As part of their ongoing coverage of Northwest coal exports, Sightline broke down where investments matter in terms of job production. Coal doesn't fair to well.

Here are some more thoughts on the matter of jobs: Peabody Energy, SSA Marine and Goldman Sachs want to build the Gateway Pacific Terminal at the price of $665 million. According to official project documents, the terminal would support 257 direct jobs, including office workers, at full build-out. That’s one new job for every $2.6 million invested and that's assuming the terminal can actually be built for its advertised price.

On the flipside, data compiled by the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, said investing the same $665 million in energy efficiency or renewables would create twice as many jobs at minimum. With solar manufacturing that's about several hundred more jobs than at the coal terminal.

Clean energy will be one of the largest growth industries of the 21st century, especially as the last decade has seen the clean energy sector grew nearly twice as fast as the overall economy. Of course, the growth of these clean energy jobs is being imperiled by the coal lobby, which has worked to undermine the emerging clean energy industry.

What's it going to be? We can stick with ill-conceived dirty enegy projects (like coal exports) that threaten the industries that are vital to our long term economic development not to mention putting our communities, water and environmental resources at unnecessary risk. It seems a healthy environment and a healthy economy go hand in hand and are not competetive in stark contast to coal.

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