"We arrived before the airport. They forgot about it," said Rosario-Maria Medina, a community activist near Georgetown, south of Seattle, right at the bustling Boeing Airport ( North of Boeing Field). When Seattle's first commercial airport opened in 1928, Georgetown had been a vibrant community for more than half a century.
We are sitting in the house that once belonged to her grandfather Ismael Barron, who moved from Texas to Georgetown in 1959. Barron joined his brother Manuel, who came here in the 1940s and, like Manuel, opened a barber shop there. Become one of Seattle's most diverse areas. Georgetown and adjacent South Park have a large number of Latinos, African Americans, Asian and Pacific Islanders, while the Seattle metropolitan area is still predominantly white.
Medina, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Friends of History in Georgetown, said that for many years, the Barbershop has been one of Seattle's only barbershops serving people of color. Manuel’s store is a hotbed of Latino propaganda.
The roar of the plane interrupted our conversation. For Medina, the interruption of sound is a constant reminder of how decades of development practices have allowed airports, industrial facilities and highways to encroach on communities. When her grandfather arrived, the local library and movie theater were closed, and the completion of Interstate 5 in 1962 killed most of the remaining commercial activity in Georgetown. "They know that these areas are mainly immigrants and refugees, so they know they can do whatever they want," Medina said.
Along with the noise, chemical pollutants pour into the community like raindrops. The housing mix in Georgetown and South Park remains diverse: 70% are black, Aboriginal, and other people of color; 42% are foreign-born; and 71.7% of low-income people who suffer from health problems due to pollution. Soot can cause many heart and respiratory problems, and the toxic lead that causes stunting in children is still added to the aviation gas burned by small planes, decades after North American roads were banned.
At the same time, carbon dioxide emissions will dissolve into the atmosphere, leading to climate change-driven heat waves, floods and other extreme weather that have disproportionately affected marginalized communities.
On this October morning, the plane flew in from the north and landed not only at King County International Airport-Boeing Airport (the full name of the county-owned airport) a few blocks away, but also descended to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport ( Sea-Tac), a regional airport in the Puget Sound area, 5 miles south. We hear about passenger jets, business jets, and freighters—United Parcel Service is the largest tenant at Boeing Airport—and occasionally small propeller planes.
The three-story windows in Medina were required to reduce noise, but they could not stop the engine from running.
In 1999, the Georgetown community failed in the fight against the Boeing Airport expansion plan. In 2008, Sea-Tac added a third runway. The noise seems to be getting worse every year. From 2015 to 2019, the number of takeoffs and landings at the county's airport increased by 12.6%.
In response, Medina joined an alliance against further increases in flights, which has repeatedly defeated one of the region's core industries in the past 12 months. This is becoming more and more common in Cascadia: In Oregon, Washington State, and British Columbia, local activists fighting for quality of life are collaborating with climate activists and using their collective power to influence local governments .
They are winning. Local leaders are responding to this pressure—often backed by the rising moral and legal authority of indigenous tribes and nations—through decrees and implementing rules to fulfill their commitments to address climate change and environmental injustice, including phasing out gas heating The rules prohibit the construction of new oil refineries and chemical plants.
"These rules will only change the whole game," said Matt Krogh, campaign director for Stand.Earth, a climate action organization based in Vancouver, British Columbia and Bellingham, Washington. Kroger said the obstacles to oil, gas, and coal development have more than practical legal implications. They also broke the inevitability of expansion around fossil fuels "since oil became huge in the early 20th century."
Kroger said that communities that banned yesterday’s dirty energy began to imagine another “inevitable path”—a path to clean energy: “It is changing people’s perceptions of the future and what will happen.”
The King County International Airport Community Coalition was organized last year in response to Boeing Airport’s $282 million master plan update. It is expected that more jets will fly in Georgetown, resulting in more noise and higher carbon dioxide emissions. The amount of air pollution that may increase. Under the leadership of former state representative and labor organizer Velma Veloria, the coalition unites groups representing Georgetown and neighboring communities (such as the Beacon Hill Commission) with environmental groups such as the Seattle 350.
The coalition calls on elected officials in the county to fulfill their recent pledges to tackle climate change and environmental injustice by preventing airport expansion.
Veloria conveyed a powerful message about the health of lowland residents living near Boeing Airport: When the Filipino activist left the legislature in 2004, the life expectancy of residents was five years shorter than those of the “uphills” of Seattle’s wealthy neighborhoods. “Now , This is a 13-year difference," Veloria said. As a result of the earlier advocacy of the social justice organization El Centro de la Raza and the Beacon Hill Committee, the coalition has Seattle and King County public health research on Sea-Tac on hand, documenting its negative health effects.
At the same time, 350 Seattle's volunteer aviation team helped establish climate connections. Its members documented how the aviation industry generates 2.5% of global carbon dioxide emissions and 3.5% of global warming, thanks to the steam trails produced by jets, which also trap heat in the earth’s atmosphere.
The Alliance and El Centro de la Raza achieved their first victory in December 2020, when King County’s elected chief executive Dow Constantine promised that the county’s 2021 greenhouse gas inventory would calculate emissions from all fuel pumped by the county’s airports quantity. Another victory came in May, when the county’s latest climate action plan called for reductions in aircraft emissions-Boeing Airport’s growth plan is expected to increase emissions by 30% between 2018 and 2035. This may help the county achieve its self-set task of reducing emissions by 50% from the 2007 level to 2030.
On the third day of this summer’s Hot Dome event, at 2:26 pm on June 28, when Constantin called Veloria to say that the airport’s master plan update was not on the negotiating table, a huge victory was achieved.
A few weeks later, Watercombe County in Washington, home to two large oil refineries, passed comprehensive land-use rules banning new processing plants, such as crude oil refineries and chemical plants. This is another thing for civic activists. A victory.
There are more prohibitions at work.
Plastic bag bans are proliferating. [1] Certain new buildings in the Cascadian jurisdiction have banned the use of natural gas equipment and furnaces, such as Vancouver, British Columbia, Seattle, and Multnomah counties, including Portland. In May of this year, Eugene, Oregon, allowed its natural gas supplier's franchise agreement to expire, which threatened Portland-based NW Natural's legal right to lay new natural gas pipelines under city streets.
State, provincial, and national governments are reluctant to exclude fossil fuels; in fact, British Columbia is still subsidizing natural gas production. However, Eric de Place, who leads energy policy work at the Seattle think-tank Sightline Institute, said that[2] a tougher approach is needed to decarbonize. Most state, provincial and federal energy policies aimed at combating climate change encourage the construction of more "clean" things, such as renewable energy power plants, low-carbon fuels, and electric vehicles. But he believes that local actions to limit infrastructure are crucial, because only by reducing the consumption of fossil fuels can we truly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
"I will applaud clean energy products in the stands," de Place said, "but I will stop using fossil fuels on the street."
Throw big oil on the table in Whatcom
For more than a decade, activism centered on Cascadia has prevented dozens of efforts to turn ports in the region into facilities for exporting coal, oil, and natural gas to the world. The movement is called the "Thin Green Line" and is widely regarded as Cascadia's most effective climate action to date.
Today's activism marks a turning point. Thin green line activists are faced with a seemingly endless number of fossil fuel export projects. Today, activists are forcing changes to the rules governing all local development, and the fossil fuel industry finds itself playing gophers.
It’s no surprise that Whatcom County, just south of the Canadian border, is playing a leading role. Since the devastating pipeline accident in the county seat of Bellingham in 1999, the county has struggled with the dangers associated with fossil fuels. A poorly maintained pipeline from the Cherry Point refinery cracked and poured more than 200,000 gallons of gasoline into a stream in downtown Bellingham.
When the fuel ignited, the explosion reverberated along a stream for several miles, killing two young boys and a teenager, destroying houses and setting up a mushroom cloud. "It looked like an atomic bomb," recalled Carl Weimer, a long-time resident and former member of the Watercom County Council.
When the owners of the pipeline pushed for a quick patch and restart, the city forced them to shut it down in an unprecedented move. The Olympic pipeline was out of service for two years, making it the longest closed pipeline in U.S. history. The settlement of more than US$100 million provided funding for the launch of a national pipeline regulatory agency.
The Bellingham Pipeline Safety Trust Fund, which Weimer has been operating for many years, is still promoting pipeline safety policies 22 years later. City residents still remember and discuss the explosion. "That pipeline accident united the community. It doesn't matter whether you are a Republican or a Democrat," Weimer said. "It really organized people and made them think about fossil fuels and the risks of fossil fuels."
Recently, the Cherry Point Industrial District in Whatcom County won a major victory in the battle of the Thin Green Line, which inspired local environmental protection activities. That conflict brought environmental activists and Lummi Nation (whose reservation is south of Cherry Point) into conflict with a large coal terminal that threatens the region’s unique and embarrassed herring. This struggle ended five years ago when Lummi persuaded federal authorities that a 3,000-foot jetty would violate a 1855 treaty that protected the tribe’s right to fish forever on its traditional territory.
This struggle resulted in progressives winning the election, who used their majority in the Whatcom County Council in 2016 to temporarily suspend Cherry Point’s new and expanding fossil fuel-related industries.
Over the next five years, as Cherry Point refinery owners BP and Phillips 66 and county business groups and unions representing refinery workers worked hard to make the ban permanent, the ban was repeatedly extended. The research report they published stated that these regulations would hinder the development of refineries and cause the county to lose thousands of high-paying jobs. They support industry-friendly county council candidates. They failed.
Phillips 66 Refinery spokesperson Tim Johnson explained that the industry "feels like our voice is not being heard."
Wei Mo, who was in the county council at the time, raised objections. He said they invited the industry to work with them to develop rules that would not hinder the improvement of existing refinery operations. "They won't come or even talk to us. They want to play political games," Weimer recalled.
Last year, the refinery finally came to the negotiating table. Driven by Eddy Ury, Bellingham’s sustainable community advocacy organization RE Resources Sustainable Development Community (a small group of stakeholders including refinery officials) agreed on strong rules established by the county planning committee A consensus. This summer, the Commissioner of Whatcom County unanimously approved the organization's final language.
These rules prohibit a series of new development projects ranging from crude oil refining and gas-fired power generation to plastic manufacturing, and create a strong and transparent framework for evaluating whether to accept non-fossil fuel development or the expansion of existing facilities-a framework for this. Will take into account greenhouse gas emissions.
Activists such as De Price said that the Whatcom vote marked the first time in North America (and even the world) that any major fossil fuel development was permanently banned in a region where the fossil fuel industry was abundant, and the expansion of existing facilities was strictly restricted.
BP and Phillips 66 stated that they came to the negotiating table to ensure that the rules clearly state that they can maintain and upgrade their refineries and seize an emerging opportunity: to refine animal fats and vegetable oils instead of crude oil to produce biofuels . These alternative fuels have their own environmental deficiencies, but the Cascadia government hopes that they will decarbonize transportation, and electric vehicles will continue to develop in the coming decades.
Less than six weeks after the Whatcom vote, BP announced a $269 million investment package in Cherry Point. This investment will more than double the production of renewable diesel to 2.6 million barrels per year—about 3% of the refinery's output—and reduce the carbon emissions of the refinery[3] by about 7%. A company statement stated that these projects will create more than 300 local jobs in the next three years.
Repositioning the City of Destiny
In other jurisdictions, including Vancouver, Washington, and Portland, campaigns are also underway to impose local restrictions on new fossil fuel facilities. Last year, Vancouver, British Columbia became the first jurisdiction in Cascadia to ratify the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, which was initiated in the declaration of the Pacific island nations threatened by rising sea levels in 2015 to phase out fossils The promise of fuel infrastructure. The Vancouver City Council’s motion instructed city staff to seek ways to reduce the supply of fossil fuels in the city.
In some places, the fossil industry is still fighting hard, testing local elected officials exhausted by epidemic restrictions, homelessness, street drugs, crime and other issues. The most intense conflict occurred in Tacoma, where a temporary city ordinance similar to the new Whatcom County rule will expire on December 2. The guerrillas are fighting for permanent rules.
Melissa Malott, executive director of Communities for a Healthy Bay, an environmental organization based in Tacoma, admitted that she experienced a panic attack while the city was debating rules.
All parties expressed their support for the conversion of Tacoma into a production center for low-carbon energy such as biofuels or [4] hydrogen production from electricity. But they are arguing about two key issues: what fuel is clean enough? Is it necessary to stop the expansion of fossil fuels to ensure cleaner investments?
Tacoma’s battles focused on the future of the city’s tidal flats, where the Puyalep tribe held an ecologically rich estuary land deed in 1854, and then gradually stolen, filled and industrialized from there. This transition began in 1871, when President Ulysses Grant signed an illegal executive order designating the waters near Tacoma—[5] x̌ʷəlč, using Pujarup’s native language, Twulshootseed—as the North American first The Pacific terminus of five transcontinental railways. Due to Grant's betrayal, Tacoma defeated Seattle on the rail line and earned the nickname "City of Destiny".
There are more and more polluting facilities around railways, including a large paper mill whose smell still envelopes the city; some shipping operations and fuel terminals;[6] liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals; and a company that processes 42,000 barrels of crude oil per day. Refineries-More and more carbon-intensive crude oil is transported by rail from Canadian tar sands.
Five years ago, in order to increase LNG terminals and other fossil fuel businesses on tidal flats, local activists joined forces to call for a suspension. The alliance ultimately includes environmental organizations, the Puyallup tribe, and coastal cargo handlers who lost their jobs because crude oil transport blocked railway lines and interrupted grain and container shipments.
In 2017, the Tacoma City Council passed a one-year broad moratorium, which has been implemented ever since. Temporary rules put new industries on hold, but they will not prevent the expansion of existing facilities.
This spring, Tacoma appears to be ready to complete its tidal flat restrictions. After extensive publicity, the Tacoma Planning Committee concluded that both new and expanded fossil fuel processing would increase the risk of catastrophic leakage; threaten salmon and thereby threaten the treaty rights of Puyallaps; and “circumvent” the city’s climate. Action goals; and prevent the development of non-fossil fuel companies that are expected to provide more job opportunities.
The planning committee proposed rules banning the development of fossil fuels and established a robust process to evaluate other options, including proposals to produce low-carbon fuels that are hindered by temporary rules.
Business groups and unions representing the industry fought back and imagined the worst. For example, community representatives from the neighboring city of Lakewood advertised that US military bases in the area might be closed because the planning committee's regulations threatened their fuel supply. When asked whether the existence of this economically important base is threatened, the spokesperson for the Lewis-McChord Joint Base succinctly replied: "JBLM will not be closed."
Malot’s panic attacks and sleepless nights began at the end of the summer when the Tacoma City Council Committee weakened the rules proposed by the committee and restored opportunities for fossil fuel growth. The committee’s amendments would allow expanded treatment of fossil fuels that Washington State considers "cleaner" than oil. This list includes liquefied natural gas, which is mainly methane, a potent greenhouse gas that has caused more than 80 times the warming of carbon dioxide in the first 20 years of the atmosphere.
Not surprisingly, the revised rules are backed by Seattle-based Puget Sound Energy (PSE), which is launching an LNG plant. The PSE stated that the weaker rules would allow it to double the production of LNG storage and marine fuel facilities to 500,000 gallons per day. It stated that reducing the use of marine fuel to power ships would reduce carbon emissions, citing a 2018 Puget Sound Clean Air Agency finding based on an outdated 2007 method.
However, international energy researchers say that methane leaks upstream of LNG plants have weakened its climate advantage over marine fuels. A World Bank report in April 2021 concluded that LNG is a technical dead-end, and it is recommended that governments not provide “new public policy support” for offshore LNG.
For activists like Malot, the Puyallup tribe is the last hope for stricter rules.
Thanks to a land claim settlement in 1990, the tribe gained a say, which bought Puyallups' ownership of the tidal flat, but also required them to consult on the continued development of the area. Last month, Tacoma Mayor Victoria Woodards postponed a vote in Parliament until November to allow time for the first consultation with the tribe.
Annette Bryan, a member of the Tribal Council, is one of Puyallups' preferred speakers on tidal flat issues. Bryan has a master's degree in civil and environmental engineering and has served as a tribal coordinator for the Federal Environmental Protection Agency for ten years. She said she knew that toxic fumes from the tidal flat industry were spreading under the Port of Tacoma, threatening "people with fins." She saw the warming of the sea and rising sea levels exacerbate the remaining threats to fish and other aquatic life: "It is caused by fossil fuels."
Bryan said that Puyallups' message about the future of tidal flats is clear: zero time for more fossil fuel development, so she called zero space for the "holes" that the committee recently inserted.
The Paris-based International Energy Agency stated that the information is consistent with the goal of reducing global emissions, and the agency’s forecast is considered the gold standard for businesses and governments. In May of this year, the organization stated that "from today" it may "not invest in new fossil fuel supply projects."
Eliminate fossil fuel free-riding
Regional activists are busy thinking about new goals beyond large industrial facilities to challenge the dominance of fossil energy.
Stand.Earth's Krogh said that many opportunities involve the use of building codes, land use regulations, and other measures to limit the growth of fossil fuel consumption that is prevalent in citizens' lives—and even begin to gradually reduce consumption.
Widespread examples are local plastic bag bans, such as the ban in Washington State that led to a statewide ban last month. Bag bans usually focus on the potential to reduce plastic pollution, but they also limit the demand for plastic. As the world shifts to renewable energy, battery cars, and all-electric buildings, fossil fuel producers increasingly see plastics as the best hope for future natural gas, oil, and coal sales. It is estimated that by 2030, the carbon emissions of the plastics industry may exceed that of coal-fired power plants.
A series of new struggles regarding the use of fossil fuels attempt to limit the consumption of natural gas in buildings. At least 9 cities and counties in Cascadia ban new gas appliances and furnaces. Although the Affordable Energy Coalition has done a lot of regional advertising, it is a campaign to protect natural gas heating supported by utilities and labor.
The other nearest front line is the community service station. In August, the Comox Valley area of Vancouver Island instructed staff to consider the option of restricting new gasoline and diesel pumps-a strategy that gained traction in California this year, after a small town north of San Francisco became the number one in the United States. One prohibits the use of new pumps.
Comox Regional Director Daniel Arbor started in August, proposing to remove oil sales from the list of permitted uses for car service stations. He said that making gasoline and diesel less convenient can encourage more people to reduce carbon emissions by switching to electric vehicles.
British Columbia, Washington State and Oregon all have laws requiring auto fuel distributors to steadily reduce the carbon intensity of their products. But it turns out that biofuels may be difficult to produce in large quantities because it is difficult to harvest enough raw materials, such as wood and vegetable oil, without pushing up food costs or degrading carbon-absorbing forests. Therefore, the Cascadia government is seeking to push drivers to use battery-powered cars and trucks as soon as possible, and to reserve biofuels for heavy vehicles that are more difficult to connect to electricity.
Last month, British Columbia announced that it would accelerate the phase-out of traditional cars and trucks, and strive to increase the proportion of electric vehicle sales required by 2030 from 30% to 90%.
Arbour proposed a ban on the installation of new gas pumps on Vancouver Island, partly to start a conversation linking oil use to climate events, such as the heat wave that killed nearly 600 British Columbians this summer. "We are trying to do something more aggressive and challenging to our usual ideas," he said.
The struggle to limit the growth of airports in the Puget Sound area has also challenged conventional wisdom. The King County International Airport Community Alliance called for a halt to the growth of the aviation industry, which is directly contrary to the concept of public airport operations and planning for future expansion-this growth concept is particularly strong in Washington State, with its extensive aerospace industry centered on Boeing.
Allowing flights to continue to increase-except during the first few months of the COVID pandemic, they have been steadily increasing-means that carbon emissions may continue to increase for the foreseeable future despite major industry efficiency measures . This is what the county airport’s plan predicts, and the airport’s recent records indicate that reality may greatly exceed its predictions.
According to the plan outline released in September last year, passenger traffic at Boeing Airport is expected to grow steadily from 2015 to 2019, down 2.9%.
The airport’s plan played down its pollution impact. It reports zero emissions of soot and other particulate pollution. It also minimizes the climate impact in many ways. The plan only counts 10% of the fuel burned during takeoff and landing, not all the fuel that the airport pumps for the entire flight. It also ignores the additional warming caused by clouds or contrails caused by exhaust gas. Add them up, and the climate impact associated with Boeing Airport may have been more than 10 times higher than estimated.
Although the airport's growth plan is temporarily shelved, activists will face a more difficult struggle with Sea-Tac, a regional hub that is completing its own growth plan. Sea-Tac responded to the Port of Seattle, which authorizes regulations to prioritize economic growth.
Activists' greatest hope for Sea-Tac may be to elect a progressive candidate for the Port Independent Management Committee. In the committee election last week, all three winning candidates ran for environmental and fair positions, including two women of color who replaced current committee members.
Activists must also deal with the second Sea-Tac plan. In 2019, the Washington legislature unanimously voted to set up a committee whose task is to find short-term expansion opportunities at the state's crowded airports and select locations for new regional hubs. The new hub will pave the way for decades of aviation-and emissions-expansion.
Seattle attorney Sarah Shifley (Sarah Shifley) is the co-founder of the Seattle 350 Volunteer Air Force. She said that in June’s high temperature dome, this summer’s fire and Hurricane Ida (which caused more than 95 billion US dollars in Louisiana) After the loss), it was “shocking”—all events were attributed to climate change and were therefore driven to a certain extent by historical aviation emissions. "I actually think it's crazy," Shifley said, without exaggeration.
Washington State Governor Jay Insley, along with Boeing Field Director John Parrott and the global aviation industry, believe that fuels with a lower carbon footprint than jet fuel-the so-called "sustainable aviation fuel"-are for aviation growth. Decarbonize with the best way promised.
The governor's office pointed out in its written response to InvestigateWest last month that the suspension of aviation growth may have an "impact" on Washington's economy, and insisted that increasing air capacity is "still effective." Inslee's office identified alternative fuels as the "most promising" of various technologies to address aviation emissions, including new efforts to electrify aircraft.
However, given the challenges associated with scaling up biofuels and the weight of the batteries required to power large aircraft, energy and climate experts doubt that low-carbon fuels can achieve such expectations. And, as Shifley points out, the focus on “sustainable” fuels ignores the disproportionate local impact on communities such as Georgetown and Beacon Hill. The Seattle and King County Public Health Research concluded that “preventing and mitigating airport-related pollution exposure” is “critical” for communities near Sea-Tac.
Even experts associated with Washington State’s extensive aviation fuel development program are increasingly stating that limiting aviation demand must be part of the solution.
Ross Macfarlane leads Sustainable Aviation Fuel Northwest, a stakeholder group that aims to develop a roadmap for cleaner aviation fuel. He said that the cost of aviation should rise to reflect its impact on the climate to help drive the demand for air travel to cheaper and cleaner alternatives, such as high-speed rail and virtual business meetings. "No department should get a free pass," McFarlane said.
Steven Hollenhorst (Steven Hollenhorst) is a sustainable development expert, he has been engaged in the research of alternative jet fuel, until recently was the dean of the Huxley School of Environment at Western Washington University, he said that the aviation industry should "Go for growth" until the industry proves that it can decarbonize. He thinks this is feasible and perhaps preferable, because life under the pandemic has shown people that they can conduct business effectively with reduced flights, and can take risks without flying at all.
Hollenhorst sees airport expansion as something that should be "disrupted" to promote social change, just as protesters are destroying fossil fuel pipelines: "Before we can remove carbon from the aviation industry, growth will only make the problem worse. I just think this is no longer reasonable."
This story is part of the "Return to Zero: Cascadia Decarbonization" series, which explores the road to low-carbon energy in British Columbia, Washington and Oregon. The project was produced in collaboration with InvestigateWest and other media organizations, and was partially supported by the Investigative Journalism Fund.