Search Results

Coal export terminals in British Columbia suffered two big blows last week. The first blow came from tar sands giant Suncor, which announced that it would halt shipments of petroleum coke, or “petcoke,” through the Ridley terminal on the northern coast of the province. The petcoke shipped through Ridley is a tar sands byproduct that’s “like coal, but dirtier,” yielding 53 percent more climate-warming pollution per ton than coal, as estimated in this...

The 1988 Nestucca oil spill fouled 110 miles of Washington’s shoreline and 280 miles of the west coast of Vancouver Island. Yet because the spill happened just a few months before Exxon Valdez—an environmental disaster that released forty times more oil than Nestucca and remained the worst oil spill in American history until Deepwater Horizon in 2010—Grays Harbor’s smaller disaster was largely forgotten. To understand what really happened and what...

In case you were wondering, the bad news for coal exporters keeps rolling in.  Take, for instance, the latest figures from the Ridley coal export terminal in northern BC: Clearly, the precipitous decline in coal exports from the terminal is still underway. Metallurgical (steelmaking) coal had been the mainstay of the terminal since 2010, accounting for more than two-thirds of the port’s coal volume. But in September, Ridley didn’t ship a single ton...

The latest wave in the tsunami of the Northwest fossil fuel export schemes has washed up in the form of a propane-by-rail facility on the Columbia River. A firm currently calling itself Waterside Energy recently announced plans for a $450 million liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), or propane, export project at the Port of Longview in Washington. The proposal comes on top of a revamped plan by the company to develop...

An oversized carbon-fuel project may be coming to a small town on the Oregon Coast. A Canadian energy company wants to build a liquid natural gas (LNG) export terminal in Coos Bay, Oregon, to ship tremendous volumes of natural gas overseas. To serve the terminal with natural gas, a pipeline company would build hundreds of miles of pipeline through 72 miles of public forests, 400 water bodies, 700 parcels of...

Do you ever think about just not voting, and then feel bad for being lazy? Or do you wonder what is wrong with your friends who don’t exercise their right to vote? Last time, I made the case that politicians aren’t bad apples, our voting system is a bad barrel. That bad barrel also taints voters, making them more apathetic, disengaged, and suspicious that the whole system is corrupted by...

British Columbia has a world-class carbon tax. Its been working for almost 7 years, cutting pollution and pumping money into other parts of the economy, like the pockets of businesses and households who now pay lower taxes. Jealous decision-makers down here in Oregon and Washington might be asking “Yes, but how how did they start taxing pollution and helping businesses and residents? How did they do it?” Clean Energy Canada set...

Last February to much fanfare, the oil company Tesoro—a firm with big plans for oil trains in the Northwest—announced that it would voluntarily replace older tank cars with newer models. More recently, the Shell Refinery at Anacortes promised to use these same tank cars at its planned oil train site. In the In the parlance of industry, they meant that they would upgrade or replace the legacy DOT-111 tank cars...

Portland and Vancouver BC officials, welcome to Seattle’s pain. With Uber launching (or threatening to launch) its app-based personal transportation service in your city, you have a real puzzle to solve. You only have to balance all these goals: Protecting consumers, supporting green alternatives to car ownership, enforcing sensible rules, jettisoning outdated ones, not rewarding bad behavior, confronting limitations of a strangled taxi system you created, navigating tough equity questions,...