Does Opposing Coal Shipments Cause Increased Greenhouse Gas Emissions? A Discussion Of The Part Economic Health Plays In Environmental Protection

Preparing ground for planting in North Dakota:  1890s
Should we have stopped here for the sake of the environment?

As the fall of 2012 gets well underway an event in California demonstrates just how important economic prosperity is to environmental enhancement.

The event has to do with soaring prices for gasoline in California, prices driving people to rise up in protest.

One of the reasons California has higher prices for gasoline than most of the rest of the United States does is a requirement that a specialty blend called the “summer” blend be sold in the state from the beginning of summer through about the last day of October.  The summer blend is mostly unique to California in that the blend, in theory at least, is formulated to burn cleaner than more usual blends.

The problem with a unique blend is that disruptions in the supply, like that occasioned recently by a huge refinery fire in the state, creates shortages and those shortages mean rising prices for fuel. 

The governor of California, Jerry Brown, is renowned for his pro-environmental stance on most issues but even governor Brown has to bow to the dictates of public pressure sometimes so, headlines as this is written read, “As California gas prices rise, Governor Jerry Brown orders early sale of cheaper winter-blend fuel.”

The event is important because it provides a striking example of something that has been known for a long time but is not much considered or discussed in the world of pop-environmentalism; ardent environmentalism is a pursuit for the well to do and, as a corollary, one of the best ways to provide for environmental enhancements is to provide for economic enhancements.

The example is striking because average gas prices in California have ranged between $4.50 and $5 per gallon in recent months.  Much of the rest of the world would look at those prices and wonder at the low cost but, in California the price is enough above the usual to cause an outcry sufficient to cause the governor of the state to take an action likely to increase environmental pollution.

The governor’s action demonstrates the close connection between environmental protections and a healthy economy; something the pop-environmental lobby forgets as they use ham handed approaches to “encourage,” or even attempt to require, citizens of less wealthy areas of the world to give up hard won but still in process economic improvements for the sake of the environment.

What the American environmental lobby has never understood is that a starving father or mother giving up their own food to allow their babies to live does not particularly care about a few extra molecules of carbon in the air if it means an extra bite of food for the baby.  The so called ozone hole is far less important than the void in the belly left by too little food.

In my own neck of the woods the pop-environmental lobby is coming unglued over the possibility that coal might be shipped by rail to one of several west coast ports and exported overseas.  We discuss endlessly the potential effect of coal dust on long term health and the fact that diesel emissions might have some effect on our lives thirty years from now.

What is never discussed is the effect supplying electricity, electricity made possible by that coal shipment, for the first time to a remote area in a nation overseas might have on the health and welfare of men and women and children living in that area today.

Perhaps more significantly, we never discuss the fact that rising economies in areas that have never seen rising economies leads to the kind of prosperity that allows newly prosperous citizens the luxury of worry about the environment. 

When one wants to study the stars through a telescope or, microbes through a microscope, one must look through the correct end of the instrument to get clarity.  Regarding coal, for example, the pop-environmental movement needs to take a step back and wonder whether looking at the issue through the wrong end of the telescope leads to true environmental enhancements or, is it possible, opposing shipments of coal from the Unites States to overseas nations is an excellent way to assure more climate change gasses and particulate emissions to the atmosphere?

Environmental issues should never be looked at in isolation.  Events in California demonstrate that environmental enhancements, real or imagined, take a back seat to a host of other socio-political issues when push comes to shove.  To ignore that reality is to imperil true progress in preserving a healthy environment for the future.