From Libby Schaff, Mayor of Oakland, California:
We will not have coal shipped through our city.
The Wall Street Journal, “Coal Hub Spurs City Brawl,” 10/19/15
Utah coal companies want to invest $53 million to redevelop an old Army base and ship their coal from Oakland to Asia. The facility would create jobs and tax revenues, and ship other commodities as well as coal, but it is caught up in California’s environmental politics. Ports in Stockton, Richmond, and Long Beach already ship coal, but opponents don’t want Oakland to become what Jessica Dervin-Ackerman of the Sierra Club calls, “a thoroughfare for dirty coal.” The coal will travel in covered freight cars, so that concern is off base. Environmentalists worry that the coal will contribute to global warming. However, there is a huge glut around the world, and if Asia can’t get coal from Oakland, it will get it from somewhere else. Furthermore, the Utah coal has a low sulfur content and burns cleaner than most other coals, so the likelihood is that if Asia goes elsewhere, it will end up burning dirtier coal, thus increasing global warming more than if it used Utah coal.
But never mind, Oakland’s heavily minority population doesn’t need jobs at the proposed facility, which would pay appreciable more than the minimum wage. They can get lower paying but more environmentally sensitive jobs at Walmart or McDonald’s. And America’s coal companies, the ones who haven’t already gone bankrupt, don’t need to develop export markets to give themselves a chance to stay in business, although regulation and the low price of fracked natural gas have made it difficult to impossible to sell coal here. What does America need exports for anyway? It runs a perpetual trade deficit, but what’s more important, closing that gap and creating jobs in a city with high unemployment and crime rates, or satisfying the environmental sensibilities of the affluent East Bay, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Marin County crowd? The question answers itself.
