Unintended Consequences Harm The Environment As Much As Deliberate Actions Sometimes Do

Sometime later this year I hope to be releasing a book tentatively titled, “15 Ways To More Efficiently Pollute The Environment.”

The work will explore ways in which we, as a society, speak out of both sides of our mouths when it comes to environmental issues.

The issues discussed in this blog, and later in the book, often use Whatcom County, Washington as an example.  In part, that is because I live in Whatcom County so examples are more easily explored from the standpoint of personal experience and, in part because Whatcom County is a smallish county that has, due to its location and its amenities, attracted large numbers of the kind of snobbish elite commonly associated with the pop-environmental movement.

Unfortunately, to paraphrase the Las Vegas slogan, what happens in Whatcom County seldom stays in Whatcom County.

The kinds of environmentally adverse actions so often seen in the county are important examples because they are often the same kinds of actions being implemented in other regions of the state, the nation, and the world.   

As just one example, the local community is in an uproar over a bulk cargo port being proposed for an area of the county called Cherry Point.  Cherry Point is an industrial preserve set aside some years ago specifically as an area in which large scale industrial projects are to be located.

The issue in the current phase of the port project is coal.  The local pop-environmental community is coming unglued over the possibility coal might be shipped from Wyoming to Cherry Point, then loaded aboard ships and sent to China.  It is important to note, serious environmentalists are also involved in the discussion.

Railroads have been a fixture in the West for most of 150 years

Prominent in the discussion is the issue of emissions as trains pass through the region pulling the long strings of coal filled cars from one place to another.

All that is fine; the issues surrounding both the larger issues involved in selling coal for use overseas and the small issues involving communities impacted as significantly increased train traffic passes through those communities deserve full analysis as decision makers attempt to come to rational decisions regarding permits, mitigations and other aspects of the effort.

But the pop-environmental blasts are also disingenuous.  Some years ago a proposal for an intermodal freight facility in Whatcom County was brought forward by a group interested in providing a place where containers loaded aboard trucks could be transferred onto train cars for shipment to ultimate destinations.  The proposal would have resulted in very large reductions in diesel emissions along a hundred mile stretch of the I-5 corridor connecting the Canadian border crossings at Blaine to Seattle.  That proposal was objected to by some of the same interests now claiming diesel emissions are a problem.

A map dated 1903 showing Whatcom County and its links to transcontinental train routes

Whatcom County is on the border between British Columbia, Canada and the United States.  The border crossings in Whatcom County are among the busiest along the long border between the United States and one of its major trading partners.  Tens of thousands of trucks cross the border daily, carrying goods back and forth to markets located in both the U.S. and Canada.

Each of those trucks travel past the area once proposed for the intermodal facility, a facility that would allow containers destined for U.S. markets to be loaded aboard trains or, alternatively, containers destined for Canadian markets to be off loaded from those same trains. 

Either way, the destination or, the point of origin for the truck traffic is usually Seattle, the closest practical intermodal opportunity available today.  In Seattle, the containers are loaded aboard the same train cars they could have been loaded aboard in Whatcom County or, in the case of imports and exports, aboard ships.

The distance between the proposed intermodal facility in Whatcom County and Seattle destinations is more than one hundred miles each way or, a two hundred mile round trip.

The point?

Again, as explained above, many of the same people and the same groups opposing the coal terminal on the basis of emissions opposed the intermodal facility; a facility that had it been built would have taken thousands of trucks, and their emissions, off the crowded I-5 freeway system in favor of an alternative that would have reduced diesel emissions by as much as 80 – 90 percent and, in terms of wear and tear on roads and the consequent need to repair those roads with greenhouse gas intensive products like concrete, significant additional savings.

Thus, the point of the book; all too often the pop-environmental, based at best on knee jerk emotion and, at worst, on self-aggrandizement, takes over discussion of an environmental issue and, as a consequence, leads the rest of society into dead end roads that, in the final analysis, amount to little more than more efficient ways to create more pollution rather than less.  But they sure do feel good!