Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire, right, talks with Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer about a controversial proposal to build a major new coal export terminal in Washington.
The shift to a green economy, as we at CAP have long argued, is more than just investing in clean and efficient energy technologies in various industries””it is a transformation of the economy from one based on volatile, ever-risky fossil fuels to one that is more diversified, more sustainable, and more economically prosperous overall. But if the United States is serious about combating the perils of climate change through economic and environmental transformation, should we really be encouraging the export of American coal to Asian markets?
It’s a debate worth having, and while it has yet to break through the media bubble of Washington, D.C., it’s already heated up in the Pacific Northwest and the coal-rich areas of the interior West.
In Washington state, proposals to build the region’s first large coal export terminals””at the very same time that the environmentally progressive state works to wean itself off coal for its own electricity””have generated a broad-based campaign of opposition to facilities that would include docks, conveyor systems, and large coal storage areas needed to load huge ships bound for Asian markets.
Meanwhile, at the same time U.S. utilities are abandoning plans to build new coal-fired electric plants, and coal’s dominant share of the U.S. power market is beginning to decline, the Department of the Interior is preparing to lease large tracts of its Wyoming lands to new coal mining projects. On a visit to Wyoming on March 22, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced that his department will sell four large coal leases to Antelope Coal LLC; Caballo Coal Company, an affiliate of Peabody Energy; and Alpha Coal West. It is expected that those leases would over 15 years provide the companies with 758 million tons of coal from the Powder River Basin. Interior will also decide this year on whether to advance proposed leases on another 1.6 billion tons of coal.
Why increase mining and production at the same time domestic coal demand is expected to slow? For export, of course. “We’re opening the door to a new era of U.S. exports from the nation’s largest and most productive coal region to the world’s best market for coal,” noted Peabody Energy Chairman and Chief Executive Gregory Boyce in a February statement. How much of that coal may eventually be exported is anybody’s guess. But the simple reality is that coal is on the decline in the United States amid an accelerating transition to natural gas and the prospect of full carbon dioxide emissions regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency.
China, on the other hand, has emerged as a leader in developing clean, renewable energy, but its demand for coal is still staggering, and growing, and China is predicted to build 2,200 new coal-fired electric plants by 2030.
Coal companies, already boosting exports through Vancouver, British Columbia, are increasingly viewing China and other overseas markets as an answer to cooling domestic demand. While coal exports are still relatively small””about 41 million tons in 2009″”they are climbing fast according to data compiled by the Energy Information Administration. Through the first nine months of 2010, the United States exported nearly 61 million tons. Exports to Asia during the first three quarters of 2010 were three and a half times total 2009 exports; China’s imports from the United States rose by more than 10 and a half times in the same period.
Exporting raw materials versus an innovation economy
The decision to ramp up domestic coal mining for export has major consequences for the United States beyond the important environmental and health impacts on the communities near mines and rail transport lines. We have always been a resource-rich country but have long made the decision not to pursue a resource-extraction model of economic growth. In Canada and Australia, by way of contrast, the extraction of minerals and fuels””much of it for export””makes up 4.5 percent and 8 percent respectively of GDP. The major reason to avoid dependence on resource extraction is that countries that pursue this model tend to become much more vulnerable to price shocks in their major resource markets””think of oil in the Middle East, for instance.
Keeping the economy diverse across a variety of sectors, on the other hand, helps cushion the blow that comes from the collapse of any one sector. This is why traditionally oil-dependent countries like Saudi Arabia, for instance, have begun investing more heavily in a broader range of technologies and industries in order to balance out their economies. In Saudi Arabia’s case, new investments in solar technologies in particular also allow the country to use less of its oil for export, making oil resources last longer and weaning the country off its current complete dependence on this very volatile commodity.
Another important reason to keep the U.S. economy diverse is that countries that do put all their eggs in the resource-extraction basket tend to see a corresponding decline in other important industry sectors, especially manufacturing. A weakened manufacturing sector results not just in lost middle-class jobs but also in a decline in a country’s overall ability to foster innovation.
The United States is not in danger of shifting to a resource-extraction economy just because we may make a decision to export some coal to China. But the decision does beg the question: Why would we want to invest in a strategy designed to foster China’s current economic growth strategy of buying up resources and infrastructure around the world in service of its own economic dominance, rather than investing in developing the domestic clean energy technologies and advanced production processes that could make us global leaders in the emerging clean energy economy?
The choice becomes even starker as we consider the environmental and health impacts of a national coal export strategy on individual communities and individuals. It is to these issues we now turn.
The battle is waged in Washington state
While the question of what kind of economy and environment we want to pursue is a truly national one, the battle over coal exports has so far been waged in the states most immediately affected by it. In Washington state, a number of national, regional, and local environmental groups are mobilizing to defeat two proposals to build new coal export facilities on major waterways.
The first such plan, proposed by Millennium Bulk Logistics, a division of Australia’s Ambre Energy Ltd., on the Columbia River in Longview, WA, would have the capacity to ship 5.7 million tons of coal a year to Asian markets. The second, proposed by SSA Marine, would be located near Bellingham, WA, just south of the Canadian-U.S. border. The terminal would have the capacity to ship 54 million tons of coal per year to Asia. SSA Marine already has an agreement with Peabody Energy to ship 24 million tons a year. The coal for both ports would be shipped by rail from Powder River Basin mines in Wyoming and Montana.
Controversy over whether Millennium Bulk Logistics sought to conceal the true size of its project in Longview by as much as 60 million tons a year caused a setback for the company. In response, it withdrew its local permit application in mid-March and said it would submit a new application after further environmental reviews.
Environmentalists who challenged the planned export terminal on health, public safety, and carbon emissions grounds hailed the decision as an interim victory. “They were caught being dishonest with the state and with the county,” said Brett VandenHeuvel, executive director of Columbia Riverkeeper, one of the organizations that had requested a state agency to overturn a county permit that won preliminary approval last November. “People don’t like being misled. There is a strong public desire to know how many trains will be holding up traffic in Longview, how many will be going through the Columbia River Gorge, and how much coal dust will be in the air,” he added.
But both the Longview and Bellingham proposals are being attacked on a number of other fronts as well. Shipping 60 million tons of coal a year would require 22 trains a day, each more than a mile long, causing traffic disruptions, noise, pollution, and other impacts from Montana and Wyoming to the coast. BNSF, a leading coal hauler, estimates each train can lose up to 3 percent of its load in coal dust during transit, which environmentalists assert can be a health hazard. They also cite potential spills into the Columbia River, mercury pollution wafting from China to the United States when coal is burned, and carbon pollution.
Though Washington state officials are considering the effects of climate-change-causing emissions stemming from shipping the coal across the western United States, there are no legal requirements to consider the carbon pollution from burning the coal half a world away.
KC Golden, who directs policy at Climate Solutions, a Seattle nonprofit, says that is a crucial consideration. “We are really at a huge economic crossroads, and we believe a moral crossroads, in terms of the relationship of our state to this global problem,” he told the Los Angeles Times.
But Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who has traveled to Washington state to support the terminal proposals, said that burning relatively clean western U.S. coal would actually be a benefit to the global climate given that China is going to burn coal from somewhere, most likely dirtier coal. And he said it was hypocritical for Washington state to oppose the projects at the same time the state burns coal from Montana and uses electricity generated in his state. “At every street corner, they’ve got a Starbucks coffee or a Seattle’s Best, and they’re drinking all that hot coffee and talking about how bad that coal is,” Schweitzer, a Democrat, told the Billings Gazette. “All the while, that coffee was heated with coal electricity that was burned in Colstrip, [Montana] and put in wires and sent to all four corners of that intersection in Seattle for 40 years. That’s a fine how-do-you-do.”
The coal export proposals also face opposition from some of Schweitzer’s own constituents. The Northern Plains Resource Council has urged Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire to carefully review the export facility proposals the group fears will harm productive Montana agricultural lands and disrupt Montana communities.
The view from Washington, D.C.
The Obama administration says it views climate change as an urgent worldwide problem and the transition to a cleaner and more diverse energy economy as a key priority. The White House website, for example, has this statement of policy:
No nation, however large or small, wealthy or poor, can escape the impact of climate change. This is a global problem, and the Obama Administration is committed to leading the charge to reduce the dangerous pollution that causes global warming, and to make the investments in the clean energy technology that will power sustainable growth in the future.
At the same time, the World Bank just came out with a new proposed energy strategy that would limit its financing of coal-fired power plants in countries around the world, in an effort to “make a significant contribution to the global goals of reducing energy poverty and achieving sustainable development.”
How can these goals be squared with the Department of the Interior’s aggressive leasing of its coal lands in Wyoming?
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, whose recent announcement of the impending lease of 758 million tons of federal coal was warmly welcomed by Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead and coal industry executives, said coal remains an important energy source for the nation.
“Coal is a critical component of America’s comprehensive energy portfolio, as well as Wyoming’s economy,” Salazar said. “Wyoming is the number one coal producer…and contributed…more than 40 percent of the coal used in the nation’s coal-fired power plants.”
Based on news accounts, Salazar made no mention of the possibility of exporting the coal. But it is hard to imagine some of that coal will not go overseas since, as the Casper Star Tribune noted, several of the major coal companies that mine Powder River Basin coal are already exporting U.S. coal and looking to expand those opportunities. Analysts expect a modest increase in U.S. demand for coal in 2011.
Coal exports are increasingly looking like the silver bullet for coal companies and utilities worried about the overall decrease in coal’s share of electricity generation that is expected in the United States in the next couple of decades, as natural gas prices drop and the EPA puts more stringent regulations on the pollution produced by coal plants. Though the Energy Information Administration predicts a modest rise in U.S. coal consumption of about 9 percent by 2035, other analysts””and recent history””suggest otherwise.
The Sierra Club, for example, says the prospects for coal have quickly dimmed as no construction began on any new coal plants in 2010 for the second year in a row. Meanwhile, utilities have dropped plans to build 38 new plants and announced plans to retire 48 plants with a capacity of 12,000 megawatts of electricity.
And Deutsche Bank projected in a report issued late last year that coal’s share of overall U.S. power generation, currently 47 percent, will drop to 22 percent by 2030, with much of that loss replaced by a shift to natural gas generation.
“Coal is a dead man walkin’,” Kevin Parker, global head of asset management and a member of the executive committee at Deutsche Bank, told The Washington Post. “Banks won’t finance them. Insurance companies won’t insure them. The EPA is coming after them … and the economics to make it clean don’t work.”
If the United States is to assume a position of world leadership in the effort to reduce global warming pollution, and if it is to commit more fully to a clean energy future with its attendant economic, health, and environmental benefits, it makes little sense for policymakers to facilitate significant increases in coal exports.
Tom Kenworthy is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. Kate Gordon is the Vice President for Energy Policy at the Center.
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Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
In answer to the heading question: ABSOLUTELY NOT!
Building port terminals for coal export is a horrible idea on every level. Many of us are angry at Salazar and Obama on this issue, since it is an obvious sellout, and makes all of their talk about slowing climate change meaningless.
There is a long tradition of Eastern financial and mining interests viewing Western states as colonies, and showing no regard for environmental impacts. We saw it in the deadly uranium mining on the Navajo Reservation, poorly regulated and toxic copper mines in Montana and Arizona, and, especially, the liquidation of the magnificent Northwest conifer forests. Citizens in the coastal Western states are getting sick of it. Washington State has shown great foresight and commitment in weaning its people off coal, and they do not want to be a part of this latest atrocity.
Eastern bankers and rapacious firms such as Peabody and Georgia Pacific have long believed that Westerners are rubes, and think that they can pacify us by paying them big enough salaries to relax in front of our satellite TV’s. They are going to get a rude awakening.
The problem is that the capitalist system working in its purest form as espoused by free market idealogues cannot coexist with the findings of climate science. Until people in government, such as Salazar and his boss, the president, really accept the science and admit that economic orthoxy as now accepted is, in fact, unacceptable, the paradox pointed out in the post will continue with the selling of coal overseas the logical result.
I hope the people in Washington State can prevent the construction of these coal exporting facilities – that coal needs to stay in the ground. That said there’s a heck of alot money being pushed around and put in pockets to make sure these coal exporting facilities go forward. The money has been winning for the last 30 years, but hopefully common sense prevails and prevents them from going forward.
Nice to hear the point about no new coal plant starts in the last two years (the ones started prior to that, the biggest coal plant construction boom in decades, are obviously getting finished), but at least the low price of natural gas has killed off new coal starts for the time being.
Twenty two trains a day each have to return empty so that is now 44 miles of trains that must pass thru the Cascades, Bitterroots and Rockies largely along side of rivers and thru mountain passes prone to slides and avalanches. All this as weather systems are intensifying. Recall how the Australian coal industries’ shipments to China were stopped with the recent “unprecedented” floods there. Imagine a mile long train washed into a local river along with a good portion of track. It could be months to years to get traffic flowing. With a minimal number of rail lines across the Great Divide remaining lines will be swamped with priority goods…
Coal, let it die… China will do just fine without more of our help. We have given them most of our money already. Besides, if we let china burn all our coal we might as well burn it and get the electricity as value? added. We get the pollution no matter what.
I like the concerns that others have expressed. Here are some additional factors that will be likely to affect the outcome.
Coal exports would also be competing for railroad time with the corn exports to Asia.
The Wyoming Powder River Basin (PRB) leases are for bituminous low-ash, extremely low-sulfur coal, predecessor of the coking coal in high-quality steel production. PRB can also be blended with poorer grades of coal to meet sulfur emissions standards. As such PRB is an ace in coal quality.
Shipping it to China has pluses and minuses. China has a steel industry that exports world wide, and the US is only a sliver of the pie of its steel purchasers. (Source: Monthly Steel Executive Summary of the Department of Commerce, which is accessed through their page, http://ia.ita.doc.gov/steel/license/index.html )
China could also blend PRB coal to reduce its sulfur emissions, and China has indicated interest in reducing air pollution, which is severe in many of its cities, leading to health problems.
In the US, coal-fired power plants have been using PRB coal in a blend to meet emission standards, so this is likely to be part of the market that buys from the new leases.
So, we could be viewing the PRB coal as an ingredient for steel production or as an intermediate measure to reduce health risks from coal, but unfortunately either use perpetuates CO2 emissions from coal combustion. How much do we want to support expansion of coal use abroad or postpone closing down coal in the US?
Burning it to heat coffee in Seattle (Wyoming Governor’s example) is a two-fold folly, emitting CO2 and wasting a specialty resource. Fortunately coal may be a “dead man walkin’, ” for fuel in the US, but are we done with manufacturing steel?
The simple answer, of course, is no, we shouldn’t be encouraging export of coal and probably not doing it either. But the issue is far more complex. Trade agreements mean that this may not be something that can be easily banned without an awful lot of political will, so another approach is probably needed. I expect to see Australia, where this type of export is already a reality, try to tackle this issue before the US makes any serious attempts.
I’ve long encouraged the idea of taxing carbon emissions at the source of extraction or point of import to avoid the political games that we’ve seen proposed with cap-and-trade and a carbon tax (e.g. big credits to current polluters). This would need to include some type of weighted calculation for electrical imports from Canada and Mexico (since the fuel used to create the electricity is not so cut-and-dry). Similarly, other energy intensive imports such as steel and aluminum products would need values assigned as not to put US industry production and export at a disadvantage. This would also help solve the issue of energy and goods export, since the tax would be applied prior to reaching port for export, making non-renewable-energy and non-renewable-energy-intensive-products export considerably less attractive. Further, it helps ensure all inputs are accounted for (e.g. the diesel fuel used to operate the mining equipment to mine the coal).
As far that being a regressive tax, a refundable tax credit (with or without a income cut-off) similar to the making-work-pay credit roughly equal to (or slightly less than) average consumption would likely be a simple answer to that. The credit would slide toward 0 over time as carbon releasing sources are replaced by renewables. If you’re poor and live in a small apartment and take the bus, then you’ll get more back than you spent in taxes. Put up solar panels and buy very little coal power, and you get money back. Buy a new gas guzzler (which also guzzles energy during production), jet-set around the country and live in a McMansion, and you’ll only get back a fraction of the carbon tax you paid over the course of the previous year. Putting a couple of programs in place to help poorer residents make their homes more efficient and getting advanced returns to pay for heating costs that normally wouldn’t be returned until April would solve the problems related to those types of issues. These programs could easily be paid for by the tax itself. Businesses, meanwhile, are encouraged to be efficient since there is no way to get credit back for wasting energy.
Personally I’d like to see a carbon/pollution tax completely replace the income tax for middle class and below, but that’s probably not politically feasible. If we can at least combine it into the tax code, we not only encourage getting off CO2 producing fuels here in the US, but we help discourage export schemes like these. If China or anyone else wants the coal, then they get to pay the tax too, to the benefit of US citizens.
gee, what an awful question to have to ask at this point in time.
NO!
Finding a Stranger in Bed
Imagine that you are female and a wife or dedicated partner to some husband or ‘significant other’.
Let’s say you walk into your room one day and find your husband, or significant other, in bed with some other woman.
Now let’s say that your husband tries to explain the situation like this:
“Honey, let me explain. I love you most and am deeply loyal. The reason I’m in bed with [pick a name] is that I want you, honey, to be happy, and doing this relaxes me and causes me to do a better job at work, and these are key times at work, and I’m due for a promotion, so (you see) sleeping with [pick a name] is all part of the plan, and I’m doing it for you. Besides … [and then comes another convoluted explanation].”
What do you think?
Convoluted arguments are usually confused and often false. And even when they are correct, they usually can’t be “followed”: key audiences give up on even trying to listen or “believe”.
The public’s ability to listen, to understand, to have some (justifiable) faith, and so forth gets wiped out — demolished — when politicians and other leaders try to give complex and contrived reasons to justify things that, when it comes to basic common sense, just don’t make sense. There is a confusion factor, a doubt factor, an “integrity of the argument” factor.
If politicians want to be serious about global warming, and want the public to be serious about it, and want the public to believe that they (the politicians) are serious about it, they simply can’t continue to come up with complex and contrived reasons why doing something like exporting coal to China makes any sense. Period. There is a great deal of truth to the idea that simplicity is beauty. We humans can only hold several ideas in our heads at once.
Cheers,
Jeff
this is quite an effort by Gov. Schweitzer:
Re: Mike Roddy | Post #2
That is a great post. Thank you.
I attended the Future Energy conference in Seattle last fall. Governor Gregoire was among the keynote speakers. There were three important takeaways from that conference relative to coal.
First, was the view that China will inevitably burn massive quantities of coal for the foreseeable future. Coal exports to China through Longview and Bellingham were not specifically discussed. However, there is no question that China is viewed as a vast market for Northwest energy sector businesses. Many of the breakout sessions involved firms of one sort or another trying to tap that market. Additionally, the number one political priority for elected officials at the state level is clearly and unequivocally jobs, jobs, jobs. All of this suggests at least some political support for coal exports through Washington, notwithstanding the obvious environmental concerns and issues that elected officials and local communities will have to address.
Second, the director of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, also a keynote speaker, is certain that the development and implementation of carbon capture and sequestration in China is inevitable. Given the amount of coal China will burn in the coming decades and the need to keep global greenhouse gas emissions within “safe” levels, we either build CCS or we go extinct (my words, not his).
Third, given the above, I interpret the situation thusly: There is general recognition that China is a critical trading partner for Washington State. There is considerable capital support and at least some political support for coal exports to China. Add in the expectation that American multinationals will tap a massive CCS market in China and one starts to sense an inevitability to all this. Cue the Ned Beatty oscar winning speech from “Network.”
There are significant numbers of regular folks opposed to coal exports, some based mostly on the types of nuisance factors others have described and some based on concerns about global climate change. On the other side there is a combination of corporate free speech and local and perhaps state politicians who will vigorously support these projects. The project proponents will argue for local job and wealth creation, soothe local concerns about nuisance issues by making investments in local transportation infrastructure, parks, schools, etc., and divide potential opposition by pitting the locals against “outside” environmentalists. It’s going to be a tough fight for opponents of these projects.
Finally, I think the “policy of brinksmanship” that the United States has engaged in with China and that Lewis has described in the comments here from time to time is a useful frame for viewing these business activities and local policy decisions. Although I’m not sure our national policy is as deliberate as Lewis describes it, inaction can result in a policy by default. As the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases, intertwined through myriad governmental and business relationships, and recklessly careening along the business as usual path, the United States and China must figure out a new way forward that prevents catastrophic climate change. We all hope there is still time to thread the needle and we all know that time is short and growing shorter every day.
This should be a moral decision, not an economic one.
Ironic that Gov Gregoire was the leader of the tobacco settlement. She seems to have forgotten much and lost her way.
KC Golden and Climate Solutions are really leading the fight here, and they could use some support–among the strongest regional climate campaigners in the country
Over the weekend was in Vancouver at the first rally on this subject here–because if they get shut out in Washington and Oregon, BC is the other option
This is a remarkable chance to cork the bottle on this Powder River coal. There are only a few places in the PNW where they can get this stuff out, and they can be stopped
Well, of course, I think the policy of the US should be to discourage the use of coal for generating electricity both at home and abroad. But, my God! 2200 new coal plants by 2030…China always wants to have the most of everything.
What China wants is cheap electricity. What China gets with rampant coal use is:
“We only see the sun for a few days each year,” said Zhou Huocun, a community doctor. “The color of our village is black. It is so dirty that nobody airs their quilts outside anymore so we are getting more parasites.” He had seen a steady increase in respiratory diseases among his patients as the air quality had deteriorated over the years. The unborn were at even greater risk. Shanxi’s birth defect rate is six times higher than the national average (which is itself three to five times the global norm). And coal was to blame.”
From a Foreign Policy article published Dec, 2010. The village is on the outskirts of the industrial city of Linfen. According to Foreign Policy Linfen has been called the most polluted city on Earth and it “has held that unenviable title for most of the previous decade.”
“China is predicted to build 2,200 new coal-fired electric plants by 2030.” from para 5. That’s a lot.
Jim Hansen maintains that to have any chance to return to 350 ppm CO2, we have to stop releasing CO2 from coal into the atmosphere by 2030. This is no secret. Hansen has published this many times. If the Obama administration does not know this they should.
I think it is hard to overstate the corruption and radical evil of our times.
The most likely outcome unless we reduce CO2 at unprecedented rates is mass death of human populations and mass extinction of species. And Obama and Salazar and all the other faux leaders that occupy the Congress and Senate will be complicit in mass death and destruction. Absolutely sickening!!
The world cannot both burn coal and avoid the worst that global warming has to offer! Jim Hansen is adamant about this as Richard Miller, #18, points out. Who is predicting that China will build 2200 coal plants by 2030 (more than 2 a week)? If we are seriously weighing export money versus thousands and thousands more deaths from coal-burning pollution plus the risk of rapidly reaching 500 ppm of CO2 and provoking disastrous feedbacks, then all is lost.
One detail worth repeating: According to some estimates half the greenhouse gas pollution of coal comes from the mining (methane, fuel for machinery, etc.), processing, and shipment. (at work no time to locate citation) Even with CCS, if it would pencil out and/or actually work, the pollution stream would only be halved.
It’s sad that there is no vision of wind, geothermal, and other clean energy coming from Gov. Schweitzer. He has the speaking chops to inspire and homespun charisma that builds trust. He’s touted clean energy in the past. Now he must be paying the pipers from Peabody and Koch.
I think it is important for Americans to know that China will build the 2200 coal plants and fuel them with coal with or without US coal exports. Nothing in the article says that China is waiting for the new coal terminals to be built. President Hu did not sit down with Washington Gov. Gregoire to discuss coal terminals; it was that shill for Montana coal interests Gov. Schweitzer. China does not need US coal but US coal companies need the China market.
In my opinion the fight over these export terminals is one of the most important regional environmental battles taking place in the country. The US has somewhere around 25% of the world’s coal, and we aren’t going to use all of it. Keeping that coal in the ground is absolutely crucial, but we don’t do the planet any good reducing our domestic coal burning if we continue to mine coal and ship it overseas.
Maybe we can ship our coal to China and have them put it and keep it in the ground for us.
Last week on the first sunny day since 1964 (it seems), my wife and I walked (okay, wheeled) my 92-year-old mother along a bike path a few feet above the Columbia River in Vantucky on the Washington side of Portland, right below the train tracks that would be carrying the coal to Longview.
More importantly, those 22 trips of mile-long coal trains through the breathtaking Columbia Gorge would often be literally breathtaking for everyone visiting who was sensitive to coal dust.
The Columbia Gorge is literally gorgeous, with 12,281 foot Mt. Adams and 11,249 foot Mt. Hood oozing glaciers and towering over the river that is within a few dozen feet of sea level as it leaves the Gorge for Portland. Rainfall drops an inch a mile from a high of over 100 inches – the official designation of a rain forest – around Cascade Locks to only a dozen inches in The Dalles.
Celilo Falls near The Dalles is one of the two oldest continuously inhabited places in the Western Hemisphere (11,000 years), with history’s richest hunters and gathers (who usually had to migrate to go after their food, but in the this case the food migrated to them) living and fishing where the salmon run. The falls themselves have been covered with water from a damn, but covering this and all other uniquely Gorgeous locations in layers of coal dust that any geologist of any time in the future could identify would only add to that tragedy.
There are dozens of waterfalls soaring off countless cliffs, the highest being the iconic Multnomah Falls that free-falls 642 feet within half an hour of downtown Portland or better hours by bike on the Old Gorge Highway past another half-dozen waterfalls and along the Sandy then Columbia Rivers to the airport’s light rail station.
If this scenery were anywhere East of Boulder, Colorado it could be one of America’s most beloved national parks.
Let’s not pollute that or the equally beautiful Bellingham, Washington or Vancouver, B.C. areas with what will one day soon be seen as the blood money it is. While of course nowhere near as egregious, it would still be the closest these areas have come to approximating the Swiss allowing Nazi trainloads carrying their victims north to pass through in the middle of the night, for as Jim Hansen says, these coal trains are death trains, maybe someday being the transportation most responsible for killing many, most or all of us. (The crime is of course nowhere near as heinous in its intent, but the results could someday add up to a crime that ultimately has over a thousand times the victims.)
Warning – Westerner Riding a High Horse with Jingoistic Spurs Approaching:
Mike Roddy’s always astute analysis at #2 includes Eastern perceptions of Westerners as rubes. Mike’s (and Jeff Huggins’) alma mater is Cal Berkeley, that when I was at the sister school UCLA had 14 Nobel Laureates on the faculty at the same time. A while back I was communicating with Walter Alvarez, a Cal geology professor who got together with his Cal physics professor and (of course) Nobel Prize-winning dad Luis and found iridium around the world consistent with an asteroid impact 65 million years ago, creating that hypothesis and now accepted (by most of those most expert) theory. This is a classic example of Cal, West Coast, creative, innovative and abundantly non-rube thinking.
While we know how we think of nuclear, the science done at Los Alamos was still an amazing scientific achievement and by far more of a University of California project than any other. Other West Coast innovations include Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the idea the public could distance run, own their own computers, and of course countless more innovations.
And Cal Tech has the highest entrance requirements of any university (MIT is the same quality but much larger), Reed (Steve Jobs’ almost alma mater) sends more students to graduate school than any other, and the entire UC system is awesome, including UC San Diego affiliated with Scripps and producing thinkers like ecologist Garrett Hardin (UC Santa Barbara), who wrote The Tragedy of the Commons, still perhaps our most useful metaphor. In fact Hardin, Paul and Anne Ehrlich (Stanford), Al Bartlett (University of Colorado), William Catton (Washington State), Jared Diamond (UCLA), Michael Soule (UC Santa Cruz) and David Suzuki (Vancouver, B.C.) are many of our best and earliest thinkers about all the implications of what I call Anthro-Earth, or the Earth of Humans, the latter destroying their habitat on the former.
I know there are great East Coast thinkers concerned with the environment from Thoreau through Rachel Carson and Jim Hansen (originally a product of Iowa), McKibben and Romm (who spent time at Scripps and the Rocky Mountain Institute), but then the environmental movement in the West includes the also impressive John Muir, David Brower, Ansel Adams to Van Jones (and those are just the Bay Area dudes). The strength of character in these folks matches their mountains, and the first of those three climbed mountains hundreds of times that Thoreau could not have imagined.
Sure in addition to Cal and all the UCs, Stanford and Cal Tech the University of Chicago, all the Big Ten schools at the graduate level and many smaller schools are great, including of course all the Ivys. But the Ivys are a mixed bag, giving us business schools, economics and many other departments that are far more responsible for the excesses of Wall Street than any other. These and the East Coast are more the schools of money (most coming from almost 400 years of endowments) and thus power and thus the status quo and thus business as usual thinking. (Of course Bill McKibben’s Middlebury [not that it’s his per se, but he teaches and lassoed his amazing 350 team from the students there] and other smaller schools are notable exceptions, and Brown – whose mascot is a UPS truck – is more liberal about most things.)
Sure the West Coast contributes to these things also, but on a per capita basis IMNOTSOH opinion the left coast is more innovative and environmental.
By the way the best person to call me on this stuff is obviously Bill McKibben, since he’s not only collected all the great environmentalist trading cards since he was a kid, but now has his own such card with an impressively growing list of statistics. And he appears to have known every environmentalist since I believe Thoreau (sharing a pond) and Plato (sharing the belief that Greece should stop cutting down their trees and I hope nothing else). So I’d love to be rebutted – let me rephrase that – proven wrong, but Bill, you must give me this:
Since 1986 the Lakers have won seven championships to the Celtics one.
At the risk of feeling like a minor hobbit in the realm of the elven kings, or the realm of basketball players, and I am still wondering about the fate of the Powder River Basin coal. If it does not go to China, as Michael Tucker (#21) suggests it might not, it still gets dug and shipped. The leases have been sold.
So, what about the PRB coal a blend ingredient in domestic coal plants?
[The hullabaloo on West Coast port development could be a flexible move by entrepreneurs who eye the corn-soy-wheat export, as well as coal.]
Let me state first of all that you’ve raised some legitimate concerns regarding the deceptive nature of the shipping company and possible damage to the environment. That’s your right and I absolutely understand and support it.
On the other hand China is going to continue to burn coal and I personally would rather it used cleaner sources of energy. However, I recognize that my wishes and preferences are rather unimportant to the Chinese.
In truth without massive Natural gas resources and unless and until the alternative energy sources become both practical and reliable and more importantly cost effective coal is going to be the fuel of choice to generate electricity. Even nuclear power would not be truly an option without government subsidies to defray the cost of safety controls. (Not that I even want to think of more nuclear power plants and the potential for disaster.)
So I ask you, if you were in charge of a developing nation with a massive population what would you choose?
Reply to Mishap #27:
What would I choose? Solar thermal power.
Coal use is a crime. It is only ignorance that sustains its apparent legitimacy.