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California, United States – Margaret Gordon saw her grandson suffer from asthma in the early 1990s in West Oakland, California. Smog from freight trucks from a nearby port, one of the largest in the United States, has caused one in five children in the area to visit a respiratory specialist like his grandson. The dust didn’t spare the elderly, either, and there was an increase in heart disease among those over 60.
In 2013, Gordon learned that part of the port would be converted into a coal processing facility to ship coal from Utah and other western US states to Asian markets. With coal that had to be transported by train, there was concern that the accompanying coal dust could exacerbate asthma and other respiratory illnesses, he said.
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Gordon launched a campaign that led to several lawsuits and a city ordinance banning the transportation of coal through Oakland, delaying the project for more than a decade.
Then on June 4, the administration of United States President Donald Trump invoked the Defense Production Act of the 1950s to announce subsidies for 14 coal plants in several states. A $700m package to revive the ailing coal industry will also fund the construction of coal plants in Alaska and West Virginia, the newest coal plants in the US in more than a decade. It also includes $75m to revive Oakland’s struggling coal plant.
Together, these measures will “lower the cost of energy and the cost of living for all Americans with clean coal power”, and create 14,000 jobs, Trump said when unveiling the package at the White House. These projects would bring relief to many red-hot areas where the decline of the coal industry has led to job losses and economic disruption.
But the package has also put Gordon and his team of Oakland residents and environmental groups on the road to fighting the administration.
It also includes the fate of Utahns and other states, where coal shortages have led to job cuts, and those in Oakland, where coal can bring health.
“Ever since we heard this, we don’t want a coal plant,” says Gordon, now 79, who has resumed his campaign against the site, including meetings with residents of West Oakland and neighboring towns that have drawn hundreds of people.
He also co-sponsored a bill by California Assembly member Mia Bonta that called for an environmental review of the state’s coal operations. Lateefah Simon, a US Congress representative from Oakland, also advocated for water and electricity restrictions on coal projects that would include ending up in Oakland.
Doing more on coal
Gordon and his union first heard of plans to bring coal by train to the port of Oakland from a Utah newspaper.
Production of bituminous coal, a type of coal mined in Utah, has fallen sharply from a mere 693 million tons in 1990 to 263 million tons in 2023, according to the US Energy Information Administration. Production of non-bituminous coal, the type produced in Wyoming and other states, has also declined from 539 million short tons to 271 million short tons from 2008 to 2023.
The site was seen as a way to encourage production by finding foreign buyers.
The decline in employment also led to a halving of coal jobs, as fewer coal workers moved to other jobs.
While coal jobs have begun to decline due to increased demand, the tax cuts from coal jobs have a big impact on communities, said Daniel Raimi, director of the Communities in Energy Transition Initiative at Resources for the Future, a Washington, DC-based independent think tank.
“People’s spending on schools and other services is reduced by these taxes,” he said.
Trump has campaigned to ease the pain in coal communities, and his administration has announced a number of measures including closing days for coal plants, reducing toxic pollution standards for them, and directing the Pentagon to buy more power from coal plants.
“This government has done more than any other administration to promote coal,” Raimi said.
But “even with all of this, a coal revival seems unlikely,” said Stephanie Chase, director of research and communications at the Energy and Policy Institute, which oversees California’s energy policy.
Some experts point to the increasing demand for energy in the US with the rise of AI data centers and the high temperatures due to climate change. This has led to an increase in electricity demand, and coal can be part of the energy mix that needs to deal with this.
Energy demand is met through geothermal and natural gas, “not new coal”, Chase said.
The first ships will depart in 2028
If the coal project goes through, trains full of coal “will go through a lot of towns,” complete with football fields, farms, schools and low-income housing, said Ben Eichenberg, an attorney at Baykeeper, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that has filed lawsuits against the latter.
“This will leave a fine and visible dust that can cause asthma and heart disease in an area where people are already injured,” he said, referring to Gordon’s decades-long campaign to document and prevent traffic accidents.
Phil Tagami, a terminal developer, sued the city for imposing a ban on coal passing through Oakland. Last September, the California Supreme Court cleared the way for the project to continue.
The project is still litigated in a Kentucky district court where Insight Terminal Solutions, Tagami’s port operator, says it was stymied by a city ordinance that did not allow coal to be transported. In this case too, a judge ordered the city to pay $230m for blocking the port.
After the court rulings, Tagami said that the project will resume and the first ships will leave the starting point at the beginning of the year 2028. The $75m government funding could be another shot.
But “this is only part of the $237m project,” said Colin O’Brien, deputy attorney at Earthjustice, an environmental advocacy group. “They still have to raise more.”
There is no coal in Oakland
No Coal in Oakland, a coalition of people from Oakland and neighboring Bay Area cities, has been campaigning against coal plants for more than a decade, filing lawsuits and forcing the project to go ahead.
Ted Franklin, a lawyer who is a member of No Coal in Oakland, says these trains can put arsenic, mercury and lead and other substances into their communities. “No one wants to be in the sacrifice zone,” he said.
Members of his group wore red “No Coal In Oakland” T-shirts at a Juneteenth event last month, protesting coal plants amid music and fried chicken. Gordon, who now walks with the aid of a walker, joined them, organizing several public meetings to oppose the terminal.
“The work has to be very skilled and very sustainable, so it’s not going to create a lot of jobs here,” Franklin said.
His team is now looking to push the project through the proper environmental review and permitting process.
At the June White House announcement, Trump was joined by Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon. His state produces more coal than any other in the country. A few weeks earlier, Governor Gordon traveled to Japan and Taiwan to promote coal in Wyoming. If it passes, the Oakland terminal will provide a gateway for this.
“They represent interests of the past rather than interests of the future,” said the Energy and Policy Institute’s Chase.
Raimi of Resources for the Future says coal from Indonesia and Australia may still be more readily available in Asia than American coal. But the package and terminal could help the state-owned coal industry.
