Originally published in The Washington Times.
Guest post by Steve Goreham
Exports from the Pacific Northwest are an ongoing battleground in the environmental war on coal. Last week, the Sierra Club and three other groups announced that they would file suit against Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway and six coal companies over shipments of coal in open-topped train cars. The announcement is an escalation in the three-year battle to stop new export terminals proposed for ports in Washington and Oregon. Underlying all the rhetoric is a concern that mankind is causing dangerous global warming.
In 2010, Peabody Energy, Cloud Peak Energy, and Australia-based Ambre Energy announced competing plans to build export terminals in the Pacific Northwest to ship coal to Asia, with Arch Coal joining the fray in 2011. Five new export terminals have been proposed. Coal would be shipped by rail from the Powder River Basin coal mines in Montana and Wyoming, loaded on ships at the proposed terminals, and transported across the Pacific Ocean to meet the growing demand for coal in China and Asia. Potential coal exports to Asia are estimated at between 50 and 100 million tons annually. Environmental groups and students have mounted a growing campaign to oppose construction of the terminals and the planned coal exports.
The Sierra Club and other opponents claim that rail transport of coal is responsible for “emitting coal into waterways in many locations across Washington” in the form of coal dust and that this violates the Clean Water Act. They fear that, if the export terminals are built, additional coal trains will add to the problem. “Coal is a toxic pollutant and this action today seeks to stop illegal pollution and keep our river free of dirty coal,” said Brett VandenHeuvel, Executive Director of Columbia Riverkeeper.
Shipping coal by rail and exporting coal is nothing new. In 2011, the US exported 89 million metric tons of coal, up 143 percent from 2002. Most of those exports went through the East Coast ports of Norfolk, New Orleans, and Baltimore to Europe, which is using more coal―not less. Most of this coal was delivered to ports by rail and water pollution has not been a major issue.
Neither is coal dust new. In 1900, coal provided 70 percent of US energy consumption. Factories, railroads, electrical utilities, and home furnaces were powered by coal. During the 1940s and 1950s, fallen snow in Chicago was blackened with coal dust after only a few days. Homeowners washed their walls once a year to remove accumulated coal dust. But thanks to cleaner-burning coal-fired plants and our nation’s shift to natural gas and petroleum, US emissions of coal dust today are at a 50-year low.
While environmentalists complain about coal dust, the real reason they hate coal is their acceptance of the ideology Climatism, the belief that man-made greenhouse gases are destroying Earth’s climate. In 2009 Dr. James Hansen stated, “The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.” Environmental groups believe burning coal will cause catastrophic climate change, so “coal dust” is used as an excuse to try to halt coal exports.
But there is no empirical evidence that human greenhouse gas emissions are causing dangerous global warming. Carbon dioxide is a trace gas. Only four of every 10,000 air molecules are carbon dioxide. Ninety-nine percent of Earth’s greenhouse effect is natural, caused by water vapor and natural greenhouse gas emissions from oceans and the biosphere. Global temperatures have not increased for more than ten years, despite a continued rise in atmospheric CO2, confounding the climate models. And despite the furor over Hurricane Sandy, history shows that storms, floods, and droughts today are neither more frequent nor more severe than in past centuries.
Yet, protests against coal in the Pacific Northwest continue to escalate. It seems that “yes we can” works except in the case of export terminals and pipelines.
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Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the new book The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.
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Here’s the ‘laughable’ continuation regarding my open records request to the university of washington – and their ‘coal train dust’ study. I have just sent the following email to the university public records office:
Ms Lechtanski, you deny my request for data ( other materials ) and yet the university seems quite willing to let ‘others’ publicize this students’ same ?
I do so look forward to you and the university explaining all of this in Federal court. Have a great weekend.
” Thompson prepares to record air quality readings from an approaching freight train in Shoreline, Wash. Thompson is a student at the University of Washington, Bothell, working with professor Dan Jaffe to research coal dust and other air quality impacts expected from proposals to export coal from ports in the Pacific Northwest. Photo by Nick Juliano. ”
http://www.eenews.net/public/Greenwire/2012/10/12/1
Nick Juliano, E&E ** reporter
Greenwire: Friday, October 12, 2012
** E&E is the leading source for comprehensive, daily coverage of environmental and energy politics and policy.
I’m starting to smell a rat here.
@ur momisugly Steve Lohr says:
April 11, 2013 at 12:02 pm
Interesting link. It does give a snapshot of the variability of responses that have existed when viewing “nature”. And how prevalent the fantastical has been, and can be, in the absence of a direct relationship which demands a recognition of “reality”.
This has, in some of the examples given, been attached to imagined or possible “beasts”, which given the direct pragmatic association with known beasts and unavoidable “truths” of nature makes sense as a direction and limitation on belief in the “unknown”.
The modern Environmentalist does not have that relationship and therefore those limitations. They are free to imagine the fantastical exists comprehensively throughout the natural world. Which is what they do. Any meaning that might arise from this cannot, like the believer in unicorns, or spirits in a particular animal, be integrated into a complex social relationship with the material world, which might form part of a quasi-religious outlook.
The Environmentalist is left merely prostrate in this the face of this. Any religious aspect to it expresses itself in a numbing of responses, rather than a heightening as in the case for the unicorn believer, because tangible natural reality of any sort MUST be subordinate to the Greater Unknown that is the Diety.
Such a being can only exist on the efforts of others or would otherwise perish.
Your finishing comments:
“Our modern nature lovers are not motivated by love of nature. They hate the nature of mankind.”
illustrate this in a way.
What is truly bizarre about these people is the position that humans are not “natural”. They are so remote from nature that they cannot actually place themselves in it. And this is possibly the only accurate element to their creed. They are denatured.
@ur momisugly stan stendera says:
April 11, 2013 at 2:57 pm
Yes, I hope you are right.
But you, me, or a million others hoping will not override any general mindset, whatever that turns out to be.
@Steve says:
April 11, 2013 at 2:35 pm
“…this is a war…”
It is.
The first and most important thing is for people to stop pretending that this is a “conversation” between reasonable people. Its not.
It is about a particular class or classes of people who intend imposing to the greatest degree they can, their will on the majority. It is presented – and even thought of by them (or some) – as being motivated by general humanistic principles but it is not.
It is about creating an ascendancy. It is primaeval in nature.
Dang! This is one of those times I wish Santa was real and that he’d put a lump of coal in all the appropriate stockings. One can dream…
It is rather odd to find out that somehow Warren Buffet, whose own trains carry coal and oil is not getting protests. And how Bill Gates a resident of Washington and who sits on Buffet’s Board, is immune from protests as well. But democrats are not held accountable by lefties, are they?
urker passing through, laughing says:
April 12, 2013 at 5:20 am
It does make it rather difficult when these or others (Gore: 10 x power use) are “exempt” to pretend that “global warming” is not at heart a strategic political issue.
Gary Pearse says:
April 11, 2013 at 2:05 am
It’s too bad that the large majority of people, who are hurt by these few anti-human saboteurs aren’t out there with a counter protest. Why do the hateful people have a monopoly on this activity? Why do we bend so easily? I think activism is going to have to be promoted to the larger society who suffer the fall out from all this abuse. Please don’t tell me this is democracy in action.
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No, I don’t think this has anything to do with democracy.
It’s much more likely to do with having to work all hours to earn a living to support a family, rather than scrounging, having an allowance or receiving NGO handouts.
Having no responsibilities makes one care less about possible outcomes of ones own (dubious/illegal/or plain daft) actions.
Steve T
The coal dust issue also came up in the East. Many trains of coal are treated with water based chemicals that put a ‘crust’ on the top of the coal. These chemical ‘crusts’ eliminate virtually all coal dust blowing off the top of the train cars. The encrusting agents, once dried, do not change the color of the coal. These encrusting agents typically are polymers, often off-spec material originally intended to be used in latex paints.
Even with modern technological improvements on coal-fired power plans, Coal is dirty and expensive to clean whereas natural gas is so much cleaner and more efficient to burn. It’s even helping to reduce the amount of carbon pumped into the atmosphere as the United States carbon reduction is currently at 1990 levels because of our increased use of natural gas in producing electricity.
To the extent there is a real dust problem, the answer is — Rhino Snot. Look it up, it works.