i'm your host valerie to rico and we're here to talk about coal trains the pacific northwest stands between the world's largest coal reserves and the world's largest coal consumer china peabody coal company would like montana soft coal to be shipped across washington state to export terminals in places like cherry point north of bellingham climate scientists say that would be a global disaster regional livability experts say it would also be a disaster for our pacific northwest way of life here to talk with us about what's at stake is erik to place senior researcher at institute in seattle thank you for joining us thanks for having me here today so what is at stake here what's at stake here is really nothing smaller than the global climate what we're looking at in terms of the proposal from peabody energy  as well as from some other coal companies is something that is completely unprecedented for the northwest we would turn from irrelative legally green and clean economy into the single largest exporter of coal anywhere in the world if all of these proposals happen together the people at a proposal that you mention to cherry point alone would be the largest coal exporting facility anywhere in north america so this would be a very substantial change both for the northwest role in energy  but also simply for the livability of the region we're not accustomed to being surrounded by coal but we're not going to be burning this call is just coming through on the way to china and the problem with coal transiting through the northwest is that it's a very heavy dirty substance that requires mile and a half long trains to be moving through seattle for example as many as eighteen or twenty times a day every day three hundred sixty five days a year those trains are noisy they are prone to leaving dust behind and they'll create an array of problems all along the rails basically from montana to cherry point where they'll eventually dump the coal for the shipments to china and it gets worse because when that pollution is burned in chinese power plants we know now from recent research that much of that pollution rises into the atmosphere travels back across the pacific ocean and then we breathe it you could see changes in the atmosphere and changes in the sun sets in the san juans the summer because the fires that were going contamination we know now in many of the cascade mountains that originates from chinese power plants that we've been hearing the term clean coal for years now including from the obama administration i mean can we not assume that the chinese are building the latest greatest in coal burning technology clean coal is a bit like a unicorn in the sense that it would be nice if they existed but it absolutely does not exist in any form whatsoever the term klink often gets thrown about to mean different things in different contexts but it's absolutely not the case that china's building clean coal facilities or what they are building are new modern coal fired power plants in a coal a new modern coal fired power plant is about as clean as a low tar cigarette is healthy for you that is to say it's better than the worst thing you could do  get an unfiltered cigarette but it's very bad for you and the the health impacts of those coal plants particularly for children who are susceptible to mercury contamination are profound and serious i thought they were putting scrubbers on coal plants here even to remove that mercury from the atmosphere in the united states we are putting scrubbers on many of our coal plants but what happens is when we make coal plants comply with even basic environmental and health regulations has it become so expensive for the coal companies to operate those plants in a clean fashion that they can do other things to produce electricity they can use cleaner burning natural gas they can use hydro power solar wind or any of your right alternatives that we have at our disposal so it's one way that if you actually did all the things that you would need to do to make coal even partially clean it's just not economical of that point so you're saying if they actually went to the trouble of making genuinely clean coal plants in china then there would be no point in shipping all of this coal across washington state to ports to china that's that's exactly right but we're talking about moving from from montana and wyoming is a is a low grade low energy coal doesn't cost very much the chinese are looking for cheap sources of of fuel for power plants and some of that fuel that happens to be trains bigger port facilities bigger piles of coal and are not you know one of the three reasons i'm hearing that people are arguing for having this happen for for having this coal cross washington state is that we need jobs here right there we've got we're talking about jobs on the railroads we're talking about jobs in the ports we're talking about jobs and export you know washington washington families need jobs there's absolutely no question that we need jobs in washington and i don't think anybody disagrees that certainly i think it's incumbent on all of us to figure out ways to develop our economy to support good family wage jobs and that's exactly the problem with the coal export facilities because what they really do is they create some jobs actually not that many jobs it turns out it's hard to to do worse for jobs than coal facilities well the numbers they're throwing around in bellingham i thought it was like ten thousand jobs to build the export facility a thousand jobs on an ongoing basis it's a few thousand jobs to build out the facilities and less than that to operate them but we know from of our range of studies that almost anything else you do with industrial portlandia would produce more jobs than coal coal is about the bottom of the barrel when it comes to jobs and if you think about container traffic container cargo at a port if you think about any higher value commodity you're going to get more employment out of that than you do from a big heavy commodity like coal which is mostly moved in by you know big pieces of machinery port but the other part of the equation i think this is where it gets really interesting is that you know people already and the coal industry wants us to look only at one side of the balance sheet they're saying just look only at the at the benefits of these proposals they don't want to look at the other side of the balance sheet side coltrane's about having a passenger rail service that will get occupied by coltrane's about being able to move freight between port and manufacturing centers in south seattle and well we just upgrade our our rail capacity you know it would be nice to think that we could upgrade our rail capacity the problem with that is that the public paying for that so we were looking at tens of millions of dollars in some cases as much as one hundred millions of dollars hundred million dollars for a single overpass of an at grade rail crossing so you're saying that the people of washington state are going to be asked to subsidize the coal trains yeah and actually since that's the people watching it they will be back to subsidize but subsidize in this case means pay ninety five to ninety eight percent of the cost of the railroad companies will pay at most five percent the coal companies will pay nothing so that this is really on the public that the coal companies want to move the coal to china and they're asking us to pay for all the consequences even something as simple as signals ation that is the crossing arms in the lights that keep cars or you know pedestrian traffic away from the rail lines those are on the taxpayers that's not something the coal companies are going to pay for i'm guessing that they would argue that they're going to pay taxes that would over time cover those costs they might argue that but they would be wrong because the cut the taxes that they will pay are so small relative to the size of the liabilities that they'll be forcing on taxpayers that there's simply no way that they would come close to covering that you know if in fact they had to pay the true costs of the impact of moving not much coal to market it would again as i point out before you it wouldn't be economical to do it they would do something else why would anyone be in favor of this why would the business community be in favor of it why would labor leaders be in favor of it i've read yesterday i believe that there were ten thousand signatures submitted in bellingham in support of the coal terminal there and we've also seen it thousands and thousands of people showing up  at what's called the scoping hearings that are taking the first look at the federal review of whether we're going to allow these projects to proceed or not people opposition to it so it's true that there's a very heated debate over this and there are some folks mostly folks really into the coal industry who feel very strongly about the proposals but what we're asking the government to do is to look at both sides of the balance sheet and not just take the proponents at their word that they'll produce x number of jobs but also begin to count  the economic costs and count of the jobs that will be lost the jobs and fisheries that will be lost there's a crab fishery located basically at that site cherry point those jobs will probably go away the herring that are sort of  foundational piece of the ecosystem for everything from salmon to orcas imputed sound those herring will probably go away if this facility gets built we need to count up those costs as well and then weigh them in the scales economically speaking before we can determine whether this is  jobs benefit or as i suspect a big net job loss for the region so you think it's a net jobs loss at minimum it sounds like what you're saying is that there's jobs being created on the one hand there are jobs being lost on the other so that we can't just take one set of numbers stick if that coal company says they're going to create a thousand jobs that's a thousand minus something and we don't know what that something is it's actually jobs being shifted from one job sector that's exactly right it's a job shift but we only know one side of the equation right now and i think it would anybody who has it takes a responsible interest in public policy needs to evaluate what that number is is it is it a thousand jobs that we lose is it ten thousand or is it more  but i think one interesting really place to start this conversation is with small town chambers of commerce because if you look at places like marysville washington or mesa washington which is a little town in eastern washington in those small town chambers of commerce ar really really getting worried right now and the reason they're worried is that the rail lines that would move that whole transect their business districts the town of marysville it can be completely i mean completely shut off from the interstate by a single coal train that's stopped along the rail lines that would prevent access from for every person who lives in marysville getting to their job on the freeway or for everyone anyone coming off the freeway who wanted to get that this is district so we're seeing lots and lots of activity among local business groups starting to take a look at these proposals and wonder what's the upside all they're seeing is downside as you said at the big at the outset that the the huge moral issue is that that this is going to put coal it's going  to carbon into the atmosphere there are going to be ecological impacts are these are these economic issues are these economic questions just kind of window dressing distraction the fair question i mean it's a fair question because we know that there is a very significant climate impact to that as it turns out there's a little something for everyone to hate in these proposals and the coltrane cells are a big feature of that and the reason i can assure anybody that it's not fear mongering is simply the math we know how much coal they say they want to move and we know how many trains that were choir they they're actually fairly accurate in their numbers about how many trains that will require we also know how fast the train can move across the street crossing and  in places like south seattle to the manufacturing district and in the northern part of downtown near the olympic sculpture park by the cruise terminal they can't move very fast they don't move very fast so we're talking about shutting down the streets every day every day by an hour to two hours a day and that's just based on the math three hundred sixty five days a year if you can imagine sitting by that cruise terminal watching you know your life tick by as yet another train goes by the traffic is already disaster in those areas we're talking of building a stadium another stadium down in the southern part of the city the and then this is been documented not only by my research but by two independent rafiq consultants we're looking at a very significant street culture is that now you've got me you know like he's talking about job you talk about the environment yeah that's all fairly abstract but i hate sitting stuck trains in seattle usually because i'm running late and then i'm sitting there for five ten minutes you know and and those trains are not a mile and a half long no they're not a mile and a half long but in the future if these proposals get built they will be a mile and a half long and anybody who's sat in traffic knows the frustration not knowing when the train is going to find the clear the intersection not knowing if another train is right on its heels if the train stops and sometimes they go forward and they back up and they go forward again you never know exactly and we don't know what time of day they could happen during rush hour or they could happen during summer cruces and they could happen right as a baseball game is getting out and in any of those circumstances all of which will happen you know then you've got very serious congestion issues and it's not just an annoyance it's not just an annoyance for somebody who wants to get home it's a real it's a real sort of fundamental economic issue for the local business community how so if you are a manufacturer located in soweto or if you have any kind of business that needs to use the surface streets where there are not great rail crossing you know the  question you should be asking yourself is does it make sense to try to continue doing business here when it's very very difficult to get you know your goods to to your customers that's a real problem it's not just a problem for seattle that it's going to be a problem for you know every city along the rail route that's going to be handling these trains in eastern washington the problem is actually much more profound those rail lines will be serving multiple terminals not just the one north of bellingham that that we're talking about today so you talk about multiple terminals and that kind of raises another question which is i guess coming coming back to the ecological issue in the idea of climate change and how that's going to affect the ecology and economics of washington state isn't this just going to happen anyway if if we don't have coal trains running through seattle won't they just run through b c are we going to get that climate change and the impact on fisheries and all of that anyhow you know it is this is this is a very interesting question there are lots of folks particularly in the coal industry who want to say there's nothing you can do about it there's no we're going to move the coal in the matter no matter what the public wants to do it turns out not to be the case and the reason we know it's not the case is  because we can read the investor statements that the coal companies themselves produce probably not when people spend a lot of time reading them but i do and what they say quite clearly to their investors is if we can't build new ports in or going to washington to move coal to china we can't get this call out of the ground we can't sell it to anybody you know the demand for coal united states is declining fast americans want cleaner energy they want cleaner air we're and we're already in the middle of that transition away from coal so these quite big coal guys are sitting there trying to figure out what they're going to do they don't have a customer base anymore it's disappearing from their eyes could they move it through british columbia they could probably move a little bit through british columbia but you were talking about a fraction a tiny fraction of the boys that they have planned for going to washington you're saying that if this coal doesn't move across washington state there's a good chance it will never move there's a very good chance it will never move and we have to remember this is coal that sits on public land this is land east of the rocky mountains that's owned by the american taxpayer it's on you know federal land in the if if we don't if they can't sell it to customers in china or in other parts of east asia there is a very good chance it's never going to get dug up in the first place and it's a peculiar phenomenon right  now the american coal industry is in steep decline stock prices are down way way down sixty eighty percent some cases and it's because the american economy is right now we're transitioning to cleaner fuel sources including natural gas is a big one but also energy efficiency also wind and also solar all that stuff is getting cheaper while coal gets more and more expensive and and we know it's a dirty polluting fuel source so it does put those of us in the northwest in a very interesting historically an interesting perspective there's a road between the biggest coal reserves in the world and the biggest coal consumers in the world and we're standing in the middle of that road right now and it's up to those of us in the northwest to decide whether we're going to allow a highway of coal to move between thank goodness because we do have laws in this country that allow the public to participate in the review of these proposals you mentioned earlier the health consequences of of moving that much coal through washington communities that one of the biggest issues i've heard is coal dust and as are there other issues as well yeah with that it's very important to think about the the health impacts of moving that much coal and there are two interesting groups that i've been involved with this the washington physicians for social responsibility and then sort of an ad hoc group called what come docs and welcome docs is i think a last kind about two hundred physicians in walking county it where bellingham is located and they have come out with sort of very detailed and thoughtful responses to these proposals and they have you know documented the whole range of impacts it's everything from inhaling coal dust that's blowing off a train as it passes but also you know just in the same way that you or i could be stuck at an acrid rail crossing can imagine an emergency vehicle you know lights on sirens going on able to reach its destination because there's a coal train transiting that great crossing was going to ask can't they just cover the coal trains i mean i guess that doesn't deal with the emergency vehicles issue but it would co this there actually has been a federal legal dispute about how that's going to get handled but we also know that when i go to the dump i have to cover my load you do it you do but you're not a real and you don't get special protection from normal environmental health laws like those like the railroads do and it's a real problem and it's a tough one to solve if they don't want to do it because the coal is not worth very much money and the thing that they do that adds cost to them is less profit for them  so you know they've been asked repeatedly to do things like that and they won't do it and we know from examples all over the country that it is very very difficult to handle large volumes of coal and not have problems so either it adds cost for them or it adds costs for us either they're so they're they're paying the cost or they're shifting the cost right i mean if we have to pay for kids with more asthma if we have to pay for dirty cars and dirty towns and dirty windows w whatever it is we've got to sort of big actors in this in this proposal cherry point one is goldman sachs who owns the largest investor stake in the poor operating company that wants to build the site and the other is berkshire hathaway which is warren  company that owns the largest investor stake in b s f railways that will be moving the call so we've got two large well known corporations and they are very very much interested in their bottom line we know that it is incumbent on the public to take a look at the public's bottom line and make sure that we don't get screwed in this transect because that's the danger the term i heard during the housing crisis was privatized profits and socialize losses in this case it sounds like it's privatized market because the public is going to be carrying all those costs you know on the same subject it's very interesting to note that you know i don't think anybody is against freight rail as a general matter if it's moving goods that have some important purpose for us  but amping up freight rail for a low value commodity makes very little sense because it has we know that freight rail movement has some impact if you think about the impact on the property owners and you can think of everybody from low income folks who are located near a track maybe an industrial part of the city to very wealthy homeowners who live you know on a on a bluff above puget sound there's just been a new analysis of property impacts and it looks like the increase in coltrane's that they're talking about would would result in a moment of very significant reduction in property values and therefore in the taxable property base for those counties the coal companies are going to pay for that the railways are going to pay for that that's again on the public the coal companies are sounding more and more like the banking industry to skim a little bit off of your house value will skim a little bit out of the kind of the price that you have to pay you know the fill your gas tank as you're sitting at the stop waiting for the train to go past will skin a little bit off of kind of the you know there your health care costs and then that goes into our you know just our pocket book i think i think it's fair to say that the coal company has a poor reputation and it's a deserved reputation when this is peabody call right i mean i can't believe that very blind eye to pollution in communities back east it's not the kind of company you want to invite to do business in your neighborhood but really you know it's not just about peabody it's about coal as a general matter is you know you had it has sort of a reputation that we think about and we think about coal in our christmas stockings we think about coal as being dirty is what you get if you don't if you've been bad from the early part of the twentieth century the images of coal miners with their you know kind of faces completely black coming out of the not about guys with pickaxes slung over the shoulder who are doing you know sort of you know good hard day's work you think about a guy sitting in the cab of a giant piece of machinery with it with a bucket basically that scrapes the layers of earth a way to get a real displacement issues for a small number of people but there would be growth opportunities in so many other energy sectors you know the party what are the sectors internationally where's energy go and you know right right now the big the big transition w united states has been the transition toward natural gas natural gas has about half the carbon content about and much less of other pollution about half the carbon content of coal so we've seen a big shift in natural gas pretty big shift toward efficiency  which is kind of free energy and a you know sort of growing shift into wind and solar all of that stuff you know can create jobs right here in the united states and it can create them in many cases in local communities you know but i  want to stress that if the if the domestic coal industry want to weigh the biggest impact probably that we have with that would be that we'd have a lot less pollution in this country we'd have a lot less mercury contamination and a lot less asthma quite frankly but their profits are not just coming out of our our taxes as subsidies and they're not just coming out of our pocketbooks by like impacting other industries they really are coming out of our health and the health effects have been profound particularly in places that are near  coal which will make our our energy portfolio much cleaner would be kind of ironic then wouldn't it for washington state to become part of the coal economy at this last space last sounds like dying gasp of the of the of the coal american heartland to consumers in asia it just sounds like it's not us it's been a place that's historically been cleaner and has prided itself on environmental leadership becoming the world's