A debate that may have worldwide consequences is now taking place in Oakland. Developers are proposing to build a coal export facility on the Oakland waterfront that will receive as yet unmined coal from Utah and ship it to China. The environmental impact could be tremendous:
...the scale of fossil fuel exports from the project would be so big it would have measurable climate change effects on a global scale... if one assumes... exports [of] the maximum allowable coal from the terminal for the 66-year term lease... [that is] about 660 million tons of coal to overseas power plants. These coal-fired plants would burn it and then release as much as 1.5 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere."The City Council is now considering the health and safety impacts of facilitating the release of over a billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere... The incremental amounts of atmospheric carbon that will drive climate change are measured in billions of tons. A billion tons matters."
The coal processing facility is part of a larger bulk commodity terminal that developers plan for the old Oakland Army Base. Except that they didn't tell anyone coal would be part of the deal until long after the Oakland City Council signed on the dotted line. In fact they pledged that coal operations WOULD NOT happen. ...CCIG is publically on record as having no interest or involvement in the pursuit of coal-related operations at the former Oakland Army Base.Several years ago Phil Tagami pledged no coal in Oakland. Here's where he said it http://t.co/...pic.twitter.com/RuTn8FhIiu
— Darwin BondGraham (@DarwinBondGraha) September 22, 2015 Now these same developers are basically saying "FU" to Oakland and its government, claiming that all authority over what goes on at the terminal was negotiated away at lease approval time.Environmental groups have countered with a lawsuit, demanding a new environmental review now that coal is on the shipping agenda.