Big Coal Seeks a Path Through Washington to China

As WEC celebrates helping achieve a landmark agreement to phase out Washington’s sole coal plant, a new coal threat looms. With coal consumption in the U.S. declining, thanks in large part to campaigns like the recent legislative success in Washington, coal companies are seeking a route for coal mined in Montana and Wyoming to reach rapidly-growing Asian markets. The most direct route is through the Pacific Northwest.

Ambre Energy and Peabody Energy have proposed two major coal export facilities in Washington: at Longview on the Columbia River and at Cherry Point in Bellingham, respectively. We expect more proposals to follow.

Stopping massive coal export proposals by some of the world’s largest corporations will be no small feat. But WEC and our partners, including Climate Solutions, Sierra Club, Columbia Riverkeeper, RE Sources for Sustainable Communities, Earthjustice, Sightline Institute, and many others, have geared up to work together against coal export and for clean energy. There is a long list of reasons to oppose coal export through Washington. Here are three that deserve a place near the top of the list:

• Coal is dirty. Moving tons of it through our state will hurt our health, water, air and wildlife.

• Washington as middleman for dirty commodities is a poor economic development strategy, especially given competition for limited rail and port capacity. Surely we can generate more jobs by shipping things we make or grow here in Washington?

• Why work so hard to reduce our carbon pollution here at home, if we’re just going to export it overseas and enable the same result of runaway climate change?

And why not throw in one more? These are the companies who used their outsized financial influence in US politics to prevent adoption of federal climate policy. Lack of real action by the US on climate change threatens our world. If these coal companies expect a welcome in Washington, they have not done their homework on the Evergreen State.

This struggle will be a long one, but we’ve already seen some success. WEC and three partners, represented by Earthjustice, filed a legal challenge to the Ambre Energy project in Longview. After The New York Times broke the story that the company had lied to the community and state about the enormous scale of their proposed project, the company pulled their application. They’ve said they will now do a full environmental review before proceeding. It’s a temporary, but significant win, allowing the full range of local and global harms from the project to be exposed.

In Bellingham, WEC has a decades-long history of legal action aimed at ensuring that a fourth and final dock at Cherry Point is built in a way that protects Puget Sound and the important, imperiled herring stock there. We continue to seek that outcome, but have made it clear that we will not support coal export at Cherry Point.

We will need our members’ help in speaking out to local and state decisionmakers about what a raw deal coal export is for Washington. Commissioner of Public Lands Peter Goldmark has a particularly important role to play, since the Department of Natural Resources must grant a lease of public aquatic lands to every export facility and has clear existing legal authority to prevent coal export as an inappropriate use of public land.

Stay tuned for updates on this important campaign.