April 4th, 2008
It’s no surprise that Big Energy gets the role of Goliath in Mat Hames’ and George Sledge’s Figh
ting Goliath: The Texas Coal Wars, a documentary produced and narrated by Robert Redford and The Redford Center at Sundance Preserve that follows a recent chain of events in which coal companies tried to fast track a bundle of new greenhouse gas-emitting plants. The surprise comes when a swell of opposition is able to seize the slingshot and fell the giant.
But the coal war that Texans fought (and still fight) is becoming all too familiar in other states. Some observers might describe the burgeoning trend as a bonafide coal rush. According to the filmmakers’ research, that’s what the governor of Texas and powerful coal interests tried to do to taxpayers in 2005-2007– by fast-tracking permits for a score of coal-fired power plants, shortening the process from 12- 18 months to a mellow six months.
The reason for the scramble: Greater environmental responsibility is inevitable in the coming years, Hames says. Many companies want to “grandfather” in coal-powered plants before laws prohibit them altogether or force executives to spend big bucks to clean up the process.
Yet, in one of those all-too-rare instances where the will of the people trumps big-energy finagling, the steamrolling efforts fizzled. As the film illustrates, there are still times when angry citizens decide they’re not going to let a handful of CEO’s build 19 belching power plants in one fell swoop (11 of those plants by a single company) without a full-on Texas brawl.
And after months and months of public pressure and legal wranglings, the number of plants planned was dropped to three. (For now. Read the post in 11thHourAction.)
The docum
entary is about a grassroot group’s battle and quasi-victory. But more than that, Fighting Goliath is about the strangely harmonic convergence of ranchers, farmers, town-folk, big city mayors, small burb mayors and environmentalists who banded together and forced the industry to scale back its plans – a decision that was announced last fall. Most environmentalists would call that a victory.
Redford apparently does. The activist, director and actor had been paying attention to the situation in Texas, where he frequently visited his grandparents as a child. And when his Sundance Preserve began meeting with mayors around the country regarding environmental issues and needs, the coal wars in Texas emerged as a symbol of bigger ills, nationwide.
The film, which is 30 minutes long and focuses on two small towns that would be most affected by the cluster of plants, began touring the festival circuit early this year. Hames and Sledge hope to get national distribution soon. For now, the filmmakers are starting to schedule individual screenings in small towns around the country, particularly in the Midwest, where similar coal wars have broken out.
In a recent conversation, co-director Hames, whose Alpheus Media also produced the 13-part PBS series, “State of Tomorrow,” talked about the country’s coal wars and how this project landed in his and Sledge’s lap.
Q: How did “Fighting Goliath” originate?
A: The project began for me when a woman named Jill Tidman at the Redford Center at Sundance Preserve called me. The Preserve had been doing a gathering every year called the Sundance Summit, where they bring in mayors from various towns around the country – small towns and large towns – and talk with them about things relating to the environment. And at the Summit for the past two years, coal has emerged as a big issue. … There’s a coal boom going on right now. It’s been huge, and the organizers at Sundance have been paying attention to Texas (and how it thwarted the coal rush), and in advance of last October’s summit they said, ‘We’ll have all these mayors together. Let’s make a film about what’s going on in Texas and show it to these mayors. That was the impetus. And from there, it kind of took on a life of its own.
Q: Why do you think Redford was so interested in the topic? And in Central Texas in particular?
A: I think Robert believes the most important thing he can do is affect change at the grassroots level. Mayors are closer to their constituents than any other type of politician or representative. They’re a good group of people to talk to. So the idea for the film came out of those meetings. … I got involved because (Austin documentarian) Laura Dunn made a film called “The Unforeseen” that Robert co-executive produced, about Barton Springs – and she recommended me to him. He lived here a lot as a child. He used to swim in Barton Springs, so he’s really familiar with Central Texas.
Q: So, what happened with the Texas coal war?
A: Coal has become a big issue in the past few years because, first and foremost, we need the energy. Everyone is aware that we need more energy. People such as the (Texas) governor, who are responsible for making sure that our state has enough energy, are looking at all different kinds of ways of providing it.
A good majority of our energy in this country comes from coal, although in Texas, the majority has come from natural gas. But when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita happened, they did significant damage to the refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. So, Gov. (Rick) Perry decided he wanted to fast track the permit process for these coal-powered electricity plants, which is normally 12 to 18 months, by saying that for any new power plants , it can’t take longer than six months. In cutting the permit time down, that suddenly created an environment where coal companies felt welcomed. It was very beneficial to them. And carbon emission standards are only going to get more stringent in the next decade or so, so there’s another sort of thing behind this coal rush – and that’s to build as many coal plants as possible before that happens. So, all of a sudden, you had 19 coal-fired power plants proposed in Texas, and of those 19, one particular company, TXU, was to build 11.
Q: Is this coal rush a national phenomenon?
A: It’s absolutely national (cities and states are running out of existing energy sources and are having to expand their grid to, for now, mostly fossil-fuel based supplements) . But I think this example was widely known by the Summit participants – in particular, Robert Redford. Once the announcement was made that TXU was going to build 11 plants alone, people got angry in Texas and they got energized to fight the coal. … Some of those people included Mayor Laura Miller of Dallas, the Mayor of Arlington, Robert Cluck, Houston Mayor Bill White and Tom “Smitty” Smith of Public Citizen Texas in Austin, who formed a coalition. And what they found was that, in order for them to have a legal case to stand on, they’d need to get involvement from cities and towns where those plants were going to be built. They had to essentially get in their cars and drive all over Texas and enlist the help of the mayors in these small towns. So there were big city mayors and small town mayors coming together – ranchers and farmers, people who are not traditionally allied with environmentalists. Some of them were conservative Republicans, some liberal Democrats, but they were all sort of unified behind this.
Q: Didn’t some of these towns want the plants – to provide jobs, boost local economies?
A: There were a lot of people who saw it that way. Their towns could benefit greatly – they could get a new gym built for their schools. They need the jobs. But at the end of the day, most of these people believed that the impact on their children’s health would be more important than those shorter term benefits. … It got kind of crazy (with the coal interests trying to entice or bully municipalities). In fact, a guy from TXU came to one of the town’s school board meetings and told them they could get all kinds of money and that he could show them how to avoid paying taxes. All kinds of crazy things were going on. At the end of the day, the people said no. Now, a year and half later, that town is still hurting. They could have used that money, but they didn’t think it was the right thing to do.
Q: So, what caused the reversal, or near-reversal, of planned plants?
A: Some of it is still going on, but basically, TXU started to take such flak from so many people in Texas that their stock started to fall. And once that happened, they became a target for a takeover. Two very large investment companies (one from outside of Texas) came in and did a leveraged buyout of TXU and promised to bring the number of plants (legal agreements were made) down to three. It’s a sort of victory, but it’s still too early to tell what will happen down the road. And that’s the way the film ends sort of: It’s hopeful and it’s great that these people could come together and cause this sort of change. But the question is, did they just win the battle or was that the war?
Q: Apparently you’ve had an amazingly positive response to this film, since you began showing it at film festivals early this year.
A: We’re getting invitations to screen the film all over the U.S. right now. (Word of mouth has caught like a prairie grass fire, Hames says). We’re just trying to keep up with it. The film is literally out in front of us and we’re chasing it. … We’re looking at screening in places like Kansas (where Gov. Kathleen Sebelius just vetoed a large coal plant) and all around the Midwest, and we look forward to having a lot more screenings in the near future, and eventually hope to air it nationally on television. We’re also working on a distribution deal. For right now, though, we’re focusing on screenings and an outreach that’s hopefully going to be in places you might find these same kinds of battles going on. We’re planning to take the film to small towns and project it onto buildings in town squares, so that people who normally wouldn’t see a film like this will get to see it.
Q: What’s the bigger picture on this for you? Coal is evil and dirty? Mayors are the only trustworthy politicians? Or that it’s possible for the little people to battle and possibly conquer Goliath — that there is at least a slingshot out there?
A: To me, what this whole thing is about is how people from all different walks of life came together to fight something they thought was wrong. If there’s a lesson here to be learned, it’s a lesson about Democracy. And that you need small town people and big city mayors and ranchers and farmers and activists to get together on these issues.
Natural Resources Defense Council
Additional reading on the Texas fight:
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