A few months ago, I posted a story about the coal trains. My thoughts haven't changed much and it seemed proper to revisit the story to prepare for the upcoming coal forum. Here is the post in its entirety and I also urge you to check out Paul Haeder's series called King Coal where he addressed this issue:

I recently posted about Bellingham Mayor Dan Pike and his opposition to the proposed coal export project at Cherry Point near Bellingham. If approved, the proposed terminal would ship 48 millions of tons of coal each year to China but that is just to start. The shipments will come from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana, entering Washington at Spokane (refueling near our aquifer), reach the Columbia River at Tri-Cities and move down the Columbia Gorge before turning north at Vancouver to run through Kalama, Kelso-Longview, Centralia, Tacoma, Seattle, Edmonds, Everett, and Mount Vernon.



These coal trains would be uncovered and would spew toxic coal dust all along the train routes. According to Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad studies, each train can lose up to 3 percent of its cargo en route. These trains would have 150 cars and be up to 1.6 miles long, with 100 tons of coal in each car.

The studies on the impact of train-generated diesel exhaust in Stockton, California indicated a clear relationship between the proximity to train traffic and cancer. A Spokane Clean Air study observed a doubling of cancer rates within a zone of 200 yards of the rail operations.

Burning 50 million tons of U.S. coal in China, would produce more global warming pollution than all the cars in Oregon and Washington combined in one year. A lot of impacts of this project can be avoided, mitigated, or reduced, but there is no escaping the fact that these shipments will result in approximately 150 million tons in new greenhouse gases annually. We can ignore or rationalize this factor because its impacts feel removed from our day-to-day lives, but we really do so at our peril. Although much will be made in this debate about “clean coal” technologies and China’s advancements in the realm of pollution reduction and carbon sequestration, the truths in this matter are that there currently is no such thing as “clean coal” and while China is making bold promises, there is a serious performance gap. The demand is astounding, with the Chinese building new coal plants at the rate of one per month. Their mines, and those in major suppliers like Australia and Indonesia, cannot keep up.

However, Crosscut reported there are some serious permitting issues in Bellingham. The 2011 shoreline permit application for the project calls for exporting up to 54 million tons annually, nearly seven times the volume as the current law allows; an estimated 48 million tons would be coal, a commodity not anticipated or categorized for exporting under their current permit. Shipping would increase from 140 vessels a year to 487 vessels, many of which would be the giant Cape-size ships.

That coal being shipped to China will be ten times the amount of coal used by Washington’s only coal-fired power plant, Trans-Alta in Centralia, which this year agreed to transition off coal by 2025. If we're moving forward on ridding ourselves of dirty energy, why turn back the clock now?

This project just doesn’t make sense for Washington, and I want to make sure that Spokane voices are heard in the debate since, as stated before, we will receive the impact of the train traffic - but not the jobs and added taxes that would go to Whatcom County. We just get the pollution; we’re the middleman between Wyoming’s coal and China’s power plants. And we need to make certain that local decision makers take into account the impacts on our lives and livelihoods.

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