Politicians say they want to support the “Keystone Economy.” Here’s why that vision means fewer jobs, no impact on gas prices, and more pollution

by Daniel J. Weiss

Rep. Ann Marie Buerkle (R-NY) told reporters during a recent press conference on the economy on that “Solyndra and Keystone represent what’s at stake this November.  Two very different visions — I think Solyndra and Keystone typify them.”

She is not the first Republican official to make this comment, promoting a vision that means relying on a very flawed pipeline project that benefits foreign oil companies.  It sharply contrasts with President Obama’s clean energy investment vision.

A “Keystone” economy means:

• No additional oil produced for the United States.  The State Department’s final “Keystone XL Assessment” concluded:

“WORLD and ETP studies indicate that building versus not building Keystone XL would not of itself have any significant impact on: U.S. total crude runs, total crude and product import levels or costs.

“This is because changing WCSB [oil sands] crude export routes would not alter either U.S., Canadian or total global crude supply.” (emphasis original)

Additionally, there are indications that a significant portion of the oil sands piped through Keystone to Gulf Coast refineries will be made into products for export rather than kept here.  At a December Congressional hearing, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) asked the CEO of pipeline owner TransCanada whether he would agree to keep all refined products from oil sands in the United States.  He declined.

On February 15, Rep. Markey offered an amendment to H.R. 3408 to “ensure that if the Keystone XL pipeline is built, the oil that it transports to the Gulf of Mexico and the fuels made from that oil remain in this country to benefit Americans.”

The amendment failed 173-254.  Rep. Buerkle voted against it, opposing retention of Keystone oil in the United States and instead supporting its export to other nations.

• Same oil prices for the United States. The analysis determined that the pipeline will only have a tiny impact on the price of crude and other products:

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In the world we must strive to achieve, however difficult or implausible it may seem today, there is no place for a major expansion of the tar sands

Climatologist Andrew Weaver asks me to direct folks to this website and this video, ”in case the tar sands piece that Neil [Swart] and I published yesterday gets spun as a ‘tars sands is good’ story”:

I do think Weaver’s study — “The Alberta oil sands and climate” in Nature Climate Change (subs. req’d) – is a tad confusing. For instance, it doesn’t even include the extra emissions from tar sands extraction in its calculations!! So people who don’t actually read it carefully are likely to misreport its findings.

According to Time magazine, “Pipeline Politics: Are the Oil Sands ‘Game Over’ for the Climate? One Study Says No”:

The good news from the Nature Climate Change paper is that, should environmentalists lose their battle, the consequences might not be quite as bad as they’ve made it out to be.

Except that isn’t what the study finds. Indeed, the final paragraph states

If North American and international policymakers wish to limit global warming to less than 2 °C they will clearly need to put in place measures that ensure a rapid transition of global energy systems to non-greenhouse-gas-emitting sources, while avoiding commitments to new infrastructure supporting dependence on fossil fuels.

In short, if you care about the 2C (3.6F) target, building something like the tar sands pipeline is a really bad idea.

By the way, if you care about a 3C (5.4F) target, building something like the tar sands pipeline is also a really bad idea — see IEA’s Bombshell Warning: We’re Headed Toward 11°F Global Warming and “Delaying Action Is a False Economy.” Risking 3C, roughly 550 ppm [assuming there aren't major carbon-cycle feedbacks], is not a good idea at all, as many studies make clear (see, for instance, New study of Greenland under “more realistic forcings” concludes “collapse of the ice-sheet was found to occur between 400 and 560 ppm” of CO2).

If 7+°F global warming — 10+°F warming over most of U.S. — by century’s end is fine with you, then the tar sands is not worth bothering about. Of course that is “incompatible with organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems & has a high probability of not being stable (i.e.  4°C [7F] would be an interim temperature on the way to a much higher equilibrium level),” according to Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change in Britain (see here).

NASA’s James Hansen himself says of the new paper:

“The argument that the currently known amount of carbon in the tar sands pit is small compared to the total fossil fuels burned in two centuries is fallacious and misleading — every single source, even Saudi Arabia, is small compared to the total. If we once get hooked on tar sands and set up infrastructure, the numbers will grow as mining capabilities increase. Tar sands are particularly egregious, because you get relatively less energy per unit carbon emitted and there is associated environmental damage in the mining.”

Indeed, the point of the new study is pretty much the same as the forthcoming paper from Hansen (see figure below).  I’d put it this way:

There are big pools of carbon that the world must not burn.  Since the United States is responsible for more cumulative CO2 emissions than any other country and has to cut emissions by more than 80% in four decades to do our fair share to avert catastrophe, it’s quite safe to say that from America’s perspective, the huge pool of unconventional oil vastly dirtier than conventional oil up north is definitely on the no-burn list.

The study makes that point in a fairly straightforward way:

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Keystone XL protests in Texas included a mix of tea party supporters, independents, Democrats, Republicans and even Occupy Dallas protesters.

by Rocky Kistner, reposted from NRDC’s Switchboard

As Congressional Republicans and Big Oil allies allies in Washington try to resuscitate the massive Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, people on the frontlines have opened a new campaign to stop the massive $7 billion project. In Texas, landowners are locking arms to fight would-be pipeline builder TransCanada over eminent domain cases that may determine where the 1700-mile project will be built.

On Friday, protesters gathered in Paris, TX, and in Austin to voice their support for Lamar County farm manager Julia Trigg Crawford, who runs a 600-acre farms that grows corn, soybeans and wheat along the Red River near Paris, TX. More than 50 protesters traveled from nearby counties to wave flags and signs on the Lamar County courthouse steps, shouting slogans like “Don’t mess with Texas” and “This is what democracy looks like.”

Check out this video of the protest and interview with Julia Trigg Crawford:

The raucous protest included an unusual mix of tea party supporters, independents, Democrats, Republicans and even Occupy Dallas protesters. They were all there to support Crawford’s eminent domain court fight with TransCanada, which wants to run the Keystone XL pipeline through her property.

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In a desperate attempt to force Keystone XL, three Senators are threatening access to a vital economic and national security safeguard, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve

by Daniel J. Weiss

Republican Congressional leaders have failed to force President Obama to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. But that’s not stopping them from trying over and over again, taking hostages in the process.

First they used the payroll tax cut extension as a vehicle to force a decision on the pipeline in sixty days, even before the final route was identified. President Obama was forced to disapprove the permit because there was no time to assess its potential pollution.

This week, several senators took a different hostage: our emergency oil supply.  On February 13, Senators David Vitter (R-LA), John Hoevan (R-ND), and Richard Lugar (R-IN) introduced the Strategic Petroleum Supplies Act, S. 2100 that would prevent President Obama from selling oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve unless Keystone is approved:

“the Administration shall not authorize a sale of petroleum products from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve… until the date on which all permits necessary … for the Keystone XL pipeline project application filed on September 19, 2008 (including amendments) have been issued.”

In other words, unless the president approves Keystone, he cannot sell our emergency oil — even if Iran causes an oil supply disruption in the Strait of Hormuz, a hurricane or other disaster disables oil production or refining facilities, or any other type of event causes gasoline prices to soar above $4 per gallon.  If any of these events happen, middle class Americans would pay significantly higher gasoline pump prices, giving billions of dollars more to big oil companies that made record profits last year.

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Does the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline have any significant energy security benefits?  No.

In my recent reply to Joe Nocera, I said a line he borrowed from Michael Levi, “may be the lamest analogy in the history of energy and climate.”  Levi, who blogs for the Council on Foreign Relations, has doubled down with a modification/clarification of his original line that makes it much worse.

Explaining why will, I think, get to the heart of much of the hand-waving by Keystone advocates. First, though, let me repost the central chart that can’t be ignored:

CO2 emissions by fossil fuels [1 ppm CO2 ~ 2.12 GtC, where ppm is parts per million of CO2 in air and GtC is gigatons of carbon] via Hansen. Significantly exceeding 450 ppm risks several severe and irreversible warming impacts.  Hitting 800 to 1,000+ ppm — which is our current emissions path and the inevitable outcome of aggressively exploiting unconventional fuels like the tar sands — represents the near-certain destruction of modern civilization as we know it as the recent scientific literature makes chillingly clear.

Levi writes (emphasis added):

Nocera’s Saturday column quotes me thusly:

“The argument you hear is that because [Keystone XL] increases greenhouse gas emissions, we shouldn’t tolerate it.  Well, so do the lights in my house.  You have to be discriminating.”

Here’s Romm’s response:

“Seriously. That may be the lamest analogy in the history of energy and climate. Nocera is actually analogizing the GHG emissions increase from 900,000 barrels a day of dirty tar sands oil with flicking on the lights in your house!”

Yes, seriously. Upon reflection, the analogy turns out to be even better than I previously thought.

Let’s do some numbers. The GHG emissions increase from substituting 900,000 barrels a day of “dirty tar sands oil” for the typical barrel of oil consumed in the United States is, at most, about 20 million tons of carbon dioxide each year. This estimate is based on assuming a 15% increase in per-barrel emissions, which is the upper limit given by the expert that Romm cites; I’m setting aside the fact that we’re actually talking about less than 900,000 barrels, since part of what would be carried isn’t bitumen, but rather lower-carbon dilluent.

On the other hand, residential lighting generated (PDF) 137 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions for the United States in 2008. So yes, flicking on the lights in our houses is actually a lot worse for the climate than substituting “dirty tar sands oil” into the energy mix.

(Side note: If you believe that the circa 900,000 barrels would not back out any other oil – something that, to be blunt, is totally implausible – then the maximum emissions increase from adding that oil works out to about the same as the annual emissions from U.S. residential lighting.)

Seriously! Upon reflection, the analogy is considerably worse than I thought.

Note: If Levi had meant to compare Keystone to turning on “the light in (all) our houses” he should have said that first.

My critique was of the original analogy — “so do the lights in my house” — which was between the lights in Levi’s house and Keystone’s oil.  Levi also cut out the second half of my response:  “How bad is this analogy?  Many people choose to get their electricity from renewable sources — so for them turning on the lights don’t even increase GHGs.  The point is people don’t have any choice about  the dirty tar sands oil — but Obama does.”

But whereas the original analogy was absurd, Levi’s modification/clarification is worse in every respect.

First, residential lighting has obvious and large benefits to us all, unlike Keystone. This kills the analogy by itself. Advocates simply have failed to identify any benefit to Keystone that deserves to be in the same sentence, paragraph, or article as the benefits of residential lighting (see below).  Levi immediately asserts:

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