Lawmakers Push Back Against Trump Coal Terminal Plans in West Oakland

“The beautiful people of West Oakland, Alameda, and Emeryville have fought for clean air, for their children’s health, and for their right to breathe for generations,” Bonta said in a statement on Monday. “Donald Trump used a Cold War emergency law to try to override all of that. He will not succeed.”

On June 4, Trump announced that he would direct the hundreds of millions of dollars toward keeping ailing coal facilities open, creating two new coal plants in Alaska and West Virginia, and constructing the Oakland export terminal.

After the Oakland Army Base closed in 1999, East Bay developer Phil Tagami planned to open a bulk export facility on a portion of the site. Though initially, he said the terminal would not handle coal, in 2015, plans to partner with Utah and allow up to 10 million tons of the state’s coal to be sent through the facility became public, prompting widespread outrage from Oaklanders.

Residents and environmental justice advocates say the terminal would worsen air quality in West Oakland, which already suffers from some of the highest asthma-related emergency room visit and hospitalization rates in the country due to pollution from highways and industrial operations.

They worry that coal dust from uncovered trains traveling through the city could add to that burden. According to Bonta, the terminal would have the capacity to export up to 10 million short tons of coal annually — which equates to multiple trains-worth a day arriving in West Oakland through the East Bay.

“Shipping coal through Oakland would exacerbate the real emergencies of global warming and public health in vulnerable communities along the Union Pacific tracks that would bring the coal to Oakland,” No Coal in Oakland, a coalition that’s been organizing in opposition to the project for more than a decade, said in a statement following Trump’s announcement. “If the terminal is built, coal dust and diesel exhaust will spew from multiple mile-long coal trains passing through our communities each day.”

In 2016, the city council passed a ban on handling or exporting coal in Oakland. Though Tagami sued, city officials and local environmental justice groups have stalled the project for a decade, as multiple legal challenges played out in court.

Last year, the state supreme court declined to take up the case. That leaves funding as one of the last major hurdles to building the terminal. Coal-producing states now hope the Trump administration’s funding infusion could be the key to finally bringing the Oakland facility to fruition.

Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon, who joined the president during his June 4 announcement, said Taiwan and Japan have recently decided to reinvest in coal as a “reliable, dispatchable, secure source of energy,” which can be extracted from the coal mines in the Powder River Basin, a 20,000 square mile stretch of coal-rich land in southeast Montana and northeast Wyoming.

“To be able to open that Oakland port is absolutely essential for the lifeblood of our state and for our coal mines,” he said.

For decades, the U.S.’s coal industry has been largely locked out of the West Coast — as liberal states have rejected projects that could be used to transfer fuel from coal producers to Asia. The American coal industry had also waned, eclipsed by less expensive natural gas and renewable energy, before the Trump administration announced it would focus on “reinvigorating America’s beautiful, clean coal industry.”

The funds Trump has proposed for the Oakland terminal and other coal industry investments were originally to be used for reducing carbon dioxide emissions from polluting industries.

He’s invoked the Defense Production Act, a wartime law that gives the president broad emergency powers to support domestic industries needed to maintain domestic security, saying that the U.S. faces a national energy emergency.

Bonta’s AB 40, the “Community First Coal Review Act,” would require local agencies to conduct an environmental impact report before granting discretionary approval for new or expanded coal handling, storage, or export terminal that would exceed a capacity of 5 million short tons per year. It would also require updated environmental reviews when there are changes to the type or quantity of coal, or after 10 years.

“West Oaklanders should not be blindly subjected to more air pollution and a multitude of health harms so the Trump administration can prop up the failing coal industry,” said Colin O’Brien, the deputy managing attorney of Earthjustice’s California regional office. “We stand with West Oakland residents who demand to know exactly how this project may harm their community.”