The Greenies are going to be crapping themselves. Morrow Pacific has signed letters of intent with manufacturers Gunderson and Vigor Industrial to build 20 enclosed barges at a total cost of over $75 million. The purpose: to transport dirty, horrible low-sulfur coal from the Powder River Basin. Offloaded from trains at Port of Morrow on the upper Columbia River, the barges would transport product downstream to Port of St. Helens, where it would then be loaded onto ocean-going ships bound for Asia. This is a nightmare development, according to Greenies.
Gunderson and Vigor tend to disagree:
“We need projects like this in Oregon,” said Bill Furman, CEO of Gunderson. “This is an amazing opportunity for Gunderson and will employ 350 local workers.”
Frank Foti, CEO of Vigor Industrial, said the Morrow Pacific project “will increase manufacturing jobs in Oregon and provide economic development in rural communities.”
Greenies are fighting it for all they're worth (and a lot of ignorant people donate to them, so they have quite a bit of cash to spend on litigation), but they're kind of out-of-step:
EarthFix, a public media project of Oregon Public Broadcasting focused on the environment, reports the following:
"A new public-opinion poll for EarthFix finds a majority of residents in Washington, Oregon and Idaho express support for transporting coal from Wyoming and Montana through the Northwest so it can be exported to Asia.
"DHM Research polled 1,200 residents in Oregon, Washington and Idaho. Fifty-five percent said they were supportive of new coal export proposals."
Unlike the well-heeled Greenies, a lot of folks in the Pacific Northwest think that creating family-wage jobs is kind of important.
They're finally catching on to the Greenie agenda.