There is an adage commonly spoken in many activist circles: Think global, act local. And several communities across the Northwest, linked together in their opposition to coal transports by concern for the health of their communities and of the planet, are aiming to do just that.

Feeling the squeeze of reduced demand for coal in the United States, a series of companies have proposed coal transportation projects that would see dozens of trains filled with Powder River Basin coal – one of the world’s largest deposits of the fuel – wind through hundreds of communities every day before arriving in Northwest ports for export to Asia. Since the terminals would help to bring hundreds of millions of tons of dirty fuel to the global market, the carbon impact would be profound. Coal from just three of originally six proposed terminals would, according to the Center for American Progress, ‘result in the same annual increase in carbon pollution as adding approximately 35 million new passenger cars to the road.”

As such, blocking these terminals has been called ‘just as important as KXL [the Keystone XL pipeline]” by Bill McKibben, who says it’s ‘one of the most crucial fights for American climate activists to […]