by Paul Leighton While humans have benefitted significantly from coal in the past, the dust and carbon dioxide emissions that emanate from it represent serious damage to local environments. More significantly, it is now accelerating global warming leading to climate change ergo increased frequency of extreme weather events.
Expanding coal infrastructures will cause us, our children and other species significant harm. Our parents didn’t know this. We do, and with all due respect, these inherent costs cannot be justified with the promise of some more jobs on Texada Island.
Risks:
• The United States’ thermal coal on one of the two trains per day, will travel nearly 8,000 miles to the China market, spreading approximately 120 tons of dust from Wyoming to Texada Island.
• Fifty-eight derailments over the last three years (one every 19 days) www.coaltrainfacts.org.
• Contamination at port facilities.
Marine traffic increases of over 900 annual transits, poses significant risk of collision with existing traffic.
• Introduction of invasive species via Asian ballast water.
• The carbon footprint of port facility expansion threatens to nullify BC’s efforts to reduce global warming emissions.
• US thermal coal has the highest carbon dioxide emissions of any coal.
• Most importantly, the project enables increased carbon dioxide emissions.
Benefits:
• Fifty(?) single generation jobs
• No matter how you look at it, the risks far outweigh any benefit, even down-line to the cheap consumer goods.
• Proponents divert us from the critical outcome of their actions with myopic rhetoric.
Quoted in a story that appeared in the Peak on December 5, 2012, Powell River Regional District Electoral Area D Director Dave Murphy espouses that coal is the same as limestone predicated on his assumption of similar dust levels. This reminds me of George Orwell’s: “We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue.” Murphy either has a serious lack of knowledge around the inextricably larger issue, or is choosing to bookend the application to absolve himself of doing the right thing. This is blatantly over-reductive and shameful for a director. Further, saying that climate change concerns need to be taken up with China and not Texada, is the same as a drug dealer saying “I don’t take the drugs, I just sell them.”
Board Chair and Electoral Area C Director Colin Palmer claims “This is beyond our level.” [September 18]. Then why does the application come to the regional district at all?
Enabling this expansion is to enable drastic climate change. The time is now to phase out our dependence on coal and other fossil fuels and transition to a green energy future. The regional district has the opportunity to make a global difference at the local level, just as it did when it created a GE-Free crop zone. Do the right thing and say no to the application, if only on the grounds that it will harm our children.
Paul Leighton has lived in the area since the early 1990s and enjoyed its flora and fauna for 47 years.
