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Louisiana may see the highest-rising seas in the world

Louisiana may see the highest-rising seas in the world

As Hurricane Katrina approached, many Americans for the first time learned about New Orleans’ precarious, below-sea-level orientation. The city is described as “bowl-like,” rimmed by levees and natural structures that might not hold back surging storm water — and might make drying out nearly impossible. It turned out that the analogy was imperfect. New Orleans is more like a TV dinner tray, and only the Ninth Ward ended up flooded.

After Katrina, anyway — a category 3 storm when it hit. But as sea levels continue to rise, and warming promises bigger storms, New Orleans’ complete submersion may be inevitable. From The Lens:

Stunning new data not yet publicly released shows Louisiana losing its battle with rising seas much more quickly than even the most pessimistic studies have predicted to date. …

Southeast Louisiana — with an average elevation just three feet above sea level — has long been considered one of the landscapes most threatened by global warming. That’s because the delta it’s built on — starved of river sediment and sliced by canals — is sinking at the same time that oceans are rising. The combination of those two forces is called relative sea-level rise, and its impact can be dramatic.

Scientists have come up with four scenarios of sea-level rise, ranging from .2 meters (8 inches) to 2 meters (about 6.5 feet). They’re using the mid-range figure, about 4.5 feet, to make local projections of relative sea-level rise.

For example, tide-gauge measurements at Grand Isle, about 50 miles south of New Orleans, have shown an average annual sea-level rise over the past few decades of 9.24 millimeters (about one-third of an inch) while those at Key West, which has very little subsidence, read only 2.24 millimeters.

For decades coastal planners used that Grand Isle gauge as the benchmark for the worst case of local sea-level rise because it was one of the highest in the world. But as surveying crews began using more advanced instruments, they made a troubling discovery.

Readings at a distance inland were even worse than at Grand Isle. “For example,” Osborne said, “we have rates of 11.2 millimeters along the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain — the metro New Orleans area. And inside the city we have places with almost [a half-inch] per year.

The Lens article includes this graph from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:

The Lens/NOAA

Click to embiggen.

Orleans parish, the one expected to be 85.3 percent under sea level by 2100, is home to the city of New Orleans.

Of course, as noted above, New Orleans is also more than half below sea level already. It’s like taking one of those cafeteria trays with the separate triangular sections and pushing it down into a bathtub. The more you push — or the more the water in the tub rises — the more it encroaches around the rim, surface tension holding it back. Eventually, as happened in 2005, it will give.

The only way to prevent that from happening is to build a larger lip around the outside, requiring a generous outlay of money and a great deal of urgency.

[NOAA’s Tim Osborne said,] “Based on the frequency of storms over the last century, we know we can expect 30 to 40 hurricanes or tropical storms to hit this area by the end of this century. Think of Isaac — not of Katrina — and add up the cost of that kind of destruction 30 or 40 times.

“During Isaac, Louisiana [Highway] 1 to Grand Isle was almost impassable. It will be impassable in a few decades unless something is done. Look at what happened to Plaquemines Parish from Category 1 Isaac. More and worse will happen in the next few decades.”

Osborne stressed the new figures mean the state’s Master Plan should be adjusted to meet the larger, faster-approaching threat.

“People are already questioning the wisdom of spending huge sums to protect Louisiana,” he said. “The state needs to make sure they’re proposing plans that will last more than a few decades, that they aren’t asking for billions to build things that might be ineffective before they are even finished being built.”

In 2009, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) openly opposed efforts to curb climate change. By 2100, of course, he’ll no longer be in office and his name will likely be forgotten. After all, can you name the governor of Atlantis?

Source

New research: Louisiana coast faces highest rate of sea-level rise worldwide, The Lens

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Meet Ernest Moniz, who may or may not be the next secretary of energy

Meet Ernest Moniz, who may or may not be the next secretary of energy

Everyone is excited about rumors that President Obama will name Ernest Moniz to run the Department of Energy. Reactions range from “Who is Ernest Moniz?” to “What happened to the other guy?” to “Who was the other guy?”

Well, we are here to answer those questions! (The first one, anyway; we’ve answered the other two before.) Since you live a fast-paced lifestyle, always on the go, we’ve broken it up into bite-sized pieces, one bit of info at a time. You are welcome in advance.

Who is Ernest Moniz?

Well, he might be the next secretary of energy — if Obama nominates him and if the Senate approves him. It is possible that in two months time he will be of very little interest to you, having not been confirmed. Or he will be of very little interest to you because he was confirmed, but you, like most Americans, are fairly indifferent to the office of secretary of energy.

But you knew that. So here’s who he is, as articulated by Reuters, which appears to have been first with rumors of his imminent nomination.

Moniz, a former undersecretary of energy during the Clinton administration, is director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Energy Initiative, a research group that gets funding from industry heavyweights including BP, Chevron, and Saudi Aramco for academic work on projects aimed at reducing greenhouse gases.

Ha ha. Sounds great! We will come back to this part, obviously.

At MIT, Moniz led intensive studies about the future of coal, nuclear energy and natural gas, and he helped attract funding and research momentum to energy projects on campus.

People familiar with Moniz’s work said, if chosen, he would bring his own energy and pragmatism to the job. …

Moniz earned kudos for a pragmatic approach toward using research to find ways to reduce carbon pollution from fossil fuels and transition to cleaner forms of energy.

We’ll come back to this, too.

What does he look like?

Well, he looks like this:

MIT

But more evocatively, he kind of looks like a Founding Father who teaches high-school English in New Hampshire.

Has he ever been in any movies?

No. According to IMDB, he’s only ever been on Frontline. Put those autograph books away!

What’s his actual, non-summarized background?

Here’s part of his bio at MIT:

Professor Moniz received a Bachelor of Science degree summa cum laude in physics from Boston College, a doctorate in theoretical physics from Stanford University, and honorary doctorates from the University of Athens, the University of Erlangen-Nurenburg, and Michigan State University. He was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Saclay, France, and at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Moniz is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Humboldt Foundation, and the American Physical Society and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He received the 1998 Seymour Cray HPCC Industry Recognition Award for vision and leadership in advancing scientific simulation and, in 2008, the Grand Cross of the Order of Makarios III for contributions to development of research, technology and education in Cyprus and the wider region.

(Honestly, “the Grand Cross of the Order of Makarios III” sounds made up.)

I would like to hear him in his own words, please.

Fine. Here you go, via Switch Energy Project, as pointed out to us by D. Ray Long.

How do environmental groups feel about his possible nomination?

A charitable way to describe how they feel would be: mixed.

As noted above, his program at MIT receives a lot of money from fossil fuel interests. And Moniz has been unabashed in his advocacy of the use of natural gas as a “bridge” fuel and even for some expansion of nuclear power. (You can read his thoughts on the latter here.)

The Hill has a small collection of quotes from disaffected greens, but the better overview comes from Inside Climate News, which has a good article on Moniz’s background. It starts with his thoughts on natural gas.

In December, while speaking at the University of Texas at Austin, Moniz warned that while natural gas could reduce carbon emissions by displacing coal-fired electricity, its increasing use could also slow growth in the clean energy sector.

“When it comes to carbon, [natural] gas is part of our solution at least for some time,” said Moniz, who served as undersecretary of energy during the Clinton administration. “And we should take advantage of the time to innovate and bring down the cost of renewables. The worst thing w[ould] be is to get time and not use it. And that I’m afraid is where we are.”

This isn’t incorrect, mind you — natural gas has spurred a drop in carbon emissions and is certainly going to be part of the mix. But it’s not something that most environmental organizations are currently championing, especially given the process usually used to extract that gas: fracking.

Moniz has accepted fracking as a necessary-but-unnecessarily-polluting evil. In 2011, Moniz presented a report from his MIT group to the Senate, saying:

“Regulation of shale (and other oil and gas) activity is generally controlled at the state level, meaning that acceptable practices can vary between shale plays,” Moniz wrote in his prepared testimony. “The MIT study recommends that in order to minimize environmental impacts, current best practice regulation and oversight should be applied uniformly to all shales.”

Moniz didn’t elaborate on how to standardize regulations and oversight …

“Prior to carrying out our analysis, we had an open mind as to whether natural gas would indeed be a ‘bridge’ to a low-carbon future,” he told the committee. “In broad terms, we find that, given the large amounts of natural gas available in the U.S. at moderate cost … natural gas can indeed play an important role over the next couple of decades (together with demand management) in economically advancing a clean energy system.”

At the same time, however, the report projected that natural gas will “eventually become too carbon intensive” and should be phased out around 2050.

Moniz’s record also demonstrates commitment to renewable energy development.

As a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, he helped write a 2010 report that recommended a federal investment of $16 billion per year for clean energy innovation — about triple the 2010 investment. Some of that money could come from the private sector, the report said. For example, “we use about 200 billion gallons of transportation fuel annually, so a two cents per gallon charge would … generate about $4 billion per year.” It said the same amount of money could be raised by charging a fee for the electricity used nationwide — a suggestion Moniz reiterated at the Texas conference.

Expect this to come up during confirmation hearings.

So, will he be confirmed by the Senate?

Well, given the drawn-out, ridiculous path Republican Chuck Hagel has been forced to crawl in his bid to be secretary of defense, God only knows. Granted, defense is a more high-profile Cabinet position, but it seems clear that his nomination happened under the belief that confirmation would be easier than it has been.

And, of course, Moniz would first have to be nominated.

OK. So, will he be nominated?

As before: God only knows. Well, God and Obama.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Meet Ernest Moniz, who may or may not be the next secretary of energy

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The Pistorius Case and South Africa’s Gun Problem

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South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius, the first double amputee to compete in the Olympics, has been charged with murder for shooting his girlfriend, model Reeva Steenkamp, early this morning. While initial reports suggested that the 26-year-old athlete had mistaken Steenkamp for a burglar, the BBC reported that authorities were skeptical: “Police say neighbours heard screaming and shouting around the time of the shooting, and that they had been called to investigate incidents of a domestic nature at the same house in the past.”

Pistorius’ ownership of and affinity for guns has been well documented by journalists, including the New York Times Magazine‘s Michael Sokolove and others. Check out this tweet from last November:

(Following the shooting, Nike pulled a South African TV ad featuring Pistorius and the tagline “I am the bullet in the chamber.”)

The shooting is the most high-profile case from a country that, like the United States, has recently grappled with the impact of its well-established gun culture. Interestingly, firearms are not mentioned in the South African constitution, and a tough gun control law was passed in 2000. When it went into effect five years later, it put a five-gun limit on most citizens, allowing just one gun per person for self-defense purposes. As the Times explained:

But getting any gun at all, critics say, is the big task. Guns are to be automatically denied to drug or alcohol abusers, spouse abusers, people inclined to violence or “deviant behavior” and anyone who has been imprisoned for violent or sex-related crimes. The police interview three acquaintances of each applicant before deciding whether he or she is competent to own a gun. Prospective gun owners must pass a firearms course. They also must install a safe or strongbox that meets police standards for gun storage.

South Africa now ranks 50th in the world in gun ownership rates, and gun-related crime has dropped 21 percent since 2004-05. Shooting murders of women, particularly by their partners, has dropped, as shown by this chart from a 2012 report (PDF) by the South African Medical Research Council. (Murders by partners are called “intimate femicides.”)

Still, in 2007, the country’s gun homicide rate was among the highest in the world, ranking 12th at 17 gun murders annually per 100,000 people. To put that statistic in context: In 2007, there were 8,319 gun deaths murders in South Africa, a country of roughly 49 million people. The United States—No. 1 in gun ownership, and with more than six times as many people—had 9,960 gun deaths homicides in 2012.

In many ways, American and South African gun culture and gun violence are quite different. But the possibility that Pistorius intentionally shot and killed Steenkamp brings to mind two of the most prominent pro-gun myths: namely, that keeping a gun at home makes you and your loved ones safer, and that guns make women safer.

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The Pistorius Case and South Africa’s Gun Problem

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Frackers set their sights on the Golden State

Frackers set their sights on the Golden State

calwest

Old-style drilling in California.

California’s Monterey Shale is full of sweet, sweet crude — maybe upwards of 400 billion barrels of the stuff. It’s also full of earthquake-prone faults and fertile farmland. I have an idea: Let’s frack the hell out of it! From CNN:

Running from Los Angeles to San Francisco, California’s Monterey Shale is thought to contain more oil than North Dakota’s Bakken and Texas’s Eagle Ford — both scenes of an oil boom that’s created thousands of jobs and boosted U.S. oil production to the highest rate in over a decade. …

“Four hundred billion barrels, that doesn’t escape anyone in this businesses,” said Stephen Trammel, energy research director at IHS [Cambridge Energy Research Associates].

The trick now is getting it out.

That will require convincing residents of the Golden State to hack up the land North Dakota-style. And by “convincing,” I mean “bribing.”

Several oil companies have put together research teams to work on the Monterey, said Katie Potter, head of exploration and production staffing at NES Global Talent, a company that recruits oil industry professionals.

If the Monterey takes off, Potter said the impact on jobs in the state would be huge, saying the shale boom has already created 600,000 jobs nationwide over the last few years.

“It could potentially solve the state’s budget deficit,” she said.

The Monterey Shale is not as easy to frack as other shale areas because it’s not flat — it’s been crunched up by years of earthquakes. While there are 400 billion barrels in there, only about 15 billion could be drilled out with current technology; most would require “more intensive fracking and deeper, horizonal drilling,” The New York Times reports. Currently, according to the Western States Petroleum Association, 628 of California’s 47,000 active wells are fracking. From the Times:

Severin Borenstein, a co-director of the Energy Institute at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, said technological advances and the high price of oil were driving interest in the Monterey Shale, just as elsewhere.

“Everyone has known that there is shale oil not just in the Monterey Shale but also in North Dakota and Wyoming and all over the country,” he said. “Back in the ‘70s, there were discussions that there’s all this oil and all we’ve got to do is get it. Now 40 years later, the technologies have become available to actually get it in a cost-effective way.”

While oil is found less than 2,000 feet below the surface in fields like Midway-Sunset, companies must pump down to between 6,000 and 15,000 to tap shale oil in the Monterey.

In December, California Gov. Jerry “Uber Alles” Brown (D) released a draft proposal to regulate fracking in the state by requiring companies to disclose the chemicals they use and the exact locations of their operations. Despite that proposal, the conservation group Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit against the state of California in late January for insufficiently regulating fracking. From the Huffington Post:

[T]he Arizona-based Center For Biological Diversity charged that the agency tasked with regulating energy production, the California Department of Conservation’s Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources (DOGGR) has “[issued] permits for oil and gas well operations … without tracking, monitoring or otherwise supervising the high-risk, unconventional injection practice.”

“State regulators aren’t complying with existing law, which requires the disclosure of the chemicals and total volume of water being used as well as the completion of a thorough engineering study,” the Center For Biological Diversity’s Kassie Siegel told The Huffington Post.

California’s Central Valley already has enough pollution to contend with from toxic farming chemicals that have leaked into groundwater. The Fresno metro area has the worst air quality in the country, topping Forbes’ list of the dirtiest U.S. cities in 2012. I know you’re strapped, California, but you don’t need to risk more environmental degradation and earthquakes to dig yourselves out of this one.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Ken Cuccinelli’s Messy Relationship With Mental Health

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Pressed at Saturday’s National Review Institute Summit on how best to fight back against President Obama’s gun control campaign, Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli didn’t blink. While he was quick to criticize the President’s approach, there was “an awful lot we can do to make Virginia Techs and Sandy Hooks less likely.” Then Cuccinelli—who recently declared his candidacy for governor—pivoted to mental health. “I’m as frugal a participant in government as you can find,” Cuccinelli said. “But I believe government has a role in helping people who through no fault of their own” suffer from mental illness.

So what did Cuccinelli, who described himself in his remarks (and on his gubernatorial campaign website) as a leader on mental health isssues, think of President Obama’s own post-Newtown proposals to improve mental health treatment? “I haven’t seen them,” he told me after the panel. (They’re here.)

That’s surprising, given his stated commitment to the issue. It’s also a bummer, because—as with many of his conservative colleagues, including the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre—Cuccinelli’s warnings about gun-grabbing mask the fact that he broadly shares Obama’s priorities on a key aspect of the gun-control package.

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Ken Cuccinelli’s Messy Relationship With Mental Health

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The Assault Weapons Ban Just Doesn’t Have the Votes

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Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) new assault weapons ban legislation has many features the original 1994 law lacked—most notably, it closes loopholes that allowed manufacturers to produce de-facto assault weapons, and it eliminates the sunset provision, meaning the new version wouldn’t expire after 10 years as the first one did. But according to Bloomberg, AWB 2.0 is missing one key thing that the original had—votes:

A proposed ban on sales of assault weapons would be defeated in the U.S. Senate today unless some members changed their current views, based on a Bloomberg review of recent lawmaker statements and interviews.

At least six of the chamber’s 55 Democrats have recently expressed skepticism or outright opposition to a ban, the review found. That means Democrats don’t have a simple 51-vote majority to pass the measure, let alone the 60 votes needed to break a Republican filibuster to bring it to a floor vote.

…The five Democratic senators from traditionally pro-gun states who’ve recently expressed skepticism about the bill are Max Baucus and Jon Tester of Montana, Mark Begich of Alaska, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Independent Senator Angus King of Maine, who is caucusing with Democrats, also said he opposes a ban.

This isn’t exactly surprising. On Sunday, Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wy.) predicted the ban wouldn’t even come up for a vote. For gun control advocates, the question going forward may be just how much capital they want to invest in what’s looking like an uphill battle—especially given the uncertain effects of the initial ban.

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Dianne Feinstein Tries to Unsuck the Assault Weapons Ban

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The problems with the 1994 asault weapons ban, according to its supporters, were twofold. The first was that gunmakers could—and did—simply modify their semiautomatic weapons to fit the law by eliminating cosmetic features. An AR-15 without a bayonet mount is still an AR-15; it’s just marginally less effective in hand-to-hand combat with Redcoats. That second problem with the ban was that it ended, sunsetting in 2004.

At a Capitol Hill press conference on Thursday to introduce new legislation banning assault weapons, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) promised that she and her colleagues had learned from their mistakes. “One criticism of the ’94 law was that it was a two-characteristic test that defined an assault weapon,” Feinstein said. “And that was too easy to work around. Manufacturers could simply remove one of the characteristics, and the firearm was legal. The bill we are introducting today will make it much more difficult to work around by moving a one-characteristic test.”

And unlike AWB 1.0, Feinstein explained, this one wouldn’t expire in 10 years: “No weapon is taken from anyone,” she said, but “the purpose of this bill is to dry up the supply of these weapons overtime, therefore there is no sunset on this bill.”

Feinstein’s bill, like the original version, includes a ban on the manufacture and importation of high-capacity magazines, defined as any feeding container holding more than 10 bullets—something gun-control advocates point to as one of the success stories in the 1994 law. It would also close a loophole that legalized the slide iron stock, which as my colleague Dana Liebelson reported, allows gun-owners to convert their firearms into fully-automatics weapons—legally.

But the package faces stiff opposition, including from some Democrats. Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) recently lamented “one-size-fits-all directives from Washington,” and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.), who initially seemed receptive to limits on assault weapons and high-capacity clips, has since clammed up.

Even if Feinstein’s bill does make it through Congress, though, there’s still an open question as to what it would actually accomplish. Although Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) suggested on Thursday that the ban might have saved “hundreds of thousands” of lives had it never gone away, a 2004 University of Pennsylvania study commissioned by Department of Justice was much more reserved: “We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence. And, indeed, there has been no discernible reduction in the lethality and injuriousness of gun violence.”

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Dianne Feinstein Tries to Unsuck the Assault Weapons Ban

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Are Robo-Pollers Cheating?

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Are robo-polls as good as live-interviewer polls? Maybe! Some people have even suggested they’re better.

But wait. Gary Langer reports on an academic study of robo-polls during last year’s Republican primary that finds something strange: if the robo-polls are done after human polls have been done, they’re just as good as the human polls. But if they’re done in states where no human polls were done—that’s the red oval in the chart below—they do significantly worse.

So what’s going on? The researchers make two suggestions. First, the poor results in the red oval are based on a small number of polls in just five states, so “it’s possible that what’s going on is something goofy in those five states.” Alternatively, the folks doing the robo-polls might be massaging their results. The researchers say their analysis “suggests, but certainly does not prove, that at least some IVR polls may use earlier human polls to adjust their results to ensure that they are not notably different from existing polls and beliefs.”

The full paper is here. Stay turned for further research.

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Are Robo-Pollers Cheating?

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It’s Not Illegal To Buy a Gun for a Criminal

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Want to buy an AR-15 for a friend who happens to be in a Mexican drug cartel? The way gun laws stand right now, you can: It’s not illegal to purchase guns for a criminal. And federal laws surrounding gun trafficking across the border are notoriously weak. Legislation that Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) unveiled Wednesday would help fix that.

The Stop Illegal Trafficking in Firearms Act, co-sponsored by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), strengthens laws governing the “straw purchase” of firearms, or the buying of guns or ammunition for someone who is prohibited from owning one. Under current law, it is only a crime to transfer a firearm to someone else with the knowledge that the person will use it in a crime. So prosecutors usually cobble together “paperwork” violations such as lying on federal forms in order to bring charges against a straw purchaser. Leahy’s bill prohibits weapons transfers in which the transferor has “reasonable cause to believe” that the firearm will be used in criminal activity, and sets up heavy penalties for doing so.

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It’s Not Illegal To Buy a Gun for a Criminal

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Visit the Tiny Town Where Big Coal Will Meet Its Fate

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Last week Beijing saw its infamous smog thicken to unprecedented levels, driven largely by emissions from coal-fired power plants across China. In recent years coal from US mines has stoked more and more of these plants, in effect offshoring the health impacts of burning coal. This year, much of the US coal industry’s focus will be on pushing an unfolding campaign that seeks to dramatically ramp up the amount of coal we ship overseas.

Morrow County, Oregon, is a quintessientially green pocket of the Pacific Northwest. It’s capped by the Columbia River, which winds past the hipsters in Portland en route to the sea, often carrying schools of the salmon that have long been an economic staple for locals. But Morrow County could soon become a backdrop for the transformation of the US coal industry, if a planned loading zone for massive shipments of coal—harvested in the Powder River Basin in Montana and Wyoming, and packed into Asia-bound cargo ships—gets final approval.

Right now, local, state, and federal lawmakers are hammering out the details in what is unfolding as one of the biggest climate fights of 2013.

Chart by Tim McDonnell

The Port of Morrow, where coal would be transferred from inland trains onto outbound river barges in the small town of Boardman, is just one of five proposed new coal export terminals now under consideration in Oregon and Washington. If built, the terminals could more than double the amount of coal the US ships overseas, most of it bound for insatiable markets in China, India, South Korea, and a suite of other Asian nations.

It’s the next giant leap forward for the US coal industry, which has in recent years turned increasingly to the East as domestic demand dwindles and Obama-era clean air regulations make it next to impossible to build new coal-burning facilities at home. But Big Coal’s ability to sell its wares overseas is increasingly bottlenecked by maxed-out export facilities, most of which are on the Atlantic-facing East Coast, anyway, better situated for shipments to Hamburg than Hong Kong. So, says Brookings Institute energy analyst Charles Ebinger, building the new West Coast terminals could be a matter of life or death for US coal.

“There’s a lot of coal in the domestic market that can’t be utilized,” Ebinger says. “The Asian market is the fastest-growing coal market in the world. If we wish to continue to export coal these terminals are very important… whatever volume of coal we could export would find a market.”

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Visit the Tiny Town Where Big Coal Will Meet Its Fate

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