Pipeline decision facing a barrel of trouble
Obvious climate-change could affect outcome
Amid
the throngs who rallied here last weekend to protest the Keystone XL pipeline were Antonette Clarke, 71, and her biologist husband, John, 75.
The Maryland couple struggled against a brisk sub-zero wind to hold up a sign saying, “Put scientists not lawyers on the Hill.”
Every month, the National Climate Data Center publishes a report sent to Capitol Hill and the White House summarizing the previous month’s average temperatures in the U.S. and around the world. The news is never good: The rise is steady. Records are equalled or broken. And politicians are taking note. It appears the scientists have indeed arrived.
Senators are busy preparing climate-change bills. When discussing the issue, U.S. President Barack Obama never fails to mention the rising temperatures, the intense storms, drought, sea-level rise, floods and wildfires. It brings the message home more graphically than talk of emission reductions. Almost everyone agrees the climate is changing.
Which makes it just about the worst time to want to build an oil pipeline that will bring Canadian “tarsands” oil — as some opponents here call it — down through the heartland of the United States.
Make no mistake. Keystone XL is under fire. Obama is trying to find a middle ground and that probably means parking Keystone somewhere in the distant future and revisiting it later when there’s more information.
“If he doesn’t, he’s going to open up a huge credibility gap between what he said in the inaugural and state of the union addresses and what he did when he was first given a chance to do a real deal in this area,” Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse said in an interview.
In Washington, controversial decisions usually mean minimizing and working toward the middle. There is no middle here. You approve it or you don’t — or you just park it, which amounts the same thing.
“The right thing to do is to simply make the strong decision, be controversial if you need to be and show the kind of leadership that brings people around to your decision rather than going half way to theirs,” Whitehouse said.
The effects of a dead Keystone could be significant in the long term, Michael Moore, an energy economist at the University of Calgary, said in an interview. “It will slow that (expansion) down, significantly cutting it in half,” he said.
Attacks on Keystone are also coming from the U.S. Senate where Democrats Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Barbara Boxer of California are sponsoring a bill that will impose a carbon “fee” of $20 on every ton of fossil fuel produced in or imported into the United States.
Unless an importing country, such as Canada, adapts similar measures to tax carbon, their manufacturers will also have to pay the U.S. carbon fee. Imports will be taxed according to the quantity of GHG emissions produced in the process of manufacturing the oil or gas. This would hit oilsands companies particularly hard because their processes produce higher emissions than conventional oil and gas.
“The president can and must use his authority to cut down on power plant pollution, and reject the dangerous Keystone XL project,” Sanders said when he announced the bill.
Another problem for Keystone also looms. It comes in the form of billions of barrels of shale oil that lie just below the surface in Montana and North Dakota — and elsewhere in the United States. The Keystone would help bring that oil to market. But the inevitable increase in the production of shale oil, which is cleaner than oilsand bitumen, could reduce the demand for Canadian imports, particularly as America attempts to reduce overall oil consumption.
Fifty-three mainly Republican senators called last week for the quick approval of Keystone.
The state department has the file and the new Secretary of State John Kerry has said he will give the issue his personal attention.
Kerry has been a strong advocate for action on climate change. Obama supports him, at least in his rhetoric. But the final decision is Obama’s. By law he has to make it on the basis of one question: Is an oil pipeline crossing a U.S. border in the national interest of the United States of America?
When you consider climate change, the promise of an oil glut in the near future, and Obama’s braying electoral base, Keystone doesn’t look so good.
Keystone owner TransCanada, however, hopes its central argument — that friendly Canada is a safer energy security bet than the Middle East — will trump all other concerns.