Coal export is kind of like the swimming pool game “Marco Polo”: if you open your eyes, it ruins the whole game.
Wyoming Governor Matt Mead emerged as a stalwart defender of the eyes-closed rule last week, urging the White House Council on Environmental Quality to avoid any consideration of climate impacts in federal evaluation of coal exports.
He called assessing greenhouse gas impacts of coal export a “novel use of NEPA as a political opinion piece on global climate change.”
The National Environmental Policy Act is primarily a guide to procedure for environmental analysis, rather than a set of substantive requirements. Its most basic function is to provide decision-makers with a thorough assessment of environmental impacts: Whatever you’re going to do, says NEPA, do it in the daylight.
No, says Governor Mead. Coal export requires darkness. Open assessment of climate impacts would be “novel”, “political.” Using the nation’s pre-eminent environmental disclosure law to analyze the effects of the nation’s biggest fossil fuel development proposal on the nation’s biggest environmental problem would “undermine the fundamental fairness of the process.”
It’s a stunning admission, when you think about it: Governor Mead is all but conceding that coal export cannot withstand an honest evaluation of its biggest impact. It puts the lie to the coal industry’s unsupportable claims that coal export will have no effect on the amount of coal burned in Asia (see distraction 2., in “King Coal’s tragic puppet show, part 4: Field guide to distractions”.)
In a letter to CEQ, Governors Kitzhaber and Inslee called for full disclosure: ”We believe the decisions to continue and expand coal leasing from federal lands and authorize the export of that coal are likely to lead to long-term investments in coal generation in Asia, with air quality and climate impacts in the United States that dwarf almost any other action the federal government could take in the foreseeable future,” they wrote.
And that’s exactly why Governor Mead won’t have any analysis of those impacts. A full, thorough, honest review of the costs and benefits of coal export proposals will sink them. So opponents fight on for light, while Governor Mead champions the only circumstance in which coal export has a chance: utter climate darkness.
