Obama gives Canada the brush off, yet again
Barack Obama is Canada’s American president. Right? Of course right. In the lead-up to his 2012 battle with the airbrushed Republican Mitt Romney, with his binders full of women, polls showed Canadians overwhelmingly preferred Obama. Even in Alberta, according to a Harris/ Decima survey taken in July 2012, Canadians would have opted for the urbane, likable Chicago Democrat over his beancounter rival by a margin of more than 30 per cent, given a vote.
But our love is unrequited. It always has been. And the indefinite shelving of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline linking Alberta’s oilsands with the Texas Gulf Coast, once considered a sure thing and now on life support thanks to Obama, is the incontrovertible evidence. This U.S. president cares about his own narrow political interests and making symbolic Green gestures — and Canada, workers on both sides of the border, western energy security, and simple honesty be damned.
Is there an American publicinterest argument at play in the Keystone XL debate? Yes indeed — in favour. Republicans and centrist Democrats have argued for years that the pipeline is a no-brainer, not only because of the thousands of construction jobs at stake, which is of immediate interest to the U.S. labour unions now howling their outrage, but because of the strategic protection it provides in the event of a cutoff or abridgement of energy supplies elsewhere — say, the Middle East or Russia.
The Arab Spring is not working out particularly well. Now Russia, led by the crazed Vladimir Putin, is using its energy muscle in Europe as a lever in its continuing efforts to seize by force the territory of another sovereign country.
Russia is the world’s secondlargest producer of natural gas. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries, including Canada, are making a show of bulking up their scanty military power in Eastern Europe.
But by far the best leverage the West has against Russia is economic. The United States is now the world’s largest producer of natural gas, thanks to exploding shale production. Some in Washington have advocated greatly expanding shipments of liquid natural gas to Ukraine. It’s not difficult to see where that leads. Though there’s no direct, immediate connection to Keystone, there is no denying the strategic value of creating a North American energy fortress. The Keystone XL pipeline is critical to the proper future functioning of the North American energy market and would therefore be the cornerstone — call it the keystone — of that fortress.
But what about greenhouse gas emissions and the survival of the planet, which will surely turn to ash if the 174 billion barrels of crude in the oilsands are extracted? The U.S. State Department said itself, months ago, that the project’s ultimate effect on GHG emissions will be negligible, because the oilsands will ultimately be devel- oped, and the crude delivered to market, if not by pipeline to the U.S. then by other means, to Asia or elsewhere. Not all the tea in Malaysia, nor billionaire Tom Steyer nor actor Robert Redford, can prevent oil and gas exploration firms from satisfying exploding emergingmarket demand for oil. Failing a mature pipeline network it will be shipped overland by rail, which is less secure.
More telling still, the New York Times helpfully pointed out in its Sunday edition, Canada and Keystone are bit players on the global carbonemissions front. In 2011, the Times’ Coral Davenport notes, citing statistics from the U.S. Energy Information Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, global emissions worldwide amounted to 32.6 billion metric tons. China produced the largest share of any one country, at 8.7 billion. The U.S. came second at 5.5 billion. Of American emissions, electric power plants, mostly driven by coal, were responsible for 2.8 billion tonnes, while automobiles accounted for 1.9 billion.
Canada’s total emissions, the same year? Wait for it: 0.6 billion tonnes. And the estimated annual emissions stemming from the 830,000 barrels of oil projected to move through Keystone XL, in the event the pipeline ever gets built? 18.7 million tonnes. It is, as one of Davenport’s sources notes, “a rounding error,” in the global context.
Yet for the sake of this rounding error, even as the United States continues to dawdle with its own coal-fired power plants, even as U.S. public opinion solidly favours construction (a Pew poll taken in March found 61 per cent in favour, 27 per cent against), even as a both Conservatives and Liberals in Ottawa, and the governments of Alberta and Saskatchewan, lobby hard for passage, Obama’s response is to kick the can down the road, in perpetuity?
It is a display of shallowness, cowardice and economic incompetence on a grand scale, eclipsed only by the president’s strange recent habit of running foreign policy by serially shaking his fist.
Mitt Romney, the unloved technocrat, promised in 2012 to approve Keystone XL on his first day in the White House. Romney must cry himself to sleep each night as he surveys the growing shambles his defeat has wrought.