Oil, Coal & the Sea at Cherry Point

— by Floyd McKay, of Crosscut.com —

The masses that stormed the gates of Big Coal in 2013 are turning their fury on Big Oil as the new year opens and the Pacific Northwest considers a future as a massive pipeline on rails connecting the fossil-fuel deposits of Wyoming and North Dakota to the furnaces and factories of Asia.

Tens of thousands of regional citizens testified at public meetings, wrote letters and Internet posts and signed petitions indicating a deep concern over two large coal-export terminals.

Their concerns and testimony on coal — which, similarly to the oil, would trek from Wyoming and Montana to Northwest ports — will largely go behind closed doors in 2014. Sweeping Environmental Impact Statements are being prepared for Gateway Pacific Terminal north of Bellingham and Millennium Bulk Terminals at Longview. County, state and federal agencies probably won’t unveil the results until at least 2015.

It is taking an unusually long time to begin the actual EIS for Gateway; officials at SSA Marine, the terminal developer and BNSF Railway have yet to sign agreements with the agencies involved.

(To read the full article, go to crosscut.com/2014/01/29/coal-port-oil-trains-bellingham).

Floyd J. McKay, professor of journalism emeritus at Western Washington University, was a print and broadcast journalist in Oregon for three decades. Recipient of a DuPont-Columbia Broadcast Award for documentaries, and a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, he is also a historian and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Washington. He resides in Bellingham and can be reached at floydmckay@comcast.net.

Thanks to Susan McBain