Washington state refuses to allow coal export terminal, in legal battle with 6 states

Top EPA official Obama’s “coal regs will be painful all of the way”

June 5, 2012

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May 23, 2012

EPA shuts down one of the largest Coal Mines in U.S.

January 14, 2011

It is the first time in the agency’s 40-year history that it has canceled a federal water permit for a project after it was issued.

The EPA noted in its own press release that it was asserting a rarely used authority

Obama’s promise to bankrupt coal industry to cost 1,000 jobs in upper Midwest

June 28, 2010

Now the latest:

A lawsuit has pitted six landlocked states against Washington State over a simple question: Who owns the federal ports?

Washington State is denying the states the permits required to build a large coal export terminal along the Columbia River. The states have sued and Washington filed a motion for dismissal.

But U.S. District Court Judge Robert Bryan rejected Washington State’s motion, setting the stage for a legal showdown over who really gets final say over which products flow through the nation’s sea ports.

“We’re talking about the Constitution and the rule of law,” said Montana Attorney General Tim Fox, “One state can’t discriminate against another state’s commodities in this way.”

Montana and Wyoming are leading plaintiffs and two of the largest coal-producing states in the country. The Powder River Basin contains 2.5 billion tons of recoverable coal and currently supplies 40 percent of the coal used in the United States. But as many states wean themselves off of electricity from burning coal, coal companies are looking to boost exports, primarily to Asia. But they have a major problem: there are no ports along the West Coast currently set up to load coal onto ships.

Four other states, Kansas, Utah, South Dakota and Nebraska, have joined the lawsuit against Washington State.

The Millennium Bulk Terminal, proposed for the port in Longview, Wash., was supposed to solve that obstacle. It was designed to export 44 million metric tons of coal a year. Important allies and trading partners Japan and South Korea were eager to buy the coal. But after conducting an environmental impact study, the state of Washington denied the terminal a required water permit.

“I think we’re on sound ground,” said Washington’s Democratic Governor Jay Inslee, “because we’re enforcing our environmental rules for clean air and noise and some other issues.”

Snip…

“It is insulting to all Washington residents that proponents of this facility have chosen to minimize and ridicule the impact diesel emissions from the largest operation of the largest coal export facility in North America would have had on the people of Cowlitz County,” said Ecology’s spokesman Dave Bennett.

But Governor Jay Inslee makes no secret of his disdain for coal. In his 2007 book, “Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy,” Inslee wrote, “coal is killing us. If we fail to restrain growth of CO2 emissions all six billion of us on this little spaceship are at risk.”

He also wrote that coal and cars are in a race to be the greatest danger to our climate. And at a recent news conference in which he announced Washington state would file its 32nd lawsuit against the Trump Administration over the dismantling of president Obama’s Clean Power Plan, Inslee said: “We’re breathing smoke from Mississippi, we’re breathing smoke from the rest of the United States. We have an interest in reducing coal smoke from all over the United States.” More at Fox News