By John Stark
The White House Council on Environmental Quality is getting involved in key issues surrounding the environmental review of potential impacts from the Gateway Pacific Terminal project proposed for Whatcom County, as well as other proposed Northwest coal terminals.
That report comes from Bloomberg BNA, a subsidiary of Bloomberg News Service that focuses on legal and regulatory issues. The reporter Paul Shukovsky, formerly of the Seattle P-I. He says the White House council called a meeting of senior agency officials to discuss their diverging views on environmental issues.
“The crux of the conflict is whether the administration will accede to demands from opponents of the export terminals that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers go beyond site-specific environmental impact statements for the five proposed projects and conduct a wide-ranging study of the cumulative impacts of all the projects together, including the effect on greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of U.S. coal in China and other Asian countries,” Shukovsky reports.
Apparently the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is having trouble with the notion of including grennhouse gas emissions on the list of environmental impacts to be studied, because there is no precedent for it.
Environmental groups and many other Bellingham residents have called for the widest possible analysis of Gateway Pacific’s impacts.
The Army?
The issue should NOT be Green House gases. This is a ploy to avoid the discussion of coal DUST as opposed to coal ASH. The EPA, which has been tasked with oversight and management of the fugitive coal dust, does concern itself with coal dust. The EPA is only concerned with coal ash, which is what is said to cause the global warming.
This is not accidental. The plan is and always has been, to approve a “programmatic solution” to the coal dust, which would not provide any protection for us, but would provide and income from the fines to fund environmental programs for the Puget Sound Partnership.
There towns in West VA, which have been pleading with the EPA for years, for relief from the coal dust from trucks and trains that travel through their towns. The EPA does NOTHING.
That is the reason that we must demand BAP, BAT standards from the start. We need every protection from the harmful affects of this coal terminal, from the start, not an after the fact program of fines that do nothing to protect the local environment.
BAP, BAT or no coal!
By the way, the White House has been fully engaged in this coal project from the beginning. That’s where all the pressure to push this coal terminal through, has come from since the beginning. That is the reason that Maria Cantwell was involved in getting approval from China for SSA to operate a receiving terminal in China, before we even knew about the coal.
Those of a more scientific bent can tell me if I’m wrong about this, John G, but I think your environmental science is a little shaky here. Global warming is attributed to the greenhouse effect from carbon dioxide and some other gases, trapping solar heat within the atmosphere. Particulates like ash have, if anything, a cooling effect because they screen out some solar radiation. Particulates from big volcanoes are widely believed to be linked to extreme winters. (I believe it is also true, however, that soot from emissions helps snow/glaciers to melt even faster when it is deposited upon them…)
Boudou: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is a key oversight agency here because they are in charge of wetlands issues as well as any development in navigable water. How did they ever get that responsibility? The Navy must have been asleep at the switch when that happened.
John, so the EPA should be happy about coal burning power plants, if your analysis is correct. I
I do know that the EPA regualates coal ash, they type that comes from smoke stacks, not coal dust.
John, The person who told me that the EPA doesn’t regulate coal dust was Craig Ollason, who used work for the county and was part of the Birch Bay Stormwater advisory board. I called him when this whole project came up to ask him what position he was going to take and he told me that he wasn’t taking any position because the Cherry Point Industrial zone had been removed from the Birch Bay/Terrell Creek Stormwater district and besides the EPA was in charge of evaluating the coal dust and that the EPA doesn’t really get involved in regulating coal dust that would settle from the air onto the lake or streams because the EPA is only interested in coal ash.
I’m not questioning or affirming any of that–just the part aboukt coal ash causing global warming.
It looks like the coal ash is a disposal problem not a clean air problem. The fact remains that the EPA does not regulate coal dust outside of the mines, and for the most part, their major concern is for the workers getting black lung disease.
If you can find a single instance of the EPA getting involved in the management of coal dust outside of the mines, I’d like to hear about it.
Again, I have no knowledge of that and I’m not challenging it.
Here is something we DO know: that Obama is a liar and that the Army Corps of Engineers have screwed things up in the past. Which scenario is more likely: 1) that the Army Corps of Engineers does something that is good for the planet, the environment, and also the human population of the earth, OR 2) Obama and his re-election uses this phony news item as another tool to get re-elected and then does what Wall Street wants anyway?
Wise minds say the second.
That should be “re-election team.”
I agree, John Galt. The White House global corporatocracy was part of this from day one. Warren Buffett (BNSF) and Bill Gates (America’s Public Enemy No. 1) conferenced with Obama there just a few weeks before Salazar (Sec. Interior) gave away the Powder River Basin to Peabody Energy. See online “Plundering America to Power the Asian Boom” (August, 24, 2011). Same time, usual suspects (SSA Marine, Peabody Energy, and BNSF) partnered up to handle “24 million metric tons of coal per year through the planned Gateway Pacific Terminal.” See online “Peabody Energy and SSA Marine Enter into Long-Term Agreement for Powder River Basin Coal Exports, February 28, 2011). I love the disclaimer at the bottom of this “entice-you-into-buying-stocks” news release, “Certain statements in this press release are forward-looking…based on numerous assumptions….”
The Army Corps of Engineers were the original managing agency for water pollution from the ~ 1890 Refuse Act until the 1972 Federal Water Pollution Control act amendments (Clean Water Act).
A coal export terminal will increase the amount of coal being consumed by increasing supply making dirty coal a cheaper alternative to other fuels.
The Supreme Court ruling in 2007 allows the EPA to regulate CO2 emissions. This project will drastically increase CO2 emissions.
Mark Jaccard, one of the worlds foremost energy experts, was recently arrested in an act of civil disobedience for blocking a train to Vancouvers coal export terminal for this reason. He develops incredibly sophisticated models at Simon Fraser University accounting for technology, science, economics and behavioral factors and he strongly opposes coal exports. And he includes natural gas as a big piece of a sustainable energy future.
The coal export terminal is a global issue.
Scare stories based on lies have very little impact with anyone who knows or seeks the truth, so here is the question, there are quite a few trains of coal going thru this community right here and now, there is monitoring being done of the coal dust from these trains by the RR, where is the evidence of the pollution?
I have a friend who lives right next to the RR tracks, I ask him every time we meet how’s he’s surviving the coal dust and we both then get a very good laugh about how full of crap our local NIMBY’s end of the world screamers are, don’t ya know!
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
AFY,
TV Washington has a special on coal. I saw the last few minutes this evening. A vineyard owner, by digging into the ballast with his bare hand, uncovered coal dust permeating the ballast. There was an implication that there was enough coal to cause instability in the ballast.
Seeing is believing.
Yeah it really bad here in Bellingham, every time I wear a white shirt outside it turns into a black shirt, it weird seeing people walking the streets in Fairhaven covered in soot looking like they are all doing an Al Jolson impersonation, don’t ya know!
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
Insight, you got part of the connection between the Obama administration and the GPT terminal, but you missed some of the other partners, like Richard Trumka, the most frequent visitor to the Obama White House and former head of the United Mine workers and Goldman Sachs, who seems to be abandoning Obama at this point in the re-election.
The Obama administration has also developed a conscience regarding the ownership of the Powder River Basin coal, most of which is on Indian land. The tribes have been lobbying to be made a direct partner in the PRB coal for years (they wanted to build a gassification plant), but the government wouldn’t approve it. Recently that was changed and the tribes were allowed to directly form a partnership with one of the coal companies for some of the newly opened areas.