Plans are afoot to ship vast quantities of coal to China through ports in Oregon and Washington. Coal trains over a mile long would chug through the Columbia Gorge. Likely they'd spew polluting coal dust.
Certainly all that coal, after being burned in China, would markedly further pollute the Earth's atmosphere with carbon dioxide. This is the best reason for not allowing the northwest to be China's coal shovel.
Science is solidly on the side of those who oppose the export terminals, such as the Sierra Club.
Today I listened to a podcast of Fareed Zakaria's GPS program where he interviewed Richard Muller, a physicist at the University of California who used to be a global warming skeptic, but now embraces the scientific facts.
Muller said that natural gas emits one-third of the carbon dioxide that coal does. So even though "fracking" is decried by many environmentalists, the plus side of unlocking new supplies of natural gas is the reduced greenhouse gas emissions if less coal is used.
Muller emphasized how important it is that China, India, and other developing nations cut down on their coal consumption. (I've added boldface emphasis to the transcript.)
ZAKARIA: And what do you think, you know, when you look at the issue of what to do about it, there are people who say, look, the only thing we can do is — what's called adaptation. We should rotate crops, we should build dikes, we should do those kinds of things, and then there are people who say, no, the problem is so serious, you have to actually get at the root cause and slow down the emission of CO2.
MULLER: I believe in the latter. And you — adaptation, we're very adaptable species. But adaptation is always disruptive, and it hurts. Let's see what we can do. And the biggest thing we have to do — we have to recognize that the reason the carbon dioxide is shooting up is not because of the U.S. Ours have actually been going down over the last few years as we switch from coal to natural gas.
Natural gas emits only one third the carbon dioxide that does coal. If we are going to do something about this, there are two things we have to do. One is energy conservation efficiency, that's really important. A huge amount we can do there.
Number two is we've got to switch the world, China, India, and particularly the developing world away from coal and on to natural gas. But that's a solution that a lot of my environmentalist friends don't like because they have decided they have to oppose hydraulic fracturing known as fracking. But in fact that is one of the two biggest things we can do. Energy conservation and the switch to natural gas from coal.
The rest of the interview also is well worth reading. I'll copy it in as a continuation to this post. Muller describes how he overcame his skepticism about both the accuracy of temperature measurements showing global warming, and the role of humans in causing it.
ZAKARIA: So when you look at the historical data now, is it fair to characterize the situation thus, that ever since the industrial revolution human beings have been pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and that that increase in CO2 has been having the effect that we call global warming?
MULLER: That is my viewpoint on this. You can't prove it. It's always possible that something random is happening that just happens to match the carbon dioxide data. But it leads me to conclude that essentially all of this warming over the last 250, 260 years has been caused by greenhouse gases emitted by humans.
Here's the entire interview with Muller:
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