Cherry Point Terminal is a moral dilemma | Letter

Published 3:47 pm Monday, July 9, 2012

As you have been reading in the Sounder and perhaps many of the local papers, our pristine environment is about to be sacrificed for the benefit of large money interests and  the inaction and disinterest of your federal representatives (whom I assume have received very generous campaign contributions from many of the players).

At first glance the exportation of coal to Asia from Cherry Point in Whatcom County seems like a good idea. It helps the few miners in Wyoming, jobs for some railroad employees, jobs for some workers at the exporting point in Whatcom County and our balance of payments with China. Unfortunately there is no benefit to the citizens in Whatcom, Skagit and San Juan County. We get few of the export dollars but get a great deal of pollution from coal dust and increased hazards created by the foreign tankers hauling coal westward. If that were the only issue, I might be tempted to be in favor of such exportation. However, when coal is burned we all know that it pollutes the atmosphere with global warming CO2, mercury, sulfuric acid, and nitrous oxide.

This pollution will drift back across the Pacific to enact tremendous health and environmental damage to our West Coast and of course the rest of the world. I have been confronted many times by “if we don’t ship it through our ports, the Canadians will through their ports. Why give them the money when we can have it and jobs to boot?” I guess you must then look inward to your moral beliefs. If what someone else does is wrong and you support only to inure a benefit for yourself,  then you align yourself in that moral camp and I doubt anyone would be able to change your basic morality. I personally don’t think one wrong (the shipping of coal through another port) especially if we have conclusive proof of the damage that this coal will have on us and the world, is a valid nor principled conclusion for any support of its  implementation.

Walter Corbin

Olga