Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Joe Nocera

 Here’s the question on the table today: Can a person support the  Keystone XL oil pipeline and still believe that global warming poses a  serious threat?

To my mind, the answer is yes. The crude oil from the tar sands of Alberta, which the pipeline would transport to American refineries on  the Gulf Coast, simply will not bring about global warming apocalypse.  The seemingly inexorable rise in greenhouse gas emissions is the result  of deeply ingrained human habits, which will not change if the pipeline  is ultimately blocked. The benefits of the oil we

The Politics of Keystone, Take 2

Building the oil pipeline is not going to lead to apocalypse.

February 10, 2012

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Some facts about pipelines (not from any energy company source)

1. Pipelines are everywhere. They usually don’t cause problems with spills. If they are ruptured, they can be turned off at the source. Anyone reading this probably has a pipeline within a few miles of their house or office.

2. The gasoline you burn today in your car was delivered, somewhere, by pipelines.

3. The “environment destruction” that comes from pipelines consists mainly of a pathway of open space that passes through pastures, over hills and through the woods. The pipeline that is near my house, for example, provides a kind of park where hundreds of people walk, take their dogs, bike or push baby strollers with no awareness at all that they are walking near an underground pipeline.

4. The pipeline that was built for the Alaska pipeline almost 40 years ago is above ground. This is relatively rare and it was built that way because of local conditions in Alaska.

5. People are sometimes killed if a pipeline under high pressure ruptures and especially if natural gas or petroleum products catch fire. This is relatively rare. People are killed in almost every human endeavor, like construction or transportation, but that doesn’t stop us from moving forward and trying to make things safer. Where would you rather have your gasoline moving, in a truck next to you on a freeway or through an underground pipeline?

6. There are multiple local, state and federal agencies monitoring the safety of pipelines and the EPA, and state officials, closely monitor the construction of pipelines to try to minimize damage to the local environment.

7. Those who want to build the Keystone XL system do not need the permission of the US State Department to build most of the line; they need it only because the line crosses an international border. The major hang up environmentally  was whether the line would cross the Ogallala Aquifer   in Nebraska, which was blocked by the legislature. Aquifers are vital to human life on the planet and the Ogallala, also known as the High Plains Aquifer, supplies clean drinking water to many western states. 

8. Stopping supplies of energy for ourselves while still importing massive amounts from the     middle-east  and maintaining a society wide dependence on fossil fuels is not a good strategy. The end result would be an economy in tatters, while the rest of the world rushed forward to use every source of energy available. To be successful, a transition to renewable energy sources has to be balanced, careful and, if at all possible, wise. We will still be using fossil fuels for some needs 100 or more years from today.

From Wikipedia

Saturated thickness of the Ogallala Aquifer in 1997 after several  decades of intensive withdrawals: The breadth and depth of the aquifer generally decrease from north to south.

Regions where the water level has declined in the period 1980-1995 are shown in yellow and red; regions where it has increased are shown in  shades of blue. Data from the USGS

Groundwater withdrawal rates (fresh water, all sources) by county in 2000. Source: National Atlas

BIKE TRAILS IN THE DC AREA

HOT HEADS ATTACK NOCERA FOR TRYING TO BRING REASON TO THE KEYSTONE XL DEBATE

As much as it bothers me to do so, I want to come to the defense of the NY Times op-ed columnist, Joe Nocera, who happens also to be an ex-colleague of mine (a long time ago). Nocera is under attack in the comments section of the Times for daring to question whether Obama was right in turning down, to this point anyway, the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada’s tar sands oil fields to refineries in Texas.

The only reason it concerns me at all to come to his defense is that I have had a bit of fun in going after some of his columns since he moved to op-ed. So now I guess I have to have less fun, but, in any case, he is generally right about the Keystone pipeline and the people writing in on the Times online section, generally, seem to not know what the heck they are writing about. A good deal of the comments seem to come from people at about this level of thought and information: 1. I have heard about the pipeline and that environmental groups are opposed. 2. It must be bad. 3. Don’t build it.  A great many people are sharing their ignorance rather than specific knowledge or a carefully informed opinion. I guess that’s what online forums are for. I suppose I’ve been guilty of this myself, on occasion. (Go to the Times online comments here.)

I am not going to republish excerpts of the comments here. They are too far off the track, too much a reflection of knee jerk reactions rather than actually thinking.  The key point against the environmentalist activist stand was made in Nocera’s column, interestingly enough, by the head of the Environment Defense  Fund, the group most opposed to Keystone XL.

Here is the prime clip from Nocera’s column:

(Nocera spoke with)  “...Bill McKibben, who led the protests against it. Although the tar sands ranks as “the second biggest pool of carbon in the world,”€� he told me, “Keystone, by itself, won’t make or break the  environment.”

 Rather, he said, he and other environmentalists had decided to draw this particular line in the sand because stopping Keystone would help accelerate what he described as the difficult transition from a fossil  fuel economy to a new, brighter world based on renewable sources of energy. “The most sensible way to go about dealing with global warming  is one pipeline at a time,” he said. “These kinds of fights are extremely important because they are the way the message gets out that we need to change.” (Underline by The TerryReport)

I can’t quite fully express my contempt for what McKibben had to say. Put it this way, if I were president and he came into my office and made an argument like this, I would be tempted to call the State Department, before or after he had left the room, and tell them the pipeline had my support and approval. Why? Because McKibbden was admitting that the issue wasn’t the pipeline at all, that his group was using the pipeline both to “get the message out” and to try to force the nation and the world off fossil fuels. To my mind, that is not his job nor the job of anyone organizing for social and political purposes. Encourage? Yes. Show a better way? Yes. Force in the nation and the world into a situation where oil becomes too difficult to use? No. It is something he could not accomplish in any case, but it gives his supporters a dream to hold onto.

As for the “one pipeline at a time” quote, please. Pipelines are not controversial projects. They lie underground, most people have no idea they are even there (I have one about 1/3 of a mile from my house and I am willing to bet that 97% of those who walk passed it every day have no idea that it is there.) As for dangers to the environment or public safety, there are very few reports of either. (From my point of view, the pipelines are not monitored closely enough in terms of leaks and probably are not rebuilt soon enough because of wear, but those are really separate issues to the Keystone controversy.)

The public comments in the Times online prove to me that people who want to protect the environment and “save the earth” can be almost as ignorant as is the far right when they screamed “drill, baby, drill” at the Republican convention in 2008. If one is opposed to the development of the tar sands, fine. Oppose that. Find a way to make it stick, but also realize that whatever is happening with global warming, we have a long, difficult road to get off oil without putting the world’s economies into shock, lowering everyone’s income by 30 to 40% and risking, literally, freezing in the dark. This is serious business. I really doubt we are going to change our ways by generating artificial energy shocks that wake us up to the need to convert to clean energy.

Stopping the Keystone XL pipeline does nothing except stop the Keystone XL. The pipeline company does not need State Department permission to build most of the pipeline and there are strong indications they will go ahead and do just that.  Stopping the pipeline is a great victory, in terms of raising money and getting support of their members, for groups like the Environmental Defense Fund.  Good organizational politics, in other words.

Here is what is likely to happen: a some point in the next two to four years, the pipeline will be built, whether or not Obama is reelected. The pipeline itself is not a big deal and the tar sands are going to be developed anyway (would the US leave that much oil in the ground? No.) The EDF will be able to claim its temporary victory and the poorly informed know-it-alls who wrote on the Times online won’t even be paying attention by then.

If one looks at an issue from a narrow perspective, it is likely that the results will be narrow, too. The environmental groups tried to label the problem with the tar sands as being a problem with the pipeline.  Why? Because it was good politics for them to do so and every activist group needs, no, must have, issues to keep their membership upset and involved (just ask the NRA, the all time experts in doing that). A lot of people just believe what they are told, because they identify themselves as environmentalists and want to be on the good side of every question. Guess what? All too often there aren’t any easy, quick answers.  The situations are complex and so are the solutions. Pretending otherwise shows a lack of clear thinking and lessens the impact on future, more vital issues.

A lot of people believe we are in an environmental emergency. That doesn’t excuse loose, poor reasoning nor taking politically motivated actions that will hurt us all in the name of an unknown, future benefit that, in any case, can’t be achieved by the means proposed.   There are serious problems in our national and world environment. It brings discomfort to a lot of people to think we must address them, but the best answer for all is to do so in a careful, responsible way, not by the creation of artificial gamesmanship.                              

Doug Terry, 2.12.12

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