The Last Mountain: Bill Haney
Tags: The Last Mountain, Robert F Kennedy Jr, environment, campaign finance, Citizens United, Coal River Mountain
There's nothing pretty about coal mining at the best of times, but mountaintop removal mining is downright obscene. The process is ugly in every sense of the word, but is less labor intensive, and therefore cheaper and more desirable for the big energy corporations who do it. However the hidden expense in terms of the environment, public health, employment, and subsidies mean that it's something that the American public is paying dearly for. The cost of mountaintop removal mining is something that is literally and metaphorically killing us.
The sordid details involve deforestation to prepare the site. The 'overburden' - in this case a euphemism for the top 250 to 500 feet of a mountain - is then removed using dynamite to reveal the underlying coal seam. The rubble created as the mountaintop is blown away is generally pushed down the mountainside, covering flora and fauna, rivers and streams, and anything else in its wake. Once the coal has been removed the mining companies are supposed to restore the site, but this requirement is at best broadly interpreted, and at worse blatantly flouted with few repercussions.
Fifty percent of the electricity produced in the US comes from coal-powered plants, and thirty percent of the coal used comes from Appalachia. As a result, 500 majestic Appalachian mountains have been destroyed. The biggest perpetrator of this destruction is Massey Energy, who proudly proclaim on their website that their 'vision' is 'to be the premier supplier of quality coal from Central Appalachia to worldwide markets.'
The physical removal of coal however, is only the first stage in a highly toxic chain of events. The coal then has to be prepared, a procedure that uses vast amounts of water to wash off the soil and rock. The byproduct of this is a filthy sludge, which contains all manner of heavy metals and other such carcinogens, that is stored in vast impoundments. These sludge ponds are generally lazily constructed using dirt that is blasted off the mountaintop to damn a valley below. For the most part, there's no concrete or steel reinforcement as would befit dams built on such a scale. Because of this, many of these impoundments are leaking, and, furthermore, because these structures are not lined, the pollutants even in the sound dams leak into the surrounding water table.
The environmental impact of such mining practices is supposed to be mitigated by the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, which in turn are supposed to be enforced by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), and, to some extent, the Army Corps of Engineers. But a Bush-era single word change to the Clean Water Act arrested its ability to control pollution, much to the delight of the polluters. Known as the Fill Rule, the definition of allowable fill material that could be dumped into lakes, rivers, and streams was essentially broadened to include all manner of waste. Thus, the Clean Water Act now serves as a license for big business to pollute.
Because of the intrinsically dirty nature of coal mining and the cozy relationship the industrialists have with those in power (George Bush famously called his election to office 'a coal-fired victory' because of the extent of the industry's contributions to his cause), pollution is an inevitable part of the process and polluters are rarely brought to task. For example, according to Environmental Protection Agency records, Massey Energy committed over 60,000 violations between 2000 and 2006, but has paid a pittance in fines, which when compared to the company's profits barely even register as a tickle on the wrist, never mind the slap they're supposed to be.
In the lieu of the government acting in the interests of the people it's supposed to represent, the battle for clean air and water, and sustainable energy and jobs is being fought on the ground by those Big Coal directly adversely effects. The struggle of one such community in West Virginia's Coal River Valley, whose homes, land, health, and employment prospects have been blighted by Massey's mountaintop removal mining operations, is documented in a new film, The Last Mountain.
A collaboration between filmmaker Bill Haney (whose previous credits include the Academy Award-shortlisted Price of Sugar) and renowned environmental lawyer and activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., The Last Mountain should be mandatory viewing for anyone who's ever switched on a light. The film not only tells the inspiring story of the grassroots fight against the Goliath that is Massey, but also underlines our implicit culpability, which can be summed up by one simple yet staggering statistic: sixteen pounds of coal is burned each day for every man woman and child in the US.
SuicideGirls participated in roundtables with Haney and Kennedy earlier this month. The following is excerpted from the interview with Haney (our conversation with Kennedy is posted here).
Question: One of the great things about the documentary, you did this in The Price of Sugar and you've done it again here, you humanize the story. You throw a lot of statistics and facts out, but at the same time you make individuals the centerpiece. How did you go about designing this particular documentary and selecting the people that you would have involved?
Bill Haney: ...I try to make movies that would move an audience the same that they would move me. I find stories of ordinary people who...circumstances press into finding things in their character that are extraordinary. I find those kind of people really compelling and really inspiring...The fight for Coal River Mountain itself is both an important story for me, and a metaphor for the fight for our energy future and the struggle to use democracy really, citizen democracy...
Then of course, there is connecting us more than 'this is a tale happening to these people far, far away.' What about our role in this? Because we're making decisions and our decisions are affecting this. Every time we click on our iPod or click on a light in America 50% of it comes from coal. And to be disconnected from those consequences -- not I think willfully, just because we're all busy and most of us have our own jobs and our own families, it's hard to keep up with this stuff -- but to not understand the linkage makes us in a curious way complicit in something that probably none of us would accept. In some way I'm trying to find a way to tell all of that, and do it in a way that it cuts through the chaff that the fossil fuel industry just pours through the television at people, telling you that there's green clean coal. Just to say it -- picture the coal -- how clean is it? But, in a way, if they just say it long enough, you start to kind of lose touch with it...
Then of course, there is connecting us more than 'this is a tale happening to these people far, far away.' What about our role in this? Because we're making decisions and our decisions are affecting this. Every time we click on our iPod or click on a light in America 50% of it comes from coal. And to be disconnected from those consequences -- not I think willfully, just because we're all busy and most of us have our own jobs and our own families, it's hard to keep up with this stuff -- but to not understand the linkage makes us in a curious way complicit in something that probably none of us would accept. In some way I'm trying to find a way to tell all of that, and do it in a way that it cuts through the chaff that the fossil fuel industry just pours through the television at people, telling you that there's green clean coal. Just to say it -- picture the coal -- how clean is it? But, in a way, if they just say it long enough, you start to kind of lose touch with it...
Q:
How did you pick your subject?
BH:
...Filmmaking is part of my work life. I also run high tech companies and I run a charity. In the filmmaking part of my work life I've made 14 movies, or something like that. Half narrative basically, and half documentaries...I have this view that there are a lot of movies I enjoy watching for three hours; For something to be worth working on for three years, I have to feel like it means something to me. To some extent, I look back and it feels like issues of inspiration and justice seem to be the things that matter to me, so I keep doing those.
Q:
Why this one?
BH:
The roots of this one are more complex than sometimes they are. I began my work life as a freshman at college in 1980 designing air pollution control systems for power plants. I invented a system for reducing what's called NOx [nitrogen oxide] emissions for power plants -- which are a precursor of acid rain and ground level ozone, or what you guys see as smog here. I spent the years 18 to 24 putting that up all over the world in power plants...and it gave me exposure to the extraordinary environmental footprint of fossil fuel plants in general, and coal in particular.
In the years that have followed I have taught environmental policy at Harvard, I've done this stuff at the EPA and lots of environmental things. I've long been wondering about what is the single most pernicious attack on the global environment and public health, and I just constantly come back to coal. So let's say that was a recurring theme.
Then Bobby Kennedy wrote a book called Crimes Against Nature. He really showed in that book, in a very powerful way, how an attack on the environment has effectively been an attack on our democracy. That in order to get away with the things that are the most egregiously profitable and destructive, you really have to subordinate the public's will.
So, for example in West Virginia...which is at the heart, heart, heart of coal country, long generations of coal country, intergenerational family commitment, deep patriotic linkages...two thirds of the people at public poles are against mountaintop mining. So how come every politician is for it? I mean, we're a democracy after all right? So Bobby, chapter and verse, hammer and tong, asked these questions, and I began to awaken a perspective in me that I was thinking about. That, in a sense, the same way that the banks privatize the gain and publicize the losses to all of our challenge, so also are the coal industry giants doing...
Then my friend Clara Bingham, one of our producers, she's a pretty famous investigative journalist, she began doing a set of stories on the corruption of the safety standards and other kinds of mine behavior questions. You know, where are they allowed to pump stuff in the ground or where are they allowed to actually shut off the methane emission standards, and what are they doing when they're caught violating. So the more immediate personal familial health consequences, safety consequences, became apparent.
I started looking for a story that would crystallize these themes, and the people in Coal River Mountain were that. They were unusually courageous and unusually effective. And probably frankly for me, most important of all, because I'm not a big fan of films that demonstrate another problem. I think you really have to go both ways. You have to find a problem and propose a solution. It doesn't have to be the perfect solution, other people can debate the solution, but it just is not as useful or interesting to me. This community had seen that as well, and they decided that they needed to know not just what they were against, but what they were for, and then they had to take action. Of course, to take action if you're a waitress or a former marine or an ex-coal miner in West Virginia, takes an awful lot of courage.
...Your values aren't things that you talk about. Your values are things you're willing to make sacrifices for. What will you give something up for? These folks were giving something up. They were giving it up every day. And those kind of characters are what draw me an awful lot I think. I admire them, I respect them, you know, I think they're inspiring to me. My guess is even if there's some other issue that an audience is thinking about that's more powerful to them than coal mining in West Virginia, they might take sustenance from the example of these extraordinary people...
In the years that have followed I have taught environmental policy at Harvard, I've done this stuff at the EPA and lots of environmental things. I've long been wondering about what is the single most pernicious attack on the global environment and public health, and I just constantly come back to coal. So let's say that was a recurring theme.
Then Bobby Kennedy wrote a book called Crimes Against Nature. He really showed in that book, in a very powerful way, how an attack on the environment has effectively been an attack on our democracy. That in order to get away with the things that are the most egregiously profitable and destructive, you really have to subordinate the public's will.
So, for example in West Virginia...which is at the heart, heart, heart of coal country, long generations of coal country, intergenerational family commitment, deep patriotic linkages...two thirds of the people at public poles are against mountaintop mining. So how come every politician is for it? I mean, we're a democracy after all right? So Bobby, chapter and verse, hammer and tong, asked these questions, and I began to awaken a perspective in me that I was thinking about. That, in a sense, the same way that the banks privatize the gain and publicize the losses to all of our challenge, so also are the coal industry giants doing...
Then my friend Clara Bingham, one of our producers, she's a pretty famous investigative journalist, she began doing a set of stories on the corruption of the safety standards and other kinds of mine behavior questions. You know, where are they allowed to pump stuff in the ground or where are they allowed to actually shut off the methane emission standards, and what are they doing when they're caught violating. So the more immediate personal familial health consequences, safety consequences, became apparent.
I started looking for a story that would crystallize these themes, and the people in Coal River Mountain were that. They were unusually courageous and unusually effective. And probably frankly for me, most important of all, because I'm not a big fan of films that demonstrate another problem. I think you really have to go both ways. You have to find a problem and propose a solution. It doesn't have to be the perfect solution, other people can debate the solution, but it just is not as useful or interesting to me. This community had seen that as well, and they decided that they needed to know not just what they were against, but what they were for, and then they had to take action. Of course, to take action if you're a waitress or a former marine or an ex-coal miner in West Virginia, takes an awful lot of courage.
...Your values aren't things that you talk about. Your values are things you're willing to make sacrifices for. What will you give something up for? These folks were giving something up. They were giving it up every day. And those kind of characters are what draw me an awful lot I think. I admire them, I respect them, you know, I think they're inspiring to me. My guess is even if there's some other issue that an audience is thinking about that's more powerful to them than coal mining in West Virginia, they might take sustenance from the example of these extraordinary people...
Q:
We're in a banana republic period now where we've had everything hijacked by the Bush administrations. All the regulatory bodies hijacked, and people just bold-face lie. They don't even act as if they know that they are lying. It's all manufactured. Everything you could pretty much say is no longer investigated, and anything you hear publicly is the opposite of what it's supposed to be -- anything about anything from any company, from any politician, anyone in public office...The truth doesn't matter. It's completely malleable...
BH:
For me, the most egregious sin of the Bush administration was the attack on the Renaissance. They basically attacked the Renaissance idea that first you gather the facts, then you reflect on them, then you form an opinion. They started with an opinion, scoured the universe for a few facts to stitch into it, and told us that that was the same thing...However, I think the public is much smarter than that...
I know there is a trend in documentary filmmaking that's basically polemical. You know, I start with a conclusion and I go look for facts to fit. It can be highly entertaining facts. I can feel very strongly about the facts. I can be a really good filmmaker about those facts. But that doesn't have the same relationship with the truth that I personally am interested in. So finding a balance between being deeply moved enough to be committed to something, and being respectful enough of the audience to try to just share the information, kind of take whatever journey you take, and let the audience take the journey with you, and let them decide what they think. Often the conclusions will be more progressive than the present case policy would suggest because the conclusions an audience will reach will not be subverted by a misuse of facts...
I believe in test screenings because I believe the role of the director is to actually find a bridge between the material being covered and the audience, not to shout their truth. I did a screening that was mostly Republicans and I asked people, 'Do you find the film partisan?' And actually, to my utter delight and astonishment in a way, they felt the film was totally fair-minded. I had one person out of 80 who thought it was clearly the work of a passionate Democrat, which of course I am...
Because the roots of conservatism, the genuine roots, are in conserving. We don't see a whole lot of that anymore, but the old debate of small government, protect nature, troops at home, budgets are small, the government is out of your life, that's a reasonable debate in my mind anyway, between bigger government, higher taxes, more public services. That's somehow gotten manipulated. There's nothing conservative about destroying the Appalachian Mountains for 8 years of coal. I think a lot of people whose political views come across slightly different than mine would agree with that.
I know there is a trend in documentary filmmaking that's basically polemical. You know, I start with a conclusion and I go look for facts to fit. It can be highly entertaining facts. I can feel very strongly about the facts. I can be a really good filmmaker about those facts. But that doesn't have the same relationship with the truth that I personally am interested in. So finding a balance between being deeply moved enough to be committed to something, and being respectful enough of the audience to try to just share the information, kind of take whatever journey you take, and let the audience take the journey with you, and let them decide what they think. Often the conclusions will be more progressive than the present case policy would suggest because the conclusions an audience will reach will not be subverted by a misuse of facts...
I believe in test screenings because I believe the role of the director is to actually find a bridge between the material being covered and the audience, not to shout their truth. I did a screening that was mostly Republicans and I asked people, 'Do you find the film partisan?' And actually, to my utter delight and astonishment in a way, they felt the film was totally fair-minded. I had one person out of 80 who thought it was clearly the work of a passionate Democrat, which of course I am...
Because the roots of conservatism, the genuine roots, are in conserving. We don't see a whole lot of that anymore, but the old debate of small government, protect nature, troops at home, budgets are small, the government is out of your life, that's a reasonable debate in my mind anyway, between bigger government, higher taxes, more public services. That's somehow gotten manipulated. There's nothing conservative about destroying the Appalachian Mountains for 8 years of coal. I think a lot of people whose political views come across slightly different than mine would agree with that.
Q:
Was there anything that you learned while you were filming this that you couldn't believe?
BH:
Yeah, I think the scale. Even though, as I said, I've been...thinking about issues around this for a long time, I don't think I grasped the scale of it. It's almost unimaginable. Like, for example, 50% of the rail traffic. 50%! I mean, we're the largest grain producer in the world. We're the largest timber producer in the world. We're the second largest steel producer in the world. Think of all the cars that are transported around America, all the goods, most of which were transported through the heartbeat of America by train, all of them combined are half the rail and the other half is coal...If you'd said to me, 'do the coal guys get money?' I would have said 'yes.' Who I was just kind of thinking of was the miners, but that the rail guys are four times as big, and that the utility guys are four times as big as that -- that surprised me.
The quantities of materials that go through a coal plant contribute to the vile consequences. For example, the average coal fire power plant is 100 times more radioactive if you're standing 100 feet away from it than the average nuclear power plant. Because although there's only traces of radioactivity in the coal, there's so much of it going through. Or the settling ponds...133 are leaking.
Here's an interesting story; The EPA was forbidden by the Bush administration to actually even ask how many of these ponds there were and where they were. So until December [2008] there was no information of any kind [about] where these things -- which now we know contain 150 billion gallons of toxic metal sludge -- where they were. Then one broke. In Tennessee in December one broke. A 56-foot high tidal wave of toxic metal stuff poured through three giant rivers. They already spent north of a billion dollars trying to clean it up...And the House of Representatives, which at the time was Democrat, began an investigation and they demanded that the EPA at least find out where these things were.
They discovered that there's 600 of them. That they contain 150 billion gallons of the stuff. That they're all on big drinking water supplies because they're basically where you moved coal to a power plant, down the river to the power plant where it used the water for cooling. So they're next to water supplies. And, at this stage, they found out that they were so dangerous that the Department of Homeland Security put a court order on the EPA to say that they couldn't tell us where 57 of them were because they were terrorist threats. So 12 months before they were so uninteresting we didn't need to know where they were. Now they're so toxic and dangerous that they're terrorist threats and they have to be hidden from us...
The quantities of materials that go through a coal plant contribute to the vile consequences. For example, the average coal fire power plant is 100 times more radioactive if you're standing 100 feet away from it than the average nuclear power plant. Because although there's only traces of radioactivity in the coal, there's so much of it going through. Or the settling ponds...133 are leaking.
Here's an interesting story; The EPA was forbidden by the Bush administration to actually even ask how many of these ponds there were and where they were. So until December [2008] there was no information of any kind [about] where these things -- which now we know contain 150 billion gallons of toxic metal sludge -- where they were. Then one broke. In Tennessee in December one broke. A 56-foot high tidal wave of toxic metal stuff poured through three giant rivers. They already spent north of a billion dollars trying to clean it up...And the House of Representatives, which at the time was Democrat, began an investigation and they demanded that the EPA at least find out where these things were.
They discovered that there's 600 of them. That they contain 150 billion gallons of the stuff. That they're all on big drinking water supplies because they're basically where you moved coal to a power plant, down the river to the power plant where it used the water for cooling. So they're next to water supplies. And, at this stage, they found out that they were so dangerous that the Department of Homeland Security put a court order on the EPA to say that they couldn't tell us where 57 of them were because they were terrorist threats. So 12 months before they were so uninteresting we didn't need to know where they were. Now they're so toxic and dangerous that they're terrorist threats and they have to be hidden from us...
Q:
You also talked about the EPA, in language and word. One of the things the film talks about is how the Bush Administration changed the language in a way that was seemingly innocuous...On first read it didn't seem to be all that important, it was a grammatical thing...What kind of impact has that had and where is that now? Why hasn't the Obama administration gone in and changed that? Because it sounds like that's just administrative and it doesn't require Congressional approval.
BH:
Well there you go. It was one of the gifts that Cheney gave America. He'd been in government for so long that he knew that you don't have to have a big public debate about a new law. It's too hard. You don't have to run a new senator who stands up and says, 'I'm going to do this and not that', because then the public pays attention. Just a little word change. By the way, I'm documenting one place, in one part, of one element of EPA. It's happening all over everything. This is where our civil rights got eroded. This is where wire tapping and domestic wire tapping became legal. It's where the banks decided to change the standards on all the home loans...Word by word, just a couple words here, a couple words there, all buried from public sight...
There is an endless sea of this stuff. In the particular case of the Fill Law, its consequences were extraordinary in terms of mountaintop mining, which is what we're talking about, but also all across the country. This notion wasn't just for coal. When you look and you read about people who are doing gold mining and using arsenic to poison the waters in Alaska, or the stuff that's happening in Yellowstone National Park in the copper mines, every place -- now you basically can dump anything you want in the water as long as there's the consequence of creating a dry spot. Well everything has a consequence of creating dry spots...In one part of my life, I built the world's largest recycling plants. I don't know the statistics today, I used to know them well. But at the time there were 13 billion tons a year of waste created in the United States. 12 billion of it was created by the mining industry. All of that is now allowed to be dumped in water and it wasn't before the Fill Law.
In terms of the Obama administration changing it back, I think that a couple of things have happened. The first is that the Obama administration has a Republican house right now...The Obama administration wasn't focused on environmental stuff very hard at the beginning and it has 12 coal state senators who were focused pretty hard on it. So when they were trying to pass healthcare reform, which was the signature domestic policy...[there] are coal state senators, Democrats, that the Obama administration needs on healthcare reform...The administration would've had to prioritize things like the Fill Rule at the national level and, frankly, would've had to start acting in the slightly sneaky way that the Bush administration was so comfortable with. They were kind of thinking ideologically, 'Well, just because they were lying and cheating, does that mean that we're supposed to lie and cheat back?' Because the way that these Fill Laws were changed wasn't really appropriate...
So they've left the EPA to some extent on it's own to fight it out. Lisa Jackson is an unbelievably heroic figure taking it on the chin all day, every day, and with the public support. She has stopped mountaintop mining in 90 sites. She has turned back permits that already existed. She has shut down mines that were contaminating fresh water supplies. She, by herself, has done more to clean up the mining industry in this country than the whole country had done in the previous 50 years. I mean she's unbelievable, but she has not gotten the benefit of a change of Fill Law, and she does not have tremendous [support]. She's under attack in Congress and her support in the administration is passionate but limited...
There is an endless sea of this stuff. In the particular case of the Fill Law, its consequences were extraordinary in terms of mountaintop mining, which is what we're talking about, but also all across the country. This notion wasn't just for coal. When you look and you read about people who are doing gold mining and using arsenic to poison the waters in Alaska, or the stuff that's happening in Yellowstone National Park in the copper mines, every place -- now you basically can dump anything you want in the water as long as there's the consequence of creating a dry spot. Well everything has a consequence of creating dry spots...In one part of my life, I built the world's largest recycling plants. I don't know the statistics today, I used to know them well. But at the time there were 13 billion tons a year of waste created in the United States. 12 billion of it was created by the mining industry. All of that is now allowed to be dumped in water and it wasn't before the Fill Law.
In terms of the Obama administration changing it back, I think that a couple of things have happened. The first is that the Obama administration has a Republican house right now...The Obama administration wasn't focused on environmental stuff very hard at the beginning and it has 12 coal state senators who were focused pretty hard on it. So when they were trying to pass healthcare reform, which was the signature domestic policy...[there] are coal state senators, Democrats, that the Obama administration needs on healthcare reform...The administration would've had to prioritize things like the Fill Rule at the national level and, frankly, would've had to start acting in the slightly sneaky way that the Bush administration was so comfortable with. They were kind of thinking ideologically, 'Well, just because they were lying and cheating, does that mean that we're supposed to lie and cheat back?' Because the way that these Fill Laws were changed wasn't really appropriate...
So they've left the EPA to some extent on it's own to fight it out. Lisa Jackson is an unbelievably heroic figure taking it on the chin all day, every day, and with the public support. She has stopped mountaintop mining in 90 sites. She has turned back permits that already existed. She has shut down mines that were contaminating fresh water supplies. She, by herself, has done more to clean up the mining industry in this country than the whole country had done in the previous 50 years. I mean she's unbelievable, but she has not gotten the benefit of a change of Fill Law, and she does not have tremendous [support]. She's under attack in Congress and her support in the administration is passionate but limited...
Q:
So she's not allowed then to change it on her own.
BH:
She's not in a position to change that on her own, correct...Sadly. Or maybe not sadly. There's supposed to be a process before these changes happen. That process was broken in the Bush administration. The Obama administration is trying to actually respect it...The Fill Law change is complicated, but it in part now it involves the Department of the Interior and therefore the Army Corps of Engineers. So now you've got a bunch of people who have to be involved.
Q:
How significant do you think it was that the West Virginia Legislature announced that they are now going to audit and investigate the DEP within West Virginia. Do you think this is a lame duck move or will this prove beneficial in some respect?
BH:
I don't know yet, I think we'll discover. It's all about the intention and about what genuine consequences take place as a result. It's better than leaving them alone. I mean, I think that the tide against mountaintop mining's free ride is turning...We'll do a set of screenings down there around the Blair Mountain March. I think that...had Senator Byrd not died, he had written letters in the last six months of his life, as the son of a coal miner, really changing his position and attacking the mountaintop removal process. Now this is a place where my personal views and the views of some of the activists in West Virginia diverge a little bit, because I don't think the answer is only to stop mountaintop mining. And I don't think the only place we should build a wind farm is on top of Cold River Mountain...
I think that the United States should get out of all of this stuff completely. I think it can do it. I think in some way that it's peculiar America's optimistic can-do attitude has been eroded by a pile of fear mongering Republicans who want to divide us from ourselves. We've been able to do all kinds of extraordinary things, there's no reason we can't be off all coal and off all fossil fuels in a relatively short period of time. And not only do I think that, but Scientific American, as a moderately conservative science-based publication, says by 2020 we could be out of all fossil fuels in this country. So a much more effective use, for me, of spending America's capital is to build a new power grid and put up renewable energy rather than spending 4 or 5 times that money shooting at kids and having kids shoot at our kids in the Middle East to get stuff that we know is polluting us -- and, by the way, destroying our economy. We read about our trade imbalance, we hear China, China, China. Well we've got a 60 billion dollar trade imbalance with China; we have 120 billion dollar trade imbalance in oil...
I personally think that the Obama administration made a terrible mistake focusing on climate change with the Cap & Trade rules as opposed to building a green economy. The environmental consequences would've been the same, but the inspirational nature would've been wildly different. If somebody said, 'We're going to rebuild the American economy. It's 3 million new jobs. We're going to do it by spending less than we spend on imported oil every year, and when we're done doing it over the next 10 years we won't need any oil from the Middle East and we won't need any coal, and that will save 25 million asthma attacks between oil and coal and all kinds of other health consequences, and put us at the low cost manufacturing for any electricity based materials in the world. I think the public would've signed up a lot more than would've to an international regime where we let the United Nations set prices and trade carbon. It just doesn't have any inspirational quality. I think we're ultimately going to need a president who says I've got a five point plan for rebuilding the American economy, and it says something interesting in it. And much as I'm a Democrat I don't think Barack Obama has yet done that.
I think that the United States should get out of all of this stuff completely. I think it can do it. I think in some way that it's peculiar America's optimistic can-do attitude has been eroded by a pile of fear mongering Republicans who want to divide us from ourselves. We've been able to do all kinds of extraordinary things, there's no reason we can't be off all coal and off all fossil fuels in a relatively short period of time. And not only do I think that, but Scientific American, as a moderately conservative science-based publication, says by 2020 we could be out of all fossil fuels in this country. So a much more effective use, for me, of spending America's capital is to build a new power grid and put up renewable energy rather than spending 4 or 5 times that money shooting at kids and having kids shoot at our kids in the Middle East to get stuff that we know is polluting us -- and, by the way, destroying our economy. We read about our trade imbalance, we hear China, China, China. Well we've got a 60 billion dollar trade imbalance with China; we have 120 billion dollar trade imbalance in oil...
I personally think that the Obama administration made a terrible mistake focusing on climate change with the Cap & Trade rules as opposed to building a green economy. The environmental consequences would've been the same, but the inspirational nature would've been wildly different. If somebody said, 'We're going to rebuild the American economy. It's 3 million new jobs. We're going to do it by spending less than we spend on imported oil every year, and when we're done doing it over the next 10 years we won't need any oil from the Middle East and we won't need any coal, and that will save 25 million asthma attacks between oil and coal and all kinds of other health consequences, and put us at the low cost manufacturing for any electricity based materials in the world. I think the public would've signed up a lot more than would've to an international regime where we let the United Nations set prices and trade carbon. It just doesn't have any inspirational quality. I think we're ultimately going to need a president who says I've got a five point plan for rebuilding the American economy, and it says something interesting in it. And much as I'm a Democrat I don't think Barack Obama has yet done that.
Q:
Cap & trade is such a fudge that maintains the status quo anyway, because it just means corporations can pay to pollute.
BH:
Well, as you know, the notion of it, which was kind of explored most effectively in the CFC protocols in Montreal, can work by slowly adjusting price so it gets more and more expensive to pollute. And you reduce the amount of pollution credits available, you take some out and you increase the price and people get more and more incentives to reduce pollution. But you have to actually have the political will to stick with it. That's a difficult thing in America because our political system is up for purchase.
Q:
Also, as the film illustrates with the tens of thousands of violations that Massey managed to get away with, it seems that in this country, instead of making corporations accommodate the law, we make the law accommodate the corporations.
BH:
Yeah. I think that's right...It's going to get worse because of the Supreme Court...the Citizens United case, it's going to get worse...It's about leadership to some extent too. In a way somebody's got to be willing to take their lumps. I mean, DEP can enforce laws, they just have to go in and take their lumps. Barack Obama could come out and say, 'You know what? These guys are trying to steal our country, and I want to take it back.' And he's going to get an onslaught of negative criticism. He might even lose his next presidential campaign. So what? He's still going to get breakfast, his kids are going to go to school, he could accept that. So there will have to be, to some extent, people who are really willing to stand up for this stuff if we want to change it...
Q:
You have the EPA, you've got the Army Corps of Engineers, essentially checks and balances. You can't get your permit for your mountaintop removal without getting your permit for your ponds and your dumping. But somewhere along the line we've lost the checks and balances.
BH:
The Army Corps of Engineers was utterly unsuited by psychology, by structure, by intention, by human resource design, to have responsibility for this. I mean, they were configured to...you're going to build a dock and put a submarine on it and you're basically putting fill in so as to do something industrial and constructive and important to the nation. Or you're going to build a levy so you can put something into the Mississippi River because it's designed to protect the community down river. The Army Corps of Engineers is going to oversee it from a national environmental, engineering standard point of view. This wasn't about any of that. The intention in none of these cases was to do something constructively industrial -- it was to dump a pile of crap. The Army Corps of Engineers had five or six people nationwide to support this stuff and they're guys out of the army. They weren't in a position of balancing the public will, environmental science, public safety, and economic development. That's the last thing. These guys got in here so they could build stuff so we could fight people who were against us, or who we thought were against us...
Q:
At the end of the film, you talk about how when the system becomes so broken, civil disobedience becomes a viable option. Do you think that it will take that in order for someone like Obama to make the right choice?
BH:
I don't know...I think that Obama, as any leading politician of either party, wants people on whatever flank he's on, in this case wants people on the left, challenging him so that he can look like a moderate by doing what many would consider to be a progressive thing. Presidents rarely are genuinely in the lead...It just doesn't happen anymore. They're poll testing and triangulating and all this kind of crap.
So civil disobedience, or at least civil action, is required in some sense, and that's okay because it's our country. We got all the Federal EPA, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, because people demonstrated on Earth Day -- and it was 10% of the population in the country. 10% of the population in the country. I can guarantee you that if 31 million Americans decide that they want to stand up and say that they want a different energy future in the country right now, we'll get it. But if we all kind of muse quietly in our rooms thinking, 'Boy oh boy wouldn't it be great if it got better, what's on ESPN,' then we won't.
So civil disobedience, or at least civil action, is required in some sense, and that's okay because it's our country. We got all the Federal EPA, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, because people demonstrated on Earth Day -- and it was 10% of the population in the country. 10% of the population in the country. I can guarantee you that if 31 million Americans decide that they want to stand up and say that they want a different energy future in the country right now, we'll get it. But if we all kind of muse quietly in our rooms thinking, 'Boy oh boy wouldn't it be great if it got better, what's on ESPN,' then we won't.
Q:
On Earth Day we're just encouraged to turn our lights out which is absolutely useless...No politician is worried about people sitting in the dark in their living rooms.
BH:
That's what made me like this community in Coal River Mountain so much...The kids who come from there, we didn't show all this in the film, but there's 80-year olds who are doing hunger strikes in the capital building in West Virginia...There's a 91 year old grandmother getting arrested...In some ways this fight for Coal River Mountain is like the Selma of our generation and it's just beginning. There weren't initially all that many people fighting for civil rights either, but it did slowly began to grow, and that's happening at this point...
Q:
You look at coal mining in other parts of the country, the Powder River Basin, there isn't a population there that is going to rise up and demand that the Powder River Basin be shut down...How do you get civic action, civic involvement, where there either isn't a population or that the population seems to be somewhat distant from the problem?
BH:
I think that what we see in American history is that it has to get tied to big questions. Let's take slavery. A lot of the revolutionists were powerfully committed, they didn't have slaves and they didn't live in slave holding states. A lot of the revolutionists came from New England and upstate New York. They felt on religious grounds and on grounds of personal principle that this was deeply wrong. One of the things that makes the American Revolution so extraordinary is that it's fairly common for revolutions to be led by the hopeless, but the American Revolution was led by the rich and powerful. Thomas Jefferson was the richest guy in his state. George Washington was the biggest landowner in the country and he didn't have any kids. He's a 50-year old guy at a stage when the average life expectancy is 50, he's the biggest landowner in the country, he has no children, so he decides he's going to take on the world's superpower by horseback -- in winter. Why? Because he thought it was the right thing to do. He understood. He thought about it in consequence and he thought it was the right thing to do. And the people who supported him thought he was the right person to follow...
And the question in part, I think, is how do we want our economy to work? You can see this stuff, you can see it in big factory farms. We've wiped out the family farm in America by giving huge subsidies to giant factory farms because they don't have to meet safety standards or environmental standards or any other standards. As a result there's 3 million Americans who worked on farms who don't. The quality of the food has gone down. The pollution has gone up. We enriched a small number of executives who take enormous bonuses and then try to manipulate the capital gains tax so that they don't pay that much. So, slowly -- and this is where Obama or where a good leader comes in, [to say] 'this is my five part plan to rebuild the economy, and to do it in a principled way, and I need your help.' I'd think he'd find a lot of Americans - or she'd find - maybe it's time for a she...
And the question in part, I think, is how do we want our economy to work? You can see this stuff, you can see it in big factory farms. We've wiped out the family farm in America by giving huge subsidies to giant factory farms because they don't have to meet safety standards or environmental standards or any other standards. As a result there's 3 million Americans who worked on farms who don't. The quality of the food has gone down. The pollution has gone up. We enriched a small number of executives who take enormous bonuses and then try to manipulate the capital gains tax so that they don't pay that much. So, slowly -- and this is where Obama or where a good leader comes in, [to say] 'this is my five part plan to rebuild the economy, and to do it in a principled way, and I need your help.' I'd think he'd find a lot of Americans - or she'd find - maybe it's time for a she...
Q:
Do you have a choice for who it might be?
BH:
I'm going to leave that to you guys.
The Last Mountain opens in New York and Washington D.C. on June 3, and goes nationwide thereafter.
Visit TheLastMountainMovie.com/ for information on screenings in your area.
The Last Mountain opens in New York and Washington D.C. on June 3, and goes nationwide thereafter.
Visit TheLastMountainMovie.com/ for information on screenings in your area.
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