“Momenta” explores the coal-train boom

A Pacific Northwest coal project is threatening the global environment on a scale greater than the Keystone Pipeline, but most people have never heard of it. Momenta is a documentary film project that shares the story of the people living along the coal export trail and the project’s global environmental implications.  Co-sponsored by the Surfrider Foundation’s Olympic Peninsula Chapter. 40 minutes. Directed by Andy Miller and Robin Moore (2014).

According to the Momenta website, “Right now, in America’s Pacific Northwest, communities are taking part in a historical opposition to Big Coal and its reckless pursuit of profits. American demand for coal is declining, and as a result the American coal industry plans to extract billions of tons of coal from the Powder River Basin and ship it to rapidly expanding Asian markets via proposed deepwater ports in Washington and Oregon. Each day over fifty mile-and-a-half-long trains, laden with Powder River coal, will travel from Wyoming and Montana through hundreds of small towns to ports in the Pacific Northwest, leaving arsenic and mercury laden coal dust in their wake. The near-constant stream of escaping coal dust imposes toxic environmental pollutants and inestimable health risks to communities through which the trains travel.  And that’s not even the worst of it…”

Bill McKibben, a world-renowned author, scholar and environmentalist, comments on the Momenta website: “That coal has to stay in the ground. You can’t make the math of climate change work if you get the huge coal deposits of the Powder River Basin out and pour them into the atmosphere.”