I have to go with Torgo on this one.

There are three categories of potential negative impacts that give rise to most objections for proposed coal projects. (1) global pollution, (2) local environmental impacts, (3) local traffic impacts. For the proposed Ambre operation, I can't see how any of these complaints are warranted.

(1) global pollution. Asia has lots of coal plants, and they burn coal from all over the world, and it has a very nasty effect on the environment. If you could stop China (or other countries) from receiving coal to burn, then you could reduce the amount of coal consumed, and could reduce global pollution. But, the global coal market is just too damn big for these pacific northwest coal projects to have an impact. There is too much other coal on the market, enough to keep China happily burning coal for decades to come. Thus, the outcome of the Ambre project is likely to have no noticeable impact on global coal consumption and subsequent pollution. It would be interesting to see some sort of supply chain analysis, showing which countries produce coal, which consume coal, and how many different routes there are for countries to get their coal to market. Perhaps such an analysis would show that there's a viable strategy for reducing coal consumption by cutting off the supply. However, I suspect the analysis would only confirm that the market is too big and too global to be impacted by any supply-side policy efforts.

(2) local environmental impacts. As Torgo said, I'm happy that someone is doing a study of what these impacts might be and how real they are. I'm not sure how barging a bunch of rocks of coal down the Columbia would affect public health along the route. But I'm open to any analysis that proves otherwise.

(3) local traffic. Coal trains are a bitch. They're huge and block traffic for miles. But the Ambre proposal is for barges, which would not have any impact on our congested transportation system.