Eight hundred people turned out in Spokane on December 4 to the fifth of seven "scoping hearings" across Washington State on the environmental review process for a proposed coal export facility at Cherry Point, 400 railroad miles to the west on the Washington coast.

"Of the 800 people who came to debate the merits of the Gateway Pacific Terminal, I'd estimate at least 700 were opposed," says Crystal Gartner, a Spokane-based organizer for the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign. "A sea of red 'No Coal Exports' t-shirts dominated the hearing venue."

The Sierra Club's Beyond Coal Exports campaign, working as part of the Power Past Coal coalition, has been organizing opposition to the coal export terminal and the vastly increased number of coal trains that would transport coal in open cars from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana to the coast.

Sierra Club organizers Crystal Gartner, Mike Scott, Krista Collard, Marc Heileson, and Cesia Kearns

Over the past year, Sierra Club volunteers and staff in Spokane have gone door-to-door to hundreds of homes, made phone calls to thousands of local residents, and collected over a thousand petition signatures opposing the coal export terminal in advance of the December 4 hearing.

"Spokane is the choke-point for all rail traffic in the Inland Northwest," Gartner says. More than 60 coal trains a day carrying coal in open cars would pass through the city if the coal export terminals now being proposed are built.

That's right, the Indy 2,000—as in two thousand petitions the Sierra Club delivered to Indianapolis Power & Light (IPL) on November 28, marking the official launch of the Club's Indianapolis Beyond Coal campaign. The petitions call on the electrical utility to retire its Harding Street coal plant, one of the dirtiest coal-burning power plants in the nation.

[Click on the image above to watch a video about the Harding Street plant.]

Indiana Beyond Coal organizer Megan Anderson, below at center, holding stack of petitions, was among the roughly 50 activists who rallied in downtown Indy and delivered the petitions to IPL headquarters.

"The Harding Street coal plant is less than seven miles from the heart of Indianapolis," Anderson said. "We collected the petition signatures over the past two months. Right now everything is on the line—decisions being made right now will determine our energy future for decades to come."

Photo courtesy of NUVO News

The Harding Street Station, as the plant is officially known, is the largest source of carbon pollution in Indianapolis. The Clean Air Task Force attributes 75 deaths, 120 heart attacks, and 1,300 asthma attacks each year to the plant's toxic emissions.

"While other utilities across the country move toward clean energy solutions like wind power and energy efficiency, IPL wants to charge customers millions of dollars to stay dependent on coal and continue to expose Indianapolis to toxic coal pollution," Anderson, at left, said at the November 28 rally.

"These upgrades will fail to address dangerous carbon pollution and coal ash. Indianapolis has a better vision for a clean energy future that protects both our health and our utility rates."

Anderson spearheaded the petition drive and recruited Sierra Club members and others to be "letter captains." Leading up to the petition delivery, Club volunteers and staff held phone banks, produced fact sheets, did online and social media outreach, and tabled and canvassed with volunteers at events in Indianapolis and other locales around central Indiana to gather petition signatures.

On Saturday, October 27, an estimated 2,000 people stood in line for hours in the pouring rain in Bellingham, Washington, to participate in the first of seven public hearings to gather public feedback on the proposed Cherry Point coal export terminal near Bellingham.

"Citizens opposing the terminal overwhelmingly dominated the hearing," says Cesia Kearns, an organizer with the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign. "Only about 30 people spoke in favor of the project, and most of them were Gateway Pacific Terminal staff."

The Sierra Club and its partners in the Power Past Coal coalition have been preparing for over a year for the "scoping hearings," which will define the scope of the environmental impact statement for the Cherry Point terminal. The Club and its allies succeeded in securing multiple scoping hearings throughout Washington State.

"We set out on to make this a state-wide and regional fight, and to take into account all the impacts of the proposal, from mine to rail and port to plant," says Kearns. "We've made the scoping hearings a major priority, focusing especially on the first hearing in Bellingham, which has now set the tone for the other hearings."

The Club has been working for the last year-and-a-half to educate the public in the Pacific Northwest about the risks and folly of transporting more than 100 million tons of coal a year in open train cars from Wyoming and Montana to five proposed coal export terminals on the Washington and Oregon coasts. To date, Seattle, Portland, and numerous other cities and locales in Washington and Oregon have passed resolutions opposing the coal export terminals.