In a recent guest column entitled “Lift the Chokehold on Shipping Coal,” Dee Brown mistakenly claims that both carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and the amount of carbon in the atmosphere from coal combustion would be lowered if Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan simply replaced, according to her, the poor-quality coal they now import from Indonesia with higher quality coal from Montana. She uses that claim to argue for certifying the construction of deep-water ports with coal loading terminals in Washington state so that more Montana coal can be exported to countries in Asia.
But Brown’s claim is simply not supported by the facts about either the quality of exported coal from Montana compared to that exported from Indonesia or how differences in the quality of coal from those two sources would affect CO2 emissions and the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. It also reflects her misunderstanding about the relationship between CO2 emissions, the absolute amount of carbon in the atmosphere and its rate of increase.
Brown is correct in saying that less CO2 would be emitted to the atmosphere if higher quality coal in terms of its energy content was used in place of lower quality coal to produce a given amount of electricity. While that would help reduce the rate of increase of CO2 in the atmosphere due to coal combustion alone, it would not lessen its absolute amount already present. What Brown appears not to understand is that until annual CO2 emissions to the atmosphere from all human activities, including fossil fuel combustion, are reduced globally to a level equal to its rate of removal by natural processes, it will continue to accumulate in the atmosphere, thereby committing the climate to warm even more in the future. Replacing low quality coal with that of a higher quality won’t change this reality.
Also, Brown implicitly assumes that the quality of Montana coal in terms of its energy content is greater than that of the primary types of coal exported from Indonesia to countries in Asia and that switching to higher quality coal will, in her words, lessen the carbon in the atmosphere. But neither her assumption nor her assertion is valid.
In terms of its energy content, the average quality of most Indonesian coal exported to Asian countries is actually higher than that of the two major types of coal mined in and exported from the Powder River Basin in eastern Montana. Since it is this coal that would be exported to Asia, this means more coal would be burned and more CO2 would be emitted to produce a given amount of electricity at coal-fired power plants in Asia if Montana coal replaced the Indonesian coal now used at those plants. As a result, both the absolute amount and the rate of increase of CO2 in the atmosphere would be higher, not lower.
Thus, Dee Brown’s claim about the beneficial effect of replacing Indonesian coal with Montana coal on CO2 levels in the atmosphere is simply not true. Her attempt to claim otherwise as a partial justification for certifying the construction of more coal terminals in Washington state to export more Montana coal has no basis in fact. If she is genuinely interested in ways to effectively lower CO2 emissions and the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, she should advocate for both leaving most of the remaining coal reserves in eastern Montana in the ground and increasing the implementation and use of carbon-free and carbon-neutral energy technologies. But her stated opposition to CO2 emission standards indicates that her real interest is only in exporting more Montana coal rather than in lessening greenhouse gases emissions and their effect on climate.
Jerry Elwood lives in Kalispell