Berkeley residents push for city council to help oppose coal terminal

By John Ramos

On Tuesday, protesters in Berkeley urged the city council to back a resolution that would prevent trains loaded with coal from reaching a proposed transport terminal near the Port of Oakland. But now that President Donald Trump has reignited the issue, they’re enlisting the help of the communities that lie along the path that the coal would take to get there.

The idea of establishing a coal transport base next to the Port of Oakland isn’t new, and neither is the fight it caused in West Oakland. But in July, President Trump rekindled the issue when he signed an order to give $75 million for the project.

“These actions will support over 14,000 jobs and save the American people $50 billion in electricity costs,” he said after signing the executive order.

To do it, the President invoked something called the Defense Production Act, intended to maintain the availability of military supplies.

“I was really shocked, shocked that they would find this loophole in making this part of the defense and military commodity,” said West Oakland resident Margaret Gordon.  “How is coal part of the defense? For whom? It doesn’t make bullets. What does it do?

“Ms. Margaret” as she’s known in the neighborhood, has fought hard for years to reduce the amount of pollution coming from the port, and her efforts have led to tighter semi-truck smog controls and zero-emission technology inside the facility.  So, the idea of locating a coal port there seemed odd to her.

“It’s such a contradiction,” she said. “On one side of an area you’re going to have zero emissions, and on the other side, you’re going to have this coal.”

But the proposed facility at the Oakland Bulk Oversized Terminal is actually on municipal land, and not part of the Port of Oakland. And the city has been sued repeatedly every time they tried to break the lease they gave the landowner. The activists said the lease was granted in 2012 under an impact report that never considered coal or even climate change. So, now they’re asking cities along the railway route where the coal trains would run to pressure the regional Air Board to take strong action.

“The air board can require an EIR, a very stringent report, on the impact of coal before any permitting is done on this.  And we are saying that’s what we want to see happen,” said anti-coal activist Bonnie Lockhart. “They know they can’t sell it here. They can’t burn it here. But they can ship it if they can get a port to do it.”

The city of Richmond has already passed such a resolution. And a bill, AB40, was recently passed in the legislature requiring large coal projects to undergo a full environmental review before approval. That bill is still awaiting Gov. Newsom’s signature. President Trump spoke specifically about the Oakland terminal as being a key transport spot for sending the coal overseas, and said he hoped it could be up and running by 2028.  But standing in the way are the activists in West Oakland, as they employ the red tape of local government to try to derail the project.

“So many people are organized against it,” said Lockhart. “I think, I’ll speak to our odds, I think we have a chance to prevent this from ever happening.”