Bellingham Comments from Digital Recorder - EISs for the Proposed ...

GATEWAY PACIFIC TERMINAL EIS SCOPING HEARING VOL. II
COURT REPORTER: BETH DRUMMOND PROCEEDING DATE: October 27, 2012
Page 137
1 I've been an environmental activist for 30 years
2 or more, and I can say I am amazed and disgusted that in
3 2012 a project such as this is even being considered at all.
4 I'm old enough to recall the first Earth Day in
5 April 1970, and many portending ideas were projected as to
6 our future on that day and that year, beginning in that
7 year. And little did I know that we would still be
8 petro-chemically dependent when the corporations profit
9 enormously from those endeavors.
10 Global warming is real. You'll notice both
11 political candidates for president are not even talking
12 about it anymore, including Barack Obama, who seems to think
13 clean coal is some sort of an idea. There's no clean coal.
14 There never has been; there never will be.
15 We are at a crisis level on a planetary scale due
16 to global warming. We need to be at 350 parts per billion
17 of carbon dioxide in order for human civilization, let
18 alone, all other plant and animal life on the planet, to
19 continue to exist.
20 As of 2009, we were at 392 parts per billion of
21 CO2 worldwide on average. We are now probably approaching
22 something considerably higher than that.
23 I was listening to Noam Chomsky be interviewed
24 yesterday on Democracy Now, and he clearly stated that now
25 it is projected that instead of a 50-year timeline, they're