Big Coal's Dirty Move

Not surprisingly, TXU's plan has kicked up a shit storm in recent months — and not just with environmental activists. More than thirty cities and towns representing nearly 7 million people in President Bush's home state have joined forces to fight the new coal plants. There have been prayer vigils and hunger strikes. TXU shareholders, disturbed by the financial risks of the project, have raised concerns about the rapid coal expansion. Big investment banks like CitiGroup and Morgan Stanley have been warned by environmental groups of the "reputational risks" of financing the project. It has even split Texas' clubby business establishment: Albert Huddleston, a Dallas oil baron and a major Republican donor, has filed a lawsuit to stop the plants.

"If TXU hadn't been so audacious, nobody would have paid much attention to their plans," says Laura Miller, the mayor of Dallas. "But the way they've pushed these plants is so brazen, so in-your-face, that it made people realize they've got to do something."

Pissing off Miller was not a smart move. A former investigative journalist who got elected mayor by campaigning against her city's billionaire boys club, she is now taking aim at Big Coal. Miller, a mother of three, spends many of her evenings and weekends traveling to small towns in rural Texas near the sites of the proposed plants, urging residents to join the Texas Clean Air Cities Coalition, which she formed to make sure that citizens have a voice in the permit process. She has also raised more than $500,000 to study how the new plants would affect the state's already miserable air quality. Dallas is currently the eighth-most-polluted city in the nation, and Houston is fourth. And because many power companies in the state burn low-grade Texas coal, the state ranks first in the nation in mercury emissions from power plants. Mercury, a potent neurotoxin, can damage the brains and nervous systems of fetuses and small children.

TXU tries to greenwash these concerns away. They ferry toxicologists to city council meetings, where they claim that mercury isn't really so dangerous. They talk about the hundreds of millions of dollars they are investing in "clean coal" research. They make vague proclamations about voluntarily cutting smog-causing emissions by twenty percent across the board in Texas, but fail to mention that federal law will soon require those cuts anyway. When pressed, TXU executives respond that much of the criticism levied against them is unfair or ill-informed. "I think a lot of the negative reaction to our plan is from people who don't fully understand the issues, or simply have a knee-jerk reaction against coal," says Morgan, the TXU spokeswoman.

More infuriating to Miller and others is the fact that the company plans to use old technology in its new plants, rather than embrace the newer and cleaner method known as coal gasification. "If they're going to burn coal, at least they could do it right," says Tom Smith, who heads the Texas office of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. Although gasification is slightly more expensive — about ten percent — the advantages are many: better efficiency, less water consumption, less air pollution. And because the process removes pollutants before the coal is burned, it's much simpler to capture and store carbon dioxide before it reaches the atmosphere.