nothing out of pocket" for health care.

With roughly 80 percent of solar panels being manufactured in China, Roberts said that blue-collar clean-energy positions may not make their way to states like West Virginia, forcing workers to either leave or join a new sector.

To avoid this, Roberts supports maintaining mining jobs and working to make them clean through carbon capture and sequestration.

"But we don't see a lot of that right now with respect to protecting the jobs that we have, extending the life of those jobs, having a place for coal miners to go, having a place for people who work into coal fired power plants to go, and having a tax base [in the coal regions] protected for a longer period of time.".

"West Virginia was the bluest of the blue states, and that started to end in 2000, and over the last 21 years this state has become the reddest state in America or is at least competing for that," Roberts told Newsweek.

For Roberts, Manchin is not just a good friend concerned about the future of the coal industry; he is also someone willing to fight for the right to unionize.

"We need the right to organize in this country again, and if we get that right, we'll have a resurgence in a lot of these areas turning bad jobs into good jobs," Roberts told Newsweek.

"Coal mining jobs were terrible jobs until the union made them good jobs