CANADA- US Activists rap Keyston BUT LEAVE DIRTY COAL BEHIND??? Canada is only No. 9 On energy out of 10 countries-what's up with that

CARTOON

U.S. activists rap Keystone but leave dirty coal alone

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=632458720105487&set=a.153203521364345.32932.100000240949070&type=1&theater



　

　

　

AND...

　

　

　

U.S. activists rap Keystone but leave dirty coal alone

Lee-Anne Goodman is Washington cor respondent for The Canadian Press.

　

　

　

　

America’s hobbled coal industry has come up with a plan to save its elf. With domestic consumption in serious decline, coal producers in Wyoming and Montana have been loading up freight trains a mile long and shipping the coal to the Pacific Northwest for export to Asian countries.

Why Asia? Air quality concerns aren’t exactly top of mind in many Asian countries, and those booming, energy-hungry nations are keen to use coal-fired power. China, in fact, is building the equivalent of two 500-megawatt coal-fired plants each week.

So even though an abundance of cheaper, cleaner natural gas and increasingly stringent federal regulations in the U.S. are putting the boots to many coal plants, Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private-sector coal producer, has boldly proclaimed that "coal’s best days are ahead," thanks to the Asian market . The industry hopes to increase U.S. coal exports to Asia by as much as 190 million tonnes a year.

That means strip mining will have to be vastly expanded in a pristine region of the United States — the Powder River Basin in northeastern Wyoming and southeastern Montana. The impact on wildlife, farmers and ranchers could be enormous.

And yet it’s the Keystone XL pipeline, not this attempt by coal producers to snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat, that overwhelmingly dominates environmental debate in the United States. This despite the fact that Greenpeace has ranked the coal industry’s determination to dramatically boost exports to Asia as the third most harmful project in the world in terms of carbon emissions.

Alberta’s oilsands ranked fifth.

So why isn’t coal being held up as the true "climate bomb" instead of Keystone XL by the U.S. environmental movement? It’s a question many Canadian officials have openly questioned themselves in the seemingly unending battle to win Keystone XL approval.

The immediate damage to local environments by drastically increasing coal production, after all, would likely be far greater than any imposed by Keystone XL, which would exceed U.S. federal pipeline safety requirements in its bid for approval. The global carbon impact of hiking coal exports to countries with no qualms ab out burning it would also pack a bigger punch.

Some academics have compared the coal industry’s tactics to those of the tobacco industry 25 years ago. In Yale Environment 360, an online magazine, environmental journalist Jonathan Thomps on called coal "the cigarette of our new age."

Indeed, in the dying days of the tobacco industry, Asia was its saviour. A Philip Morris vicepresident even enthused publicly that the Asian market was s o lucrative that it "confounds the imagination." Tobacco companies now sponsor as many as 100 elementary schools in China, where 16 million children under the age of 15 are smokers.

The Clear Air Task Force has determined that coal kills more than 13,000 Americans a year, and causes heart attacks and asthma attacks. A United Nations official, meantime, recently made an urgent call for countries across the Asia-Pacific region to tackle air quality and human health .

Environmentalists are hesitant to say that coal exports should be a bigger target in the U.S. than Keystone XL. I spoke to a climate activist this week who said she hopes to see both issues share the national spotlight.

But two climate change experts recently urged environmentalists to rethink its Keystone-centric strategy in a column for the Bloomberg news outlet.

"While Keystone is a single project, U.S. coal is an entire energy system," wrote Matthew Stepp and Alex Trembath, urging the environmental movement to "shift back" its focus to coal.

It seems to me the American environmental movement has a bigger, and more dangerous, enemy than the Keystone XL pipeline — one that's right in its backyard, posing not just domestic but global threats on a disturbing array of fronts.

http://thechronicleherald.ca/opinion/1139562-goodman-us-activists-rap-keystone-but-leave-dirty-coal-alone



　

　

　

---------------------------