Rick Perry’s Dirty Deals With Big Coal

Perry fast-tracked new plants and made Texas even more polluted than it already was.

Texas Gov. Rick PerryJebb Harris/The Orange County Register/ZUMA Press

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


In April 2006, a few days before Earth Day, Texas Gov. Rick Perry joined executives of TXU, the state’s largest utility and biggest carbon dioxide emitter, in cheering plans to open a staggering 11 new coal-fired power plants throughout Texas. With rolling blackouts still fresh on many Texans’ minds, Perry hailed TXU’s rapid expansion as a path to energy security, not to mention a way to create jobs and potentially lower energy costs.

Perry had earned his spot alongside the TXU brass. Months before the announcement, Perry signed a controversial executive order fast-tracking the permitting process for new coal-fired plants, shrinking a process that once took anywhere between one and four years down to a mere six months. And at the same time he was helping usher in new coal plants, Perry was raking in tens of thousands of dollars in donations from TXU. “Perry is very pro-coal, and will bend over backward to do whatever the coal industry asks of him,” says Tom Smith, director of Public Citizen’s Texas office. “He’s the longest ongoing natural disaster in Texas history.”

There is plenty in Rick Perry’s record as Texas governor to worry and anger environmentalists watching him surge to the front of the Republican presidential field. Texas has ranked No. 1 in the nation for carbon dioxide emissions under Perry’s watch. He’s packed the state’s environmental watchdog, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, with appointees more interested in dishing out permits to polluters than protecting the environment. And for much of his governorship, Perry has warred with the federal Environmental Protection Agency. “Texas is almost over the top in its hands-off approach to environmental regulation and bias toward industry under Gov. Perry,” says Ilan Levin, an attorney with the Environmental Integrity Project, an national advocacy group that fights for strong enforcement of environmental laws. (A Perry spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.)

Levin points to Perry’s relationship with coal giant TXU as a case study in his willingness to cozy up with dirty industries, especially when it suits him politically.

Power plants that burn coal are a leading source of pollution in the United States. Coal pollution results in 12,000 hospitalizations every year for chest pain, coughing, and breathing trouble, and worsens the effects of asthma and emphysema. Toxic mercury spewed by coal plants poisons rivers and aquatic wildlife while posing serious health risks to children and pregnant women. Given all that, it was no surprise that cities and towns in the shadow of the proposed plants rose up in opposition, in some cases suing to block the new plants. Perry’s executive order was also challenged in court and later deemed unconstitutional by a Travis County judge. In the end, only three of TXU’s new coal plants were built. But Perry stood by the utility throughout 16-month battle.

That loyalty paid off. Between January 2001 and July 2011, the utility, now known as Energy Future Holdings Corporation, gave (PDF) Perry $633,575—more than any other politician. Former TXU chairman Erle Nye, whom Perry appointed to Texas A&M’s Board of Regents in 2003, gave the governor $2,000 on the day he signed the coal-plant executive order, and another $25,000 six months later. TXU’s PAC also gave Perry $5,000 shortly after he signed the order.

The TXU ties go beyond Perry. The governor’s business development director Roberto DeHoyos joined state legislators in 2007 on a deer hunt paid for by a TXU lobbyist, and another lobbyist plied Perry’s legislative director, Ken Armbrister, with free college sports tickets. “TXU has long found it cheaper to invest in politicians than pollution controls, and Rick Perry is the case in point,” Public Citizen’s Tom Smith says.

Perry’s alliance with big polluters isn’t surprising considering his own denial of climate change. In his book Fed Up!, Perry writes that “we have been experiencing a cooling trend” on earth—a thoroughly debunked claim. As for the vast number of experts who say human-caused global warming is real, Perry explained in New Hampshire last month, “I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects.”

Perry has also fought a years-long battle with the EPA, the federal government’s environmental watchdog, with Perry constantly savaging what he sees as the agency’s unnecessary meddling in how Texas does business.

In the past three years alone, Texas has sued the EPA a dozen times. Last year, for instance, the state sued the agency when the EPA struck down the state’s “flexible” air quality permitting system for violating the Clean Air Act. And in February 2010, Texas sued the EPA over its plans to begin to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, a move that Perry slammed as “arbitrary and capricious” and “contrary to the Clean Air Act.” Many states, on the other hand, have begun to comply with the EPA’s GHG rules, which attempt to directly grapple with the growing pace of climate change.

Make no mistake: Perry’s environmental record isn’t an aberration. Texas’s record on emissions, air quality, and environmental protection has badly lagged the rest of the country under previous governors. It was George W. Bush who, as Texas governor, allowed industry to police itself when it came to emissions and environmental protection. But even then, critics say Texas’ environmental stewardship is worse than ever with Perry in charge. “He’s not somebody who is a thoughtful conservative who wants to protect things but do so in the least intrusive way,” says Jim Marston, director of the Environmental Defense Fund’s Texas Office. “He simply is for helping his friends make money at the expense of the public or landowners.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate