X-axis is the range of potential resource in billions of barrels. Y-axis is grams of Carbon per MegaJoule of final fuel.

The Canadian tar sands are substantially dirtier than conventional oil as the chart above shows (longer analysis here).  They may contain enough carbon-intensive fuel to make stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide at non-catastrophic levels all but impossible.

And that is the point of Dr. James Hansen in a must-read essay on the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline to bring that dirty fuel into this country, “Silence Is Deadly: I’m Speaking Out Against Canada-U.S. Tar Sands Pipeline.”

Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has been right longer about the climate than just about anyone else (see “Right for 27 years: 1981 Hansen study finds warming trend that could raise sea levels“).  So he deserves to be heard.

Here is his essay, to which I’ve added some commentary with links:

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“PRICE SPIKES:  Have increased the number of hungry people worldwide in recent years, and led to food riots in several countries.”

Okay, the fact that climate change is helping to destabilize the food system and cause major price spikes is not a ‘bombshell’ to Climate Progress readers.  We’ve been writing about this for a long time (see “how extreme weather, climate change drive record food prices” and links below).

The bombshell is a 4000 word front-page story in the Sunday New York Times (above the fold!) headlined:

A Warming Planet Struggles to Feed Itself

Let me extract the key parts and best quotes for you, though I highly recommend reading the whole thing.  It is quite thorough.

UPDATE:  At the end are two featured comments, including one by long-time poster Wit’s End (aka Gail) where I’ve copied and activated the link to her website, another new feature I’m adding for select comments as an end-run around the lame FB system.

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Environmental issues are becoming a major part of the rhetorical fight leading up to the 2012 elections.

Republicans are trying to put Democrats on the defensive by calling environmental regulations “job killers”; Democrats are working to label Republicans as the “Grand Oil Party.” Both parties are using issues like climate change, offshore drilling, renewable energy and emissions regulations as important pieces of their early campaigning.

A recent piece from the Economist called “Environmentalism under fire” describes how political leaders are approaching the issues:

That is in part, presumably, because at the mid-terms last year the Republicans succeeded in portraying the Democrats’ plans to restrict emissions via a cap-and-trade scheme as an all-out assault on the economy, to great effect. John Shimkus, another Republican congressman, says Republicans will benefit again if environmental regulation remains a fraught issue next year. But Democrats like Mr. Waxman argue that the Republicans are reading too much into their victory last year. Voters may put their immediate economic concerns ahead of more amorphous worries about global warming in the wake of the recession, he says, but they are still not willing to tolerate a broader assault on regulations that protect public health.

In short, both the Democrats and the Republicans think they have found a winning theme in the other party’s environmental policies. And they may both, in fact, be right. Most polling suggests that the environment is not a critical issue in the eyes of many voters. But talking about it is a great way to fire up activists and donors on both sides.

So what do you think? Will voters respond to these issues? And if so, which strategy will be more effective?

Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour (R) is a Big Oil apologist who raised $2 million in oil money for GOP governors.  That’s probably why he doesn’t draw a big distinction between oil and chocolate.  For him, they are both a treat.

On TP Green, CAP’s Kristen Bartoloni discusses Barbour’s amazing testimony Thursday before the House Oversight Committee on the recovery efforts after last year’s BP oil spill.  Barbour blamed the economic devastation in the Gulf Coast not on BP or the other companies responsible for poisoning the region, but on the media, for  supposedly showing a “chocolate pelican“ over and over again:

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