Jobs. Don't forget about jobs.

ABC Headline:  "Trump's push to open economy could cost lives."

The virus kills. Poverty kills. 

The tradeoff between jobs and other values is an old one. Today the virus.  The battle has split environmentalists on the left from union and non-union laborers. The battle has fueled the rural-urban divide. Prosperity is found in cities, by people working in offices, moving data around. Doing less well are people in rural areas, who used to make money extracting a resource.

This week readers of the New York Times got more sad news. Reporter Nicholas Kristoff updated his sad story of his childhood classmates in the rural coastal town of Yamhill, Oregon. The last of the five children in one family died young, this one of heroin overdose. Each of them in essence died, he writes, of poverty and despair. The economy of their small town had collapsed.

When the resource extraction industry declines--coal in some regions, minerals in others, timber in Oregon--the jobs dwindle. Then follow human pathologies. Alcoholism. Drug use. Crime.

The job loss is a tolerable cost--sometimes an invisible cost--to people who live elsewhere and visit those places to vacation or retire. How nice that the houses are so inexpensive, the streets so uncrowded. The lumber mill is now a casino, how nice. Too bad nearly all the restaurants have closed.

Among people in the relative urban area of Medford, Oregon, with a diversified economy built around medical services and government, there is a near political consensus opposing a Liquified Natural Gas Export terminal 100 miles to our west at the Port of Coos Bay. The pipeline needs to transverse a rural part of our county and that give us leverage to stop the multi-billion dollar project. It would be by far the largest taxpayer in the neighboring country, but that is them. Their jobs, their port, their taxpayers. 

We have other interests. 

Local environmental activists stand on a principle. If we can stop natural gas from mid-continent from getting to market it is a strike against fossil fuel development. Natural gas would replace coal, but actually, thinking globally, China should be putting in solar panels and wind turbines, not importing gas. There are no fossil fuels to develop in our area and the export terminal is another county's windfall. They can be a quaint tourist town. 

Today, we have a guest post from a Coos County resident with a more nuanced view. She identifies as an environmentalist. She also sees Coos Bay, Oregon for what it is, a place struggling, whose primary economic edge is their well placed port. As Kristoff has documented, there is a cost to poverty, a human cost.

Guest Post by Sheryl Gerety

Gerety

"LNG Terminal: Coos County Asks For It"

I retired to Coos Bay in 2014, where within weeks House Representative Peter De Fazio held a town hall. He wanted to talk about fishing and transportation issues; many in the audience had questions about his support for or resistance to the LNG terminal.  

There were colored T-shirts for Team LNG, with a lot of folks standing behind the rows of seats who pressed him to throw his influence into the ring. March 19, 2020 FERC (Federal Energy Commission) conditionally approved the Jordan Cove LNG export terminal and Pacific Connector Gas Pipeline.  

Since attending that meeting 6 hears ago I've been asked where I stood on the basic question: should it happen?  I've had and heard many conversations, some with City and County officials, some with private sector residents who make their livings operating and repairing tug boats, farming cranberries, running an Italian restaurant, within and without Coos County. I've learned that whether Pembina builds a pipeline connector and the LNG terminal on the Port of Coos Bay is not about exporting natural gas per se.  

The actual problem is that our port, the only deep water port between San Francisco Bay and Seattle Tacoma Puget Sound, is an outdated and significantly underused facility fighting to attract investors to power the local economy. The one potential solution arrived at after 40 years of searching for funds to maintain and expand Port services turns out to be exporting natural gas to Asia. Maybe. 

Channel dredging

As a way to imagine why coastal Oregon has had to make such a long and only partly successful project out of revitalizing it's one surviving economic engine, think of the state of Oregon as the Inca Empire. All commerce runs along the inland altiplano, the seats of culture, religion and wealth are in Cuzco, Arequipa, Quito, but not Lima.  The Incas were not a nation of seafarers and their highlands survivors' contempt for the coastal cities remains visceral to this day. Oregon's seat of government and major cities lie east of the coastal range along the I-5 corridor. The interior view of our coastal towns is that they would do well to remain isolated, quaint e.g. poor, vacation retreats for the inlanders who golf, beach comb, charter fishing boats or ply kayaks along the tide pools.  

Since the bad old 80s, when the timber industry failed, Coos County and the cities of North Bend and Coos Bay together with the Port Authority and the Coast Guard have pursued federal and state grants to rebuild a railroad spur that carries lumber from mills in Coquille, Coos Bay and North Bend to the docks for export, but also on to Eugene. TARP funds were awarded for that project.  But money to dredge the ship channel from the Charleston Bar has been in short supply as has money to build out the docks and repair the railroad bridge that crosses the Bay to the west of the McCullough Bridge on OR101. The support sought from the State House and Senate to establish a pilot wind farm off the coast hinged on building out docks to load equipment and service vessels to build the turbines hit gale force political headwinds.  

When LNG terminal talks began, the Obama administration had been promoting a scaling down of fossil fuels, eliminating the worst offender, coal, by offering natural gas as the cheaper and cleaner fuel source available immediately and useful for building out renewable energy projects. 

The local intent has been and continues to be leasing locations on the port to (now) Pembina while once again looking for off-shore wind farm ventures.  The enormous front loading required to get the port up to speed will have been helped along almost to completion for the next generation of energy sources.  

Now, with CO₂ levels climbing toward a point of environmental no return, using the port as a means to a worthy end is not viewed as principled enough to pass the smell test.  It's money, after all, that is driving the decision. And what decision of any magnitude should be taken because of money?  Here, Pembina money for schools, law enforcement and city/county services pretty much stands between us and no functional government, school districts, roads and a hard won hospital. I've made many a Red Cross fire call to multi-generational households of working poor that consist of a tenant in a fifth wheel or camping trailer connected by an extension chord to a 60-100 year old house with original wiring. 

We have thousands of households maintaining this tenuous mutual life support system, and hundreds of homeless sheltering in the woods around town.  Cooking meth is still a way to make cash. It is about money, folks, and money is one currency we have that measures how well we are doing as a society.