The Battle for Clean Energy in Coal Country
Reveal
The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX
4.7 • 8K Ratings
🗓️ 3 June 2023
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Montana has a long history of making money by extracting and exporting its natural resources, namely coal. State politicians and Montana’s largest electricity utility company seem set on keeping it that way.
Reveal’s Jonathan Jones travels to the southeastern part of the state, to a town called Colstrip. It is home to one of the largest coal seams in the country – and one of the largest coal-fired power plants in the West. He finds the state’s single largest power company, NorthWestern Energy, recently expanded its share in the Colstrip power plant and is planning to build a new methane gas plant on the banks of the Yellowstone River. Meanwhile, in the state capital of Helena, lawmakers have passed a flurry of bills to ensure the state’s continued reliance on fossil fuels. NorthWestern supports many of these bills, including one of the most extreme laws to keep the state from addressing climate change. Jones follows the money behind the coal expansion in Montana and the local and statewide resistance efforts to push the state toward clean energy.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I'm Al Letson. |
| 0:10.6 | The local coal industry has always been a villain in William Walks Along's life. |
| 0:15.9 | They're like a monster. It's teetering. Ready to fall over. And I want to be part of the |
| 0:24.9 | effort to cut it, throw it, let it bleed out, let it go away. |
| 0:30.2 | William grew up on the northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in Southeast Montana. It's near |
| 0:36.7 | one of the largest coal seams in the country and one of the largest coal-fired power plants |
| 0:42.2 | in the West. He remembers when they started building it when he was in high school in |
| 0:47.6 | the 70s. |
| 0:48.6 | Oh, I remember distinctly all kinds of strange people from all over the country, construction |
| 0:54.2 | workers and they'd blast those power plants to test them. And they could just drown everything |
| 1:02.3 | out even in the classroom. It kind of started you and they were starting those big power plants out. |
| 1:08.8 | The power plant is in a town called coal strip and William was against it from the beginning. |
| 1:14.5 | But when the construction was done, a lot of people from his community went to work there. |
| 1:19.9 | And I had adults and high school students telling me my brother, we were traders, we should |
| 1:27.8 | go back to the coastship and dig coal. |
| 1:31.7 | William never worked for the power plant or the coal mine that fed it. In the 90s, he became |
| 1:37.2 | the vice president of the tribe at a time when there was a push to expand coal mining |
| 1:42.5 | into the reservation. |
| 1:44.4 | They were trying to get rid of our indenation as an obstacle or barrier to unfettered energy |
| 1:51.7 | development, including undermining our sovereignty, promising economic self-sufficiency at the |
| 2:00.1 | cost of our historical, cultural sites. It was just a total shakedown of our way of life. |
| 2:12.3 | For the last three decades, William has done everything he can as a tribal administrator |
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