Climate Solutions believes in a vital principle for climate action: first, stop making it worse. If you do the climate math, this principle emerges as a precondition for the success of all other climate strategies -- a keystone, as it were, for climate solutions. We simply don't have enough time or money to keep pouring new capital into long-lived infrastructure for extracting, transporting and burning fossil fuels.
The fossil fuel industry wants to use the Northwest as a staging ground for their private gain. The proposed coal export and oil transport terminals pose a host of dangers to Northwest communities, our economy, our health and our climate. As the Northwest and the rest of the world are increasingly feeling the effects of climate change from more frequent and extreme droughts, wildfires, and flooding, proposed coal export and oil transport infrastructure in the region would lock-in for decades huge amount more carbon pollution.
Power Past Coal
Coal companies are targeting Northwest ports as the gateway for coal terminals that would ship up to 100 million metric tons of strip-mined coal abroad. While the Northwest invests in clean technology jobs for wind, wave and solar energy, the coal export terminals would reverse major commitments to reduce our region’s contribution to global warming pollution. Climate Solutions is part of the Power Past Coal coalition, an ever-growing alliance working to stop coal exports off the West Coast.
Stand Up to Oil
The North America oil industry is experiencing explosive growth, with transport of volatile crude oil on rail from Bakken shale fields of Montana and North Dakota increasing more than 2000 percent in just four recent years. The rails, ports and waters of the Northwest are key to the industry’s expansion plans, with a number of new refinery and terminal projects now proposed, in development or operating. In response to all the threats, Climate Solutions is part of a broad constituency as part of the Stand Up to Oil campaign, opposing with a collective voice the industry efforts to turn our region into a fossil fuel highway, supporting efforts to make existing transport safer and working to hasten our transition to clean energy.