Category Archives: Coal

Bakken Crude, Climate Change, Coal, Crude By Rail, Fossil fuels, Oil refineries, Oil trains, Take Action

CLIMATE ACTION: Protesters Block Train Tracks to 2 Washington Refineries, 52 arrested

Repost from ABC News
[Editor:  This article reports no arrests.  A later report in the Washington Post: 52 climate activists arrested in Washington railroad protest.  – RS]

Protesters Block Train Tracks to 2 Washington Refineries

By Phuong Le, AP, SEATTLE — May 15, 2016, 12:13 AM ET
Anti-Oil Protests
Members of the Seattle Raging Grannies sit in their rocking chairs chained together on the Burlington-Northern Railroad tracks at Farm to Market Road in Skagit County on Friday evening, May 13, 2016, in Burlington, Wash. From left are Deejay Sherman Peterson, Anne Thureson, Shirley Morrison and Rosy Betz-Zall. Hundreds of people in kayaks and on foot are gathering at the site of two oil refineries in Washington state to call for action on climate change and a fair transition away from fossil fuels. (Scott Terrell/Skagit Valley Herald via AP)

Hundreds of climate activists on Saturday marched to the site of two refineries in northwest Washington state to call for a break from fossil fuels, while a smaller group continued to block railroad tracks leading to the facilities for a second day.

Protesters in kayaks, canoes, on bikes and on foot took part in a massive demonstration near Anacortes, about 70 miles north of Seattle, to demand action on climate and an equitable transition away from fossil fuels such as oil and coal.

A day before, about 150 activists had pitched tents and set up camp on nearby railroad tracks to block the flow of oil flowing to the nearby Shell and Tesoro oil refineries.

“We can’t wait anymore. We’ve got to do things now,” Clara Cleve, 76, of Edmonds, said Saturday. “Direct action is very effective. My grandchildren are not going to have a place to live unless we move quickly now.”

Cleve said she plans to spend another night in a tent on the tracks and is prepared to be arrested for trespassing if necessary.

The protests are part of a series of global actions calling on people to “break free” from dependence on fossil fuels. Similar demonstrations are taking place in Los Angeles and Albany, New York, on Saturday and in Washington, D.C., on Sunday.

In upstate New York, climate activists gathered at a crude-oil shipment hub on the Hudson River in an action targeting crude-by-rail trains and oil barges at the Port of Albany. A group of activists sat on tracks used by crude oil trains headed to the port. Police did not report any arrests as of midday Saturday. Albany is a key hub for crude-by-rail shipments from North Dakota’s Bakken Shale region.

In Washington state, organizers are targeting two refineries that are among the top sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the state. Tesoro has started shipping Bakken crude oil to its refinery, and Shell is proposing an expansion project that would similarly bring in Bakken crude oil by train.

Officials with both Shell and Tesoro said in earlier statements that they respect the right of people to demonstrate peacefully, and that safety is their highest priority. A Shell spokesman also noted that the company, which employs about 700 workers at the refinery, is proud to be a part of the community and the refinery is a vital part of the region’s energy infrastructure.

BNSF Railway spokesman Gus Melonas said no trains are scheduled through Saturday but he declined to say whether any are expected to run Sunday.

“We had anticipated this and therefore adjusted scheduling with customers,” Melonas said. “At this point, we’re allowing the protest on our property.”

There had been no word of any arrests during the day, Given Kutz, a spokesman for the Skagit County Emergency Coordination Center, said late Saturday night.

The tracks, which connect BNSF’s mainline to Anacortes, serve the two refineries, as well as other customers who ship animal feed, steel and lumber by rail, Melonas said.

Skagit County spokeswoman Bronlea Mishler said authorities are monitoring the situation. Crowd estimates of the march range from several hundred to about 1,000 people, she said.

Bud Ullman, 67, who lives on Guemes Island, participated in the march, which he described as good-spirited, peaceful.

“The scientists are right. We have to get away from our dependence on fossil fuels, and it has to be done in a way that takes into serious consideration the impact on workers, families and communities,” he said.

The three-day event ends Sunday and has included “kayaktivists” demonstrating on water, community workshops and an indigenous ceremony.

“I’m here because there’s nothing more important to me than protecting the Earth,” said Elizabeth Claydon, 24, who lives in Seattle. “This is an urgent matter, and traditional ways are not working.”

Many of the nearly 40 groups involved in organizing the event were also involved in large on-water kayak protests against Shell’s Arctic oil drilling rig when it parked last year at a Seattle port.

Coal, Crude By Rail, Davis CA, Derailment, Oakland Ca, San Francisco Bay Area, Valero Benicia Refinery, Valero Crude By Rail

First oil, now coal: More fears of trains coming through Davis

Repost from the Davis Enterprise

First oil, now coal: More fears of trains coming through Davis

By Felicia Alvarez, March 25, 2016

The railways are rumbling with controversy once again as state agencies examine a coal train proposal that could send an additional 9 million tons of coal destined for export across California each year.

Four to six 100-car-long coal trains could travel through Davis each day under the plan, delivering coal from mines near Salt Lake City to a new cargo terminal in Oakland. The train route runs roughly parallel to Interstate 80, through Sacramento and Davis and onward to the Bay Area.

“It would more than triple the amount of coal coming out of the West Coast,” said Ray Sotero, communications director for state Sen. Loni Hancock, D-Oakland. Hancock introduced several bills in February to block the coal’s transportation.

The exports hinge on the construction of a new port in Oakland, which is receiving state funding for infrastructure and redevelopment in the surrounding areas. Development on the site has been underway for the past three to four years, led by developer Phil Tagami of Bowie Resource Partners, a Kentucky-based coal company with coal mines in Utah, Sotero said.

The coal train controversy arrives amid ongoing debate over Valero’s proposal to expand its refinery in Benicia and increase crude oil shipments by rail through Northern California.

The proposal — which would send 50-car-long crude oil shipments through Davis and nearby cities twice a day — was rejected last month by the Benicia Planning Commission, but the City Council will hear Valero’s appeal in April.

Coal is far less likely to explode or poison watersheds — unlike tar sands or crude oil — but it still poses an environmental threat, said Lynne Nittler, a Davis environmental advocate.

“It’s a little safer … but air quality-wise it’s nasty,” she said.

About 18,300 tons of coal dust per year could be released into Northern California’s air, affecting cities from Sacramento and Davis to Emeryville and Oakland, according to an environmental health and safety report by the Sierra Club. The report takes a lower-end estimate with the assumption that three coal trains could travel along the rail route each day.

Coal dust includes lead, mercury and arsenic, as well as fine particles that can contribute to asthma and heart disease, the report states. It also can contaminate air, water and soil, and homes and other buildings adjacent to the railroad tracks.

Local air quality is already below state safety standards, said Tom Hall, a spokesman for the Yolo-Solano Air Quality Management District. The region is currently at the “severe non-attainment” level for ground-level smog, he said.

Right now, railroad transport accounts for about 7 percent of nitrogen oxide — a key component of smog — in the area.

“Any extra nitrogen oxide is kind of a problem,” Hall said.

The notion of increasing coal shipments runs contrary to national trends on this greenhouse-gas-producing fuel. President Barack Obama took a stand against coal earlier this year, halting new coal mining leases, effectively putting a stop to new coal production on federal lands.

“We’ve become such short-term thinkers. … That thinking is deadly to us at this point,” Nittler said.

Meanwhile, the political battle rages on.

Utah Gov. Gary Herbert signed a deal last week for a $53 million loan to support construction of the new terminal in Oakland. Proponents of the port project say it will bring new jobs and a consistent market for Utah’s struggling coal industry, the Los Angeles Times reports.

California legislators are igniting their own push against the coal trains through the four bills introduced by Hancock.

Two of the bills are directly geared at the Oakland port. SB 1277 would prohibit shipping coal through the port, which is publicly funded in part. SB 1278 would require an environmental impact review for agencies that have authority to vote on any part of the project.

SB 1279 and SB 1280 would prohibit the use of public funds to build or operate any port that exports coal, and require port facilities that ship bulk commodities and receive state funds to prohibit coal shipments or fully mitigate the greenhouse-gas emissions with coal combustion.

A hearing on the bills is scheduled for April 5 at the state Capitol.

Climate Change, Coal, Crude Oil, Fossil fuels, Methane, Natural gas, Take Action

NY TIMES: Environmental Activists Take to Local Protests for Global Results

Repost from the New York Times

Environmental Activists Take to Local Protests for Global Results

By John Schwartz, March 19, 2016
Bill McKibben was arrested during a protest at Seneca Lake near Reading, N.Y., on March 7. He was protesting the proposed expansion of a natural gas storage facility. Credit Monica Lopossay for The New York Times

READING, N.Y. — They came here to get arrested.

Nearly 60 protesters blocked the driveway of a storage plant for natural gas on March 7. Its owners want to expand the facility, which the opponents say would endanger nearby Seneca Lake. But their concerns were global, as well.

“There’s a climate emergency happening,” one of the protesters, Coby Schultz, said. “It’s a life-or-death struggle.”

The demonstration here was part of a wave of actions across the nation that combines traditional not-in-my-backyard protests against fossil-fuel projects with an overarching concern about climate change.

Activists have been energized by successes on several fronts, including the decision last week by President Obama to block offshore drilling along the Atlantic Seaboard; his decision in November to reject the Keystone XL pipeline; and the Paris climate agreement.

Bound together through social media, networks of far-flung activists are opposing virtually all new oil, gas and coal infrastructure projects — a process that has been called “Keystone-ization.”

As the climate evangelist Bill McKibben put it in a Twitter post after Paris negotiators agreed on a goal of limiting global temperature increases: “We’re damn well going to hold them to it. Every pipeline, every mine.”

Regulators almost always approve such projects, though often with modifications, said Donald F. Santa Jr., chief executive of the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America. Still, the protests are having some impact. The engineering consultants Black and Veatch recently published a report that said the most significant barrier to building new pipeline capacity was “delay from opposition groups.”

Activists regularly protest at the headquarters of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in Washington, but there have also been sizable protests in places like St. Paul and across the Northeast.

In Portland, Ore., where protesters conducted a “kayaktivist” blockade in July to keep Shell’s Arctic drilling rigs from leaving port, the City Council passed a resolution opposing the expansion of facilities for the storage and transportation of fossil fuels.

Greg Yost, a math teacher in North Carolina who works with the group NC PowerForward, said the activists emboldened one another.

“When we pick up the ball and run with it here in North Carolina, we’re well aware of what’s going on in Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island,” he said. “The fight we’re doing here, it bears on what happens elsewhere — we’re all in this together, we feel like.”

The movement extends well beyond the United States. In May, a wave of protests and acts of civil disobedience, under an umbrella campaign called Break Free 2016, is scheduled around the world to urge governments and fossil fuel companies to “keep coal, oil and gas in the ground.”

This approach — think globally, protest locally — is captured in the words of Sandra Steingraber, an ecologist and a scholar in residence at Ithaca College who helped organize the demonstration at the storage plant near Seneca Lake: “This driveway is a battleground, and there are driveways like this all over the world.”

The idea driving the protests is that climate change can be blunted only by moving to renewable energy and capping any growth of fossil fuels.

Speaking to the crowd at Seneca Lake, Mr. McKibben, who had come from his home in Vermont, said, “Our job on behalf of the planet is to slow them down.”

He added, “If we can hold them off for two or three years, there’s no way any of this stuff can be built again.”

The demonstration at Seneca Lake earlier this month. Many protesters cheered when sheriff’s vans arrived. Credit Monica Lopossay for The New York Times

But the issues are not so clear cut. The protests aimed at natural gas pipelines, for example, may conflict with policies intended to fight climate change and pollution by reducing reliance on dirtier fossil fuels.

“The irony is this,” said Phil West, a spokesman for Spectra Energy, whose pipeline projects, including those in New York State, have come under attack. “The shift to additional natural gas use is a key contributor to helping the U.S. reduce energy-related emissions and improve air quality.”

Those who oppose natural gas pipelines say the science is on their side.

They note that methane, the chief component of natural gas, is a powerful greenhouse gas in the short term, with more than 80 times the effect of carbon dioxide in its first 20 years in the atmosphere.

The Obama administration is issuing regulations to reduce leaks, but environmental opposition to fracking, and events like the huge methane plume released at a storage facility in the Porter Ranch neighborhood near Los Angeles, have helped embolden the movement.

Once new natural gas pipelines and plants are in place, opponents argue, they will operate for decades, blocking the shift to solar and wind power.

“It’s not a bridge to renewable energy — it’s a competitor,” said Patrick Robbins, co-director of the Sane Energy Project, which protests pipeline development and is based in New York.

Such logic does not convince Michael A. Levi, an energy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“Saying no to gas doesn’t miraculously lead to the substitution of wind and solar — it may lead to the continued operation of coal-fired plants,” he said, noting that when the price of natural gas is not competitive, owners take the plants, which are relatively cheap to build, out of service.

“There is enormous uncertainty about how quickly you can build out renewable energy systems, about what the cost will be and what the consequences will be for the electricity network,” Mr. Levi said.

Even some who believe that natural gas has a continuing role to play say that not every gas project makes sense.

N. Jonathan Peress, an expert on electricity and natural gas markets at the Environmental Defense Fund, said that while companies push to add capacity, the long-term need might not materialize.

“There is a disconnect between the perception of the need for massive amounts of new pipeline capacity and the reality,” he said.

Market forces, regulatory assumptions and business habits favor the building of new pipelines even though an evolving electrical grid and patterns of power use suggest that the demand for gas will, in many cases, decrease.

Even now, only 6 percent of gas-fired plants run at greater than 80 percent of their capacity, according to the United States Energy Information Administration, and nearly half of such plants run at an average load factor of just 17 percent.

“The electricity grid is evolving in a way that strongly suggests what’s necessary today won’t be necessary in another 20 years, let alone 10 or 15,” Mr. Peress said.

Back at Seneca Lake, the protesters cheered when Schuyler County sheriff’s vans showed up. The group had protested before, and so the arrests had the friendly familiarity of a contra dance. As one deputy, A.W. Yessman, placed zip-tie cuffs on Catherine Rossiter, he asked jovially, “Is this three, or four?”

She beamed. “You remember me!”

Brad Bacon, a spokesman for the owner of the plant at Seneca Lake, Crestwood Equity Partners, acknowledged that it had become more burdensome to get approval to build energy infrastructure in the Northeast even though regulatory experts have tended not to be persuaded by the protesters’ environmental arguments.

The protesters, in turn, disagree with the regulators, and forcefully. As he was being handcuffed, Mr. McKibben called the morning “a good scene.”

The actions against fossil fuels, he said, will continue. “There’s 15 places like this around the world today,” he said. “There will be 15 more tomorrow, and the day after that.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 20, 2016, on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Protesters Across U.S. Turn Up Heat on Fossil Fuel. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
Alberta Canada, Carbon pricing systems, Carbon taxes, Climate Change, Coal, Jobs, Keep it in the ground, Oil industry lobby, Pipeline transport, Public transit, Renewable energy, Tar sands crude

Alberta Canada: Don’t cheer the new premier yet. Demand she break the oil barons’ vice-grip

Repost from The Guardian
[Editor:  Significant quote: “…investment in oil and gas creates fewer jobs than practically any other industry. Investment in the clean energy sector, on the other hand, creates 7 to 8 times more work. The oil barons aren’t essential “job creators”; they’re economic suppressers.”  – RS

Don’t cheer Alberta’s premier yet. Demand she break the oil barons’ vice-grip

Alberta’s climate plan falls far short of what’s possible: unleashing a green economy that creates hundreds of thousands of jobs and transitions off the tar sands

By Martin Lukacs, 24 November 2015 14.12 EST, updated 25 November 2015 10.28 EST
The Syncrude Oil Sands site near to Fort McMurray in Northern Alberta. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

Alberta’s new climate plan is drawing praise from sources that have rarely got on with the oil-exporter – Al Gore, labour unions and some of North America’s biggest green groups. At first glance, it’s not hard to see why: Alberta is promising an accelerated phase-out of coal, increased funds for renewable energy and impacted workers, and a price on carbon. It’s a major step hard to imagine scarcely a year ago, when the province was still under a multi-decade Conservative reign.

So why then are the oil barons celebrating? Beaming with pride, the heads of Canada’s biggest tar sands companies flanked Premier Rachel Notley during Sunday’s announcement.

Their hope: that Alberta’s globally tarred reputation will suddenly be scrubbed clean. Despite the lofty rhetoric, the government has committed only to bringing emissions below today’s levels by 2030 – making it even less ambitious than what Stephen Harper’s federal petro-state offered. This might be what the Premier meant when she promised that new pipelines – which companies desperately need to export tar sands – would soon benefit from “creative lobbying and advocacy efforts.”

The tar sands now has a glossy new sheen. Alberta’s plan sets a cap on their emissions – an acknowledgement that tar sands will no longer grow infinitely. Except it’s so high as to allow a staggering forty percent increase over the next fifteen years. And if a Conservative government returns to power, could it abandon the policy and ensure nothing is accomplished? In other words, this is a cap big enough to drive a three-story tar sands truck through.

Here’s the other reason the oil barons are cheering: they know they could be getting squeezed a hell of a lot more. After all, Alberta’s New Democratic Party got elected with a mandate for bold change. Albertans were tired of oil-soaked politicians who let companies vacuum up billions in profit amidst skyrocketing inequality and deteriorating public services. And the oil price crash made clearer than ever before the cost of a boom-and-bust economy built on a single volatile commodity.

Climate science backs that mandate for rapidly transforming our economy: it tells us that since we’ve delayed for so long, small reforms will no longer suffice. And Albertans understand the scientific reports that the vast majority of fossil fuels need to stay in the ground to avert dangerous climate change – the impacts of which they’ve already experienced in flooded Calgary and a drought-parched countryside. But while good times fueled denial, the ecologically suicidal politics of the establishment could be ignored. When the oil shock hit, they also started looking economically reckless.

As the oil barons thrash about in a self-induced crisis, this should be the time to part ways with them. Exxon is being investigated in the United States for having discovered the lethal consequences of climate change in the 1970s, then lied about it for decades while doing everything to make this catastrophe a reality. Low oil prices – which don’t look to be going away – have already forced the cancellation of extraction projects and created a thaw in investment throughout Alberta’s oil patch. The cost of renewable energy has dropped at incredible and unexpected speed. And just weeks ago, President Obama rejected the Keystone XL pipeline. It was not, as Premier Notley put it, a “kick in [Alberta’s] teeth.” But you couldn’t pick a better moment to kick the oil barons to the curb.

None other than the Economist – not exactly a radical menace to big business – has argued that the oil price collapse offers a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to transform a dysfunctional energy system.

The Alberta government could start by vanquishing the myth that the oil barons are economically indispensable. As the oil industry has thrown almost forty thousand people out of work, they have proved their interests never aligned with Albertans. The facts always told a different story: investment in oil and gas creates fewer jobs than practically any other industry. Investment in the clean energy sector, on the other hand, creates 7 to 8 times more work. The oil barons aren’t essential “job creators”; they’re economic suppressers.

So why – and this applies equally to Prime Minister Trudeau – fixate on building cross-country pipelines, when you could create more jobs in clean energy? Tackling climate change could be not just a public relations strategy to finesse the exporting of Alberta’s bitumen. It could be a chance to massively boost and transform the economy – making it more healthy, just and humane.

Look at what Germany – a similar, industrialized nation – has accomplished. In just over a decade, Germany has generated 30 percent of their electricity through renewables and created 400,000 good jobs in clean energy, much of it community-controlled and run by energy cooperatives. Using the right policies, Alberta could make this transition happen even more quickly, with greater benefits for First Nations, workers, and those getting the worst deal in the current economy.

It’s not too late to seize the historic opportunity. The NDP could still put forward a plan to create 200,000 good, green jobs over the next several years. Reports have laid out how this could happen with targeted investment: in accessible public transit, in energy-saving housing retrofits, in eco-system restoration, and by taking advantage of Alberta’s incredible potential for renewable energy. Nature didn’t make Alberta an oil province. Erect new signs: welcome to solar, wind and geothermal country.

How should Alberta pay for this transition? By putting their hands on the enormous profits of the industry that created the crisis in the first place. The new carbon tax – and the royalty hike the government must vigorously pursue – should be raised to send a stronger message to the market to jump-start a transition off oil.

Economists have shown a fair and effective tax would look more like $200 a tonne. $20 or $30 a tonne will not cut it – especially when half of the revenue generated will return as subsidies to oil and gas companies and dirty electricity generators. At this rate, most oil companies will be spending barely $1 more per barrel of oil. Polluters should be paying, not being paid off. The only message this will send the market is to “dig, baby, dig.”

Rolling out a plan to create a new, cleaner economy that’s more just and prosperous would convince voters there is an alternative to the oil economy. At that point the NDP could initiate a debate on a moratorium on tar sands development that has been called for by a hundred of North America’s top scientists. Scientific studies show we could get all of our electricity from renewables by 2030, not just 30 percent as Alberta now promises; and an economy entirely run by renewables by 2050. When popular movements can build pressure for such a transition, one thing will be sure: oil barons won’t be hand-clasping on the stage – they’ll be howling from the sidelines.

These movements, with Indigenous communities leading the way, have pushed the Alberta government this far. Now they must push them farther, and faster. It’s not time yet to cheer Alberta’s premier. Demand instead she break the oil barons’ vice-grip on our future.