Speaking as a risk management professional and lifelong resident of Pierce County, hearing that the world’s largest anything, which also happens to be highly toxic and flammable, will be imported into our backyard piques keen interest.
We already know methanol is the cheapest, crudest of fuel stocks and nasty stuff. You can’t touch it. You can’t breathe it. With a flashpoint of an average day in spring, it should be nowhere near sparks, static electricity, oxygen, or – with irony – even itself. In my professional world, we refer to something like this as a “super hazard.” In excess of 600 million pounds are planned to be stored in the center of our urban core by the refinery’s applicant, Northwest Innovation Works, LLC.
But perhaps more dubious than the risks inherent in the product itself is the fact it’s being sold to the public as part of our state’s “clean energy future.” Take fracked natural gas, which is as bad or worse for the planet than coal, pipe it from Canada to the Port of Tacoma, incentivize it with $200 million in local tax breaks, convert it to methanol while using 14.4 million gallons of our fresh water per day and up to 450 megawatts of electricity, ship it through the Puget Sound in super tankers to China, where it will be sold as feedstock to fuel the Chinese plastics industry, so it can then be sold back to us to fill our landfills and pollute our oceans. Our “clean energy future”?
This duplicity in messaging is often referred to as “greenwashing.” It’s used to sell environmentally questionable projects like this one to the public and decision makers. The proposed methanol refinery is perhaps the most blatant example I’ve seen since “clean coal”. In all places, Tacoma, the home of two of the most polluted Superfund sites in America.
It appears EnviroIssues, a large Seattle-based public relations firm, and a number of well-connected lobbyists, are providing the army of staff responsible for dressing up this project for the public. They specialize in selling “thorny issues” and maintain an extensive (and lucrative) book of government contracts, which include the Department of Ecology, which just granted Lead Agency status to the City of Tacoma for the proposed methanol refinery on Port of Tacoma land, also EnviroIssues clients. While you won’t see them on their client list, a simple web search will reveal EnviroIssues has their fingers in any number of other petro-chemical or fossil fuel projects seeking a home in the Pacific Northwest.
Northwest Innovation Works LLC, fronted by these surrogates, has spent millions on a sophisticated public relations effort promising such things as a “Double Green Bridge,” “Ultra Low Emissions,” and of course jobs. Whether you’re a mom, union member, elected official or all three, please take their message with a grain of salt. Realize it was crafted (and then quickly trademarked) by skilled advertisers with a singular goal of easing your conscious just enough into believing there may be some benefit to handing over our water, electricity, health, safety, and environment to a limited liability corporation, which has not previously built or operated anything.
To be honest, this refinery being built anywhere pretty much loses me at the word plastic. Thinking more broadly, however, I suspect most of us would agree projects so critical to our lives should rise or fall based on their merits, rather than how many millions of dollars are spent to disguise them as environmentally-friendly or conceal their risks.
Phil Brooke, Wilkeson, Wash.
