Activists waging a national war on coal have turned their sights on the Pacific Northwest, targeting proposed shipping terminals in Washington and Oregon that would export coal to China.
They’re aggressively lobbying federal officials to change how these projects are evaluated. If they succeed, our economy could become a casualty of the war on coal.
Currently, such projects undergo a rigorous environmental review known as an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) involving months or even years of public hearings and analysis by federal, state and county regulators. The EIS for each project must also examine the cumulative impacts of other potential activities in the area.
But opponents want to insert a second, more expansive layer of environmental review, which some are calling a Programmatic EIS (PEIS), which would have to be completed before each individual project EIS could begin. This additional review would include all of the Washington and Oregon proposals and expand to analyze their potential “cumulative” economic and environmental impacts across the region, the United States or perhaps the world.
A PEIS is historically reserved for assessing the broad national impacts of a federal action or a new federal policy. But the activists want to apply that same scope of review to a local shipping terminal.