The Washington Standard is reporting on the conversion from coal to natural gas for the Chehalis power plant. The roots of this go back to the 2000s, when People For Puget Sound (I was a board member and lobbied for our legislative priorities) , The Sierra Club and many other environmental groups started lobbying to shut down the plant.
Finally, almost 20 years after we started the efforts we are just now seeing the conversion discussed as happening soon. There was no mention in the article about *when* the conversion would happen, only that it *is* going to happen. The company (a Canadian firm) waited until the very last month of the very last year before they would have legally been mandated to announce the conversion rather than the shut down of the plant. It has to be asked whether or not the Legislature, in their 2011 agreement couldn’t have simply pushed the deadline to 2012 and we could have seen the coal particulate gone 13 years ago? How many more cases of cancer did we see and have to pay for medical bills between then and now? We’ll never know.
Obviously, this shift to natural gas, another fossil fuel, only minimally reduces our need on those fuels or the harm to the environment. It does reduce the particulates in the smoke that causes cancer, but continues to accelerate our slide towards an unstoppable global warming scenario.
Once again, our politicians acted with no urgency, in the benefit of a foreign corporation who exploited their lack of urgency to the last minute they could. Wonder how much lobbying money went to the swing votes in that legislation? Again, who knows. Those politicians are long gone, maybe even to the company itself. It is no wonder that the voters continue to see little value in the political class who seem undermine every effort to protect the environment and take the lobbying money thrown at them by the very people they are supposed to be protecting us from being harmed by their industries.
“And so it goes.” Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five