Keystone XL Oil Sands Pipeline — Al Jazeera’s Impartial Interview of Three Experts with Different Perspectives — and President Obama’s Game-Playing Hypocrisy

© 2012 Peter Free

 

20 January 2012

 

 

What are the substantive considerations regarding building the Keystone XL Oil Pipeline?

 

Al Jazeera presented a succinct and impartial view of the issues surrounding whether to build the Keystone XL Pipeline in the United States:

 

Inside Story Americas, US oil pipeline: Storm in a barrel? Al Jazeera (20 January 2012) (25-minute video)

 

I provide this link because the mainstream American media has done a relatively poor job of presenting concise arguments for and against in one place.

 

 

Background — political game-playing

 

The Pipeline is intended to transport oil from Alberta’s Athabasca Oil Sands to Port Arthur, Texas.

 

President Obama — in his typically self-interested skirting of leadership’s responsibilities — initially postponed deciding whether to approve the Canadian corporation’s application to build in the United States until after the 2012 election.

 

Republican-dominated Congress called his bluff by requiring him to make a decision by 21 February, as part of the temporary tax cut extension:

 

Obama said that the Feb. 21 deadline . . . made it impossible to adequately review the project proposed by TransCanada. But he left the door open to the possibility that a new proposal might pass regulatory muster.

 

“This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people,” the president said in a statement.

© 2012 Juliet Eilperin and Steven Mufson, Obama administration rejects Keystone XL pipeline, Washington Post (18 January 2012)

 

 

No time to decide? — 3 years isn’t enough?

 

TransCanada’s “Presidential Permit” application arrived at the U.S. Department of State on 19 September 2008.

 

Report to Congress Concerning the Presidential Permit Application of the Proposed Keystone XL Pipeline, United States Department of State (18 January 2012) (at first paragraph under “Background”)

 

The Report explained that:

 

Executive Order (EO) 13337 delegates to the Department of State (the Department) the authority to receive applications for Presidential permits for cross-border facilities and outlines a process for the Department to determine whether granting such permits would be in the national interest.

 

On November 10, 2011, the Department concluded that it required more information before a determination could be made regarding the Keystone XL pipeline application for a Presidential permit.

 

The time period provided in the Temporary Payroll Tax Cut Continuation Act of 2011 is not adequate for the Department to conduct the necessary analysis to gain the additional information.

 

The Department therefore recommended that the President determine that the permit application for the Keystone XL pipeline filed on September 19, 2008 (including amendments) be denied and that he determine the Keystone XL pipeline, as presented and analyzed at this time, does not serve the national interest.

 

The President concurred with the Department’s recommendation and made that determination on January 18, 2012.

 

Report to Congress Concerning the Presidential Permit Application of the Proposed Keystone XL Pipeline, United States Department of State (18 January 2012) (at paragraph immediately preceding “Background”) (paragraph split)

 

 

 

See why do so many Americans currently despise the federal government?

 

The President’s charade regarding Keystone is the kind of foot-dragging that legitimately infuriates business leaders.  And anyone else of sound mind and reasonable expectations.

 

A competent environmental review does not take three years to complete.  Especially with so many oil pipelines already in existence.  It is not as if there is not a track record to examine in all sorts of physical environments.

 

The Department of State’s Report is, in a word, dishonestly intended nonsense.

 

 

The Administration’s hard-core environmental hypocrisy

 

In glaring contrast to its pretended upset with Congress’ imposed “yes or no” Keystone permit deadline, the Obama Administration almost instantaneously re-opened the Gulf of Mexico to oil drilling, after BP’s Deepwater Horizon “largest oil spill ever” disaster.

 

The President’s Keystone XL “no time” excuse is hypocrisy on fleet feet.

 

 

Regarding the badness of oil sands

 

The best reasonably short overview of  oil production from “oil sands” is Peter Fairley’s essay in Technology Review.

 

 

Citation

 

Peter Fairley, Alberta’s Oil Sands Heat Up, Technology Review 114(6): 52-59 (November-December 2011)

 

 

Oil sands oil production is monumentally un-green

 

In addition to being profligately energy intensive, oil sands production currently takes a good crack at destroying and polluting significant parts of ecosystems.

 

Oil sands production may create 10 to 45 percent more greenhouse gases than conventionally-produced crude oil.

 

Note

 

This estimate’s range is a good indicator of how little we know about the phenomena we come to “too easy” conclusions about.

 

And, if the Pipeline is permitted to cross the United States’ geographically immense Ogallala Aquifer, leaks could pollute the underground water resource.

 

The Ogallala is already being overdrawn.  Pollution would worsen an already worrying situation.

 

On the other hand, there is our oil greed

 

As with so many of our social conundrums, the most essential problem is us and our oil avarice.

 

We’re attached to our lifestyles.  Because virtually no one lives next door to Athabasca’s sands, almost no one has to put up with the visible ecological mess the process makes.

 

Pollution outside the oil sands region is predominantly comprised of unseen greenhouse gases.  By the time the globe heats up enough to make our descendants really uncomfortable, we polluters will be dead.  So we don’t, for the most part, care.

 

Equally important, oil sands and pipeline construction mean at least a handful of temporary jobs.  We’ve already seen how the prospect for employment allowed BP to run amok in the Gulf of Mexico.

 

And, arguably — depending upon who actually buys the transported oil — an enhanced Canadian source for American oil demand slightly improves our national security.

 

In sum, oil production gives us black gold, mobile lifestyles, and jobs.  Its anti-Pipeline alternative offers us good things that mostly no one appreciates, until they’re long gone.

 

Guess who’s probably going to win the conflict between these alternatives?

 

 

If we environmentalists are going to pick a fight, it might be more efficient to pick one that has a reasonable chance of achieving a good outcome

 

Opposing the Pipeline, without offering workable alternatives, makes the environmental lobby look naive and (debatably) stupid to what is probably the majority of Americans.

 

It might be wiser to put green-oriented psychic energy into:

 

(a) ensuring that the Pipeline project is completed with economically affordable environmental precautions,

 

(b) funding and following through on environmentally more friendly energy ventures,

 

and

 

(c) supporting a gasoline tax to fund them.

 

The boom-bust nature of alternative energy funding in the Unites States has been a major obstacle to the kind of sustained progress that start-up technologies need to succeed.

 

Contributing to government and industry efforts to finance energy sources evolution on a long-term basis would be a more useful expenditure of money and time than engaging in anti-Pipeline agitation and litigation.

 

 

An example from Germany — plan for the future

 

Germany installed 3 gigawatts of solar power capacity last month alone.  The United States installed only 1.8 GW in all of 2011.

 

Germany subsidizes solar power energy production with an eye to future needs.  The United States consistently bumbles along in the belief that completely free markets will fix all our problems.

 

Nobody thinks that green energy is currently economically competitive with oil, natural gas, and coal — all of which externalize their environmental costs to zero.

 

But thoughtful economic planners recognize that virtually all technologically new industries require some kind of economic support to reach their (arguably) eventually necessary place in the sun.

 

When Americans do provide such support, we tend to do it in very short-term boom-bust cycles that make it impossible for new industries to do consistent venture planning and technological development over the long-term.  Not smart.

 

The environmental lobby would do better to use its influence to point us in more favorable directions (like Germany’s example) than trying to oppose Big Oil in simplistic ways that are probably self-defeating.

 

When people are out of work and can’t heat their homes — or get to where they need to go because they can’t pay for fuel — they are unlikely to support measures that are likely to make their situations worse.

 

 

The moral? — The battle over Keystone XL isn’t just about plutocracy and Big Oil, it’s also about our personal greed(s)

 

And the inept Presidential leadership that embodies all three.