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23 May 2012 4:14 PM

The carbon consequences of Northwest coal exportsBy Eric de Place

A version of this article originally appeared on Sightline Daily.

There are at present six proposals to export coal from Northwest ports. If all of these proposals are built, and if all of them operate at full capacity, the Northwest would be shipping 145 million tons of per coal year.

When burned, that coal will produce roughly 262 million tons of carbon dioxide per year. It’s such a staggering figure that it’s a little hard to grasp. So here’s some context:

The coal export proposals are, in other words, a disaster for the climate. In aggregate, they are actually far worse than the Keystone XL pipeline.

If you want to dig into the numbers on a project-by-project basis, here they are:

Cherry Point, Wash. SSA Marine is planning to build and operate the Gateway Pacific Terminal, a new shipping facility north of Bellingham, Wash., that would be capable of handling 48 million tons of coal per year. Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private sector coal company, has already agreed to supply 24 million tons of coal.Longview, Wash. Millennium Bulk Terminals, a subsidiary of the Australian coal mining company Ambre Energy, purchased a port site on the Columbia River. Arch Coal, a major American coal mining company, has a 38 percent stake in the site. Ambre hopes to export 44 million tons of coal, with 25 million tons in the first phase.Grays Harbor, Wash. According to newspaper accounts, RailAmerica is planning to develop a coal export terminal at the Port of Grays Harbor’s Marine Terminal 3 that could handle 5 million tons of coal each year.Port of St. Helens, Ore. Kinder Morgan is planning to build and operate a coal export terminal at the Port Westward Industrial Park near Clatskanie, Ore., that will be capable of handling 30 million tons of coal per year, with 15 million tons in an initial phase of development.Port of Morrow, Ore. Ambre Energy is planning to construct a facility on the Columbia River in eastern Oregon that will transfer coal from rail to barges that will be towed downriver to Port Westward, where the coal will be loaded on ongoing vessels. The company says that the system will be capable of handling 8 million tons per year.Coos Bay, Ore. The Port of Coos Bay is considering a mysterious proposal, known to the public only as “Project Mainstay,” that officials say could export 6 to 10 million tons of coal per year.

Notes: My calculations assume that Powder River Basin coal generates 8,500 British thermal units (BTUs) per pound, and that 1 million BTUs produce 212.7 pounds of CO2. Gasoline consumption refers to “motor gasoline” and comes the U.S. Federal Highway Administration’s statistics, which assume 19.6 pounds of carbon dioxide per gallon of gasoline.

Eric de Place is a senior researcher at Sightline Institute, a Seattle-based sustainability think tank, working on promoting smart policy decisions for the Pacific Northwest. Visit http://daily.sightline.org/blog/ to read more on Sightline’s blog.

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One long-term consequence of the polyphasic sleep experiments I did in 2005-2006 is that I still retain the ability to fall asleep very quickly. Enough time has passed that I suspect this is a permanent change.

These days when I decide to go to sleep, I can typically fall asleep within 30 seconds or less. Sometimes I can be asleep within just 2-3 seconds. As Rachelle can attest, this is no exaggeration.

This isn’t narcolepsy. I don’t drift off during the day, and I don’t fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow. Unless I’m unusually super-tired, the decision to sleep is under conscious control. When I decide to sleep, my body falls asleep almost immediately.

This is true for falling asleep at night as well as for taking naps if I so desire.

On many occasions I’ve been startled awake while Rachelle and I were lying in bed together. After we talked for a while, I decided to fall sleep, so I did just that. A few seconds later I’m startled awake by Rachelle, who suddenly started talking again. To her it was just a pause in the conversation lasting only seconds, but for me that was enough time to fall asleep, start dreaming, and be startled awake, clearly remembering the details of my dream.

This sometimes happens 2-3 times in a row. After being startled awake once, I “thank” Rachelle for scaring me, and then I go right back to sleep within seconds. Rachelle mistakenly assumes I’m still awake and makes another verbal comment, which wakes me up yet again. Sometimes she laughs about it, not in a sadistic way but rather in semi-disbelief that I could be falling asleep so quickly. She also finds it amusing.

When this happens a few times in a row, sometimes I’ll re-enter the same dream and continue where I left off, but usually I’ll enter a different dream that doesn’t seem related to the first dream.

There’s a bit of time dilation when I’m dreaming, so I may feel that several minutes have passed in the dream world, while Rachelle tells me that only seconds passed within her waking time frame.

This has happened more times that I can count. It’s definitely not an isolated event.

Normally I start dreaming immediately as I’m falling asleep, sometimes even before I’m asleep. When I close my eyes at night, I can often see dream characters trying to interact with me and dream scenery beginning to open up. It’s very easy to slip into that dream world if I just keep my eyes closed.

Falling asleep in this way is like accepting an invitation. I don’t have to do anything. I just have to welcome the dream world that’s already beckoning me to join it. It’s a feeling of being pulled into the dream world as opposed to trying to get myself to fall asleep. It takes more effort to stay awake.

I’m not saying this ability is special or unique. I’ve studied various how-to aspects of sleep like lucid dreaming and sleep hacking, but I don’t know what the statistics are in terms of how long it takes most people to fall asleep. A bit of Google searching suggests it’s around 10 minutes though, unless you have insomnia.

For me this was a significant change since I didn’t have this “ability” before experimenting with polyphasic sleep. Those 5-1/2 months of sleeping in a different pattern must have trained my body to initiate sleep without delay. With only 20 minute naps around the clock, my body had to learn to go to sleep very quickly and not waste a minute of precious sleep time. Otherwise I’d have been very sleep deprived during those months. By necessity my body had to speed up the process it used to fall asleep. I couldn’t waste 10 minutes trying to fall asleep if my nap was only 20 minutes total — that would be like trying to function on half as much sleep.

Even though Rachelle sometimes finds it a bit odd, and I get startled awake more often than I’d like, I consider this change to be a beneficial gain. My sleep is much more efficient than it was before I experimented with sleep hacking. I don’t waste time lying in bed trying to fall asleep. When I want to go to sleep, I sleep. And if I want to delay sleep and stay up later, I can do that too.

I share this partly as a cautionary warning to others who want to experiment with different sleep patterns. There may be long-term consequences even if you only experiment for a short time. Some consequences may not be so positive. So if you do undertake such experiments, be aware that you’re taking a risk.

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