Tim Johnson, Cascadia Weekly, May 25, 2011

Bellingham has a big decision to shoulder. Author and environmentalist Bill McKibben is cheering us on.

In 2009, McKibben helped build 350.org, the largest-ever coordinated rally of any kind, dedicated to building awareness of the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions in a warming world. The author of The End of Nature recently helped produce The Global Warming Reader, a collection of essays on the science, politics and social meaning of catastrophic climate change.

“Consider,” McKibben observes, “what has to happen if we’re going to deal with global warming in a real way. Concentrations of carbon bon dioxide greater than 350 parts per million in the atmosphere is not compatible with the planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted. The world as a whole must stop burning coal by 2030—and the developed world well before that—if we are to have any hope of ever getting the planet back down below that 350 number.”

Of Bellingham in particular, the New Englander says, “There’s virtually no place on the continent that’s done a better job of showing us how to live locally. Now, by quirk of geography, Bellingham is going to have to make some decisions about what kind of role it wants to play globally.”

McKibben’s visit was spurred by the announcement of plans by Seattle-based SSA Marine, Inc., to build the largest coal export terminal in North America at the aquatic reserve at Cherry Point. In February, the company inked a deal with Peabody Energy to export up to 24 million metric tons of coal per year through the planned Gateway Pacific Terminal. Fully built, the facility could ship more than 54 million tons of coal from Wyoming’s Powder River basin to markets throughout Asia. And that’s in addition to the 21 million tons of coal per year already being shipped out of Roberts Bank south of Vancouver, British Columbia.

“These two scales” the beginning and the end of the export chain, McKibben says, “are very much related. If the carbon in those vast coal deposits gets spewed into the atmosphere, then all the science shows we will heat the planet past the point our civilizations can tolerate— that Powder River basin is one of earth’s great carbon bombs, and the fuse seems to run through Cherry Point.” Global warming, he warns, will carry enormous costs. “Taller levees. Higher food prices. Treating malaria patients in New Delhi and maybe New York. One estimate put the tab higher than the combined cost of both World Wars and the Great Depression,” he says. “What we need to do is make the markets foresee that cost and act accordingly.

“In a radically warmer world, even a remarkably sufficient local economy and agriculture like the one being built in your neck of the woods doesn’t stand a chance. You can be the greatest organic farmer on earth, but if it’s raining every day for a month, you’re not growing much. And that’s just the kind of disturbance the climate scientists predict, and that we are already beginning to see around the world.”

Halting the juggernaut is a huge challenge. Coal currently provides 50 percent of our electricity.

“If you think it’s tough for us,” he adds, “imagine the Chinese. They’ve been opening a coal-burning power plant a week. You want to tell them to start shutting them down when that coal-fired power represents the easiest way to pull people out of poverty across Asia?

“I just spent some time in China for National Geographic,” McKibben says. “They’re working harder than anyone on carbon sequestration. Their guess is they can sequester 2 percent of their power plant emissions by 2030. It’s not going to help in time.

“The only hope of making the kind of change required is to really stick in people’s minds a simple idea: Coal is bad. It’s bad when you mine it, it’s bad for the city where you burn it, and it’s bad for the climate.”

Economic benefits that may accrue through the siting of a coal port near here are elusive, McKibben believes.

“The argument that someone else will eventually build the port is a poor one. Eventually we will learn not to burn coal—I’d bet inside of a decade or two. The question is how much damage will be done in the meantime.

“How much coal exists is less important than how much we burn in the next couple of crucial decades,” McKibben says. “If we burn coal at the rate envisioned by the owners of Powder River basin—here or in China—it’s very clear we will push us far, far deeper into serious global warming territory. The highest use of our coal reserves is to keep them where God put them—underground where they can do no harm.”

As an alternative, coal companies might promise to ship coal only to power plants equipped with sequestration equipment that are pumping the carbon underground.

“Then,” McKibben notes, “ their export would be less noxious, at least on a global level.”

It depends, he believes, on the kinds of outcomes our society wants to underwrite.

“The problem is not just subsidies” for fossil fuels,” McKibben says. “It’s the fact that we simply let them pour their main waste product into the atmosphere for free. If we charged them the real price for the damage they do the planet, then those renewable technologies would be competitive immediately.”

In the meantime, Whatcom County must decide if it wishes to underwrite a coal dock at Cherry Point as a policy commitment.

“There’s something poignant about a place like Bellingham, which has helped awaken our sense of new possibility, joining forces with the coal industry, the oldest and darkest of our 'modern’ technologies.

“The accident of the map has given Bellingham a real chance to strike a ringing blow for a workable world,” he says. “I grew up in Lexington, Mass., and I understand that history really does touch small places, and that choices must be made!

“If we are going to counter the power of the fossil fuel industry, it’s not going to be by outspending them. We need a different currency,” McKibben says, “bodies, creativity and spirit.”

He remains upbeat about our chances.

“I have enormous confidence that people in Bellingham will do all in their power to stand with people across the world who are fighting for the planet’s future.”

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