Keystone XL: Did the State Department Level with Us?

Last week the U.S. Department of State released its Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline. The Keystone XL (or KXL) is a huge proposed pipeline capable of pumping 830,000 barrels of Canadian tar sands bitumen per day across the country and down to the Gulf of Mexico for refining and export. Two years after pulling back their first EIS due to lack of transparency, the State Department has finished a new improved version.

I’ve read a lot of it, and as far as I can tell, there’s virtually no change from the first one, which seemed to be gift-wrapped for a polluting industry. The KXL, they tell us again now, will have no significant environmental impact.

How could that be? 

In light of all that’s been learned about climate and the tar sands in the last two years, I really wondered. So I read the thing, or large chunks of it. And I’m troubled at what I see. I mean no disrespect to the good people from the State Department who worked on this, but it looks to me like they had their answer before they even gathered the data.  Among many flaws, these jumped out at me:

• The EIS clings to the idea that the tar sands will be fully developed regardless of what we do with the KXL: We can’t do anything anyway, they repeatedly say.
• The EIS ignores the reality that in the struggle for Earth’s climate, time matters: Opening the carbon floodgates now is much worse than potentially opening them later.
• And ominously, the EIS uses the lowest numbers of just about anyone in assessing just how carbon-polluting the tar sands really are.

We can’t stop them anyway

I’m really not making this up. The EIS says that if we stop the KXL now, we won’t cut tar sands production by more than 1%. And if every single pipeline proposal from the tar sands is killed, then by 2030, we will have only reduced production by 2-4%.[i]

Currently, the tar sands produce around 1.8 million barrels of oil per day. The KXL would add another 830,000 barrels per day of shipping capacity. That’s an increase of 36% from this one project. The higher upstream emissions alone (not including transporting, refining and burning the stuff) will be equivalent to the annual emissions from 6.3 coal-fired power plants or over 4.6 million cars.[ii]

You and I may think that 36% is a big jump in capacity. But still, the EIS tells us that approving the KXL won’t significantly add to tar sands production and emissions. They cite two reasons. First, there are other pipeline proposals, and – implicitly – they’ll probably be approved.  

In fact, there are four other pipeline proposals in various stages of planning. Two are in application stages, one has just been proposed, and the last one is still conceptual. They all are smaller than KXL, and the most important – Enbridge’s Northern Gateway – has to overcome fierce opposition from British Columbians and the legally-empowered First Nations tribes.  All the others are years away, and face unknown obstacles.[iii]

No matter, the State Department tells us. Even if all the pipelines get killed, tar sands production won’t suffer by more than 2-4% by the year 2030. And none of that decrease is because the “bitumen” (or tar) won’t move: it will be a little more expensive to ship it by train and truck, and that will cut demand a tiny bit.

So we’re wondering, how much do the Canadians plan today to move by rail or truck? Well, there are 2,750,000 barrels per day of proposed projects on the books. Four of them are pipelines (KXL being the largest) and they account for 99.3% of the total. The other is a railroad project, and it amounts to 0.7% of the total. It hardly registers in their plans. But the EIS assumes that this puny effort will swell into a behemoth and entirely replace the pipelines, if we don't say yes to the KXL.

This seems like an ominous start, doesn't it? We begin our EIS by assuming that nothing we do will affect the amount of tar sands oil that gets mined and burned, even though the KXL is the biggest and furthest advanced in the application process, the trailing proposals face political and legal obstacles, and the alternative mode of transportation is Lilliputian. Does this have you worried too?

Time doesn’t matter

It takes time to change the world. Sustainable energy technologies take time to develop. International agreements take time to negotiate. And the effects of climate chaos, as devastating as they are, take time to drive home the need for action.

But the EIS seems to hold that a huge increase in tar sands carbon emissions now is no more risky than a potential carbon explosion of equal dimensions in 2030. But this cannot be.

Every year, the cost of solar, geothermal and wind power comes down. Fuel efficiency standards are increasing sharply, reducing demand for the dirtiest oil. This year, CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have grown to 395.6 part per million; but in 2030, they’ll be about 433 ppm, even if the growth rate doesn’t increase (and it’s increasing). By then, we’ll certainly have had many more Katrinas and Sandys; Texas and Arizona will likely be essentially dry and burnt; coastal communities will no longer debate the reality of rising sea levels; and numerous developing countries will likely be acknowledged as non-viable climates for their people. Most importantly, the Congressional struggle against climate science will likely be little more than a distant memory.

But, on page after page, the EIS falls into the same trap: nothing will change; resistance now will be circumvented later; the world will not find the will to mitigate harm to the climate. When it comes to climate disruptions, time is not our friend: carbon-choked air and acidic oceans take forever to clean themselves. But in this one arena – the public will to act – time certainly works for us. With the passage of time, we can no longer ignore the things we once ignored, before floods ravaged our coasts and droughts burned up our forests. And we haven’t seen a fraction of it yet.

Time does matter. We are struggling to minimize harm to the Earth until people of goodwill everywhere stand up for what can no longer be suppressed.

Choosing the least alarming data

I was surprised to find the EIS asserting that tar sands oil, when measured on a life-cycle basis (or “well to wheel”) is only 17% more carbon polluting than the average oil refined in the U.S. I had seen lower numbers, but only in oil company publicity. And even more notably, the EIS suggested that, as oil supplies everywhere become scarcer, the tar sands’ carbon premium will likely decline, as other sources become dirtier.

I shouldn’t suggest that 17% more greenhouse gases per equivalent gallon is not serious.  If you go out and buy a highly efficient car that gets 40 mpg, gasoline made from 17% dirtier crude oil is like having the emissions of a 34 mpg car. That’s a big drop.

But it’s not nearly as big as most others would tell you.  The Department of Energy reports that the extraction of tar sands oil is 2.3-4.0 times more carbon polluting than conventional oil, resulting in at least a 22% well-to-wheel carbon penalty.[iv]  The EPA has set the tar sands carbon penalty at as much as 37%.[vi] And in Europe, the fuel-quality directorate determined that the average tar sands life cycle carbon intensity is approximately 23% worse than the average conventional crude used in Europe.[vii]

There is much more in the State Department EIS to make earth-keepers nervous. But these alone make me wonder where the administration plans to take us – whatever the president’s public pronouncements. We know that the Canadian government really wants an easy route to the sea for their crude. So do the big oil companies.  And when some 40-50,000 of us showed up at the White House a few Sundays ago to urge Obama not to approve the KXL, he was out golfing with – would you believe it? – oil company executives.[viii]

I’m sure that over the next few months, millions of people will weigh in on this, and urge the president to act to protect the Earth from a massive increase in the most polluting forms of oil. Won’t you consider adding your voice? It’s easy, and you can start by clicking here.

Thanks for reading, and may God bless you.

J. Elwood

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[i] Keystone XL Pipeline, Draft Supplemental EIS; ES 6.2 Market Analysis, p. ES-19 http://keystonepipeline-xl.state.gov/documents/organization/205719.pdf

[ii] Pembina Institute Backgrounder; Climate Implications of Proposed Keystone XL Oilsands Pipeline; http://www.pembina.org/oil-sands/os101/climate#footnote1_u8eycct

[iii] Pembina; p. 5

[iv] National Energy Technology Laboratory, Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions, November 2008; p. 12

[v] U.S. EPA: Letter of Cynthia Giles to Dept. of State; July 16, 2010; http://yosemite.epa.gov/oeca/webeis.nsf/%28PDFView%29/20100126/$file/20100126.PDF

[vi] U.S. average 2005 baseline was determined by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency together with the U.S. Department of Energy. For reference, see EPA (2010), Renewable Fuel Standard Program (RFS2): Regulatory Impact Analysis February 2010, EPA-420-R-10-006

[vii] Adam Brandt, Upstream greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from Canadian oil sands as a feedstock for European refineries, Executive summary (Department of Energy Resources, Stanford University, 2011), 41–42.

[viii] Huffington Post; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/20/obama-climate-protest_n_2719338.html

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Climate Change as Liberal Politics

President Obama surprised many – including me – by highlighting the challenge of global climate change in his second inaugural address on Monday.

“We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that failure to do so would betray our children and future generations,” Mr. Obama said. “Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms.”

Predictably, the president’s remarks drew criticism from his opponents. Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, a group financed by the oil-billionaire Koch brothers, had this to say about the president. “His address read like a liberal laundry list with global warming at the top,” Mr. Phillips said. “Americans have rejected environmental extremism in the past and they will again.”

"We will respond to the threat of climate change...."

Some readers may be curious about the term “extremism.” I think the more interesting link is between “global warming” and “liberal laundry list.”

It turns out that Mr. Phillips isn’t alone. Nearly every pundit I heard after the speech – on both the right and the left – made the linkage: climate change is a liberal cause. To some of us, that’s like calling cancer research, quantum physics or the ozone layer a liberal cause – or a conservative one, for that matter. But we still can’t deny the facts: Americans everywhere know that on the whole, progressives tend to take climate science more seriously, and conservatives tend to discount it.

I’ve looked into this before, and shown that we’ll look long and hard before finding an atmospheric scientist of any political persuasion whatsoever who doesn’t take human-caused climate change seriously.  But despite ever-more-exhaustive scientific research, in the political realm, the debate rages on, and the liberal-conservative labels persist.

Well, yesterday, I read a small book by MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel. Listed on Time Magazine’s “Time 100: The People Who Shape Our World,” Dr. Emanuel summed up the brief history of the politicization of the climate discussion in a few insightful – and surprisingly even-handed – paragraphs. I thought I’d share them with you:

From: What We Know About Climate Change; Kerry Emanuel

Especially in the United States, the political debate about global climate change became polarized along the conservative-liberal axis some decades ago. Although we take this for granted now, it is not entirely obvious why the chips fell the way they did. One can easily imagine conservatives embracing the notion of climate change in support of actions they might like to see anyway.

Conservatives have usually been strong supporters of nuclear power, and few can be happy about our current dependence on foreign oil. The United States is renowned for its technological innovation and should be at an advantage in making money from any global sea change in energy-producing technology: consider the prospect of selling new means of powering vehicles and electrical generation to China’s rapidly expanding economy. But none of this has happened.

Paradoxes abound on the political left as well. A meaningful reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions will require a shift in the means of producing energy, as well as conservation measures. But such alternatives as nuclear and wind power are viewed with deep ambivalence by the left. Senator Kennedy, by most measures our most liberal senator, is strongly opposed to a project to develop wind energy near his home in Hyannis, and environmentalists have only just begun to rethink their visceral opposition to nuclear power. Had it not been for green opposition, the United States today might derive most of its electricity from nuclear power, as does France; thus the environmentalists must accept a large measure of responsibility for today’s most critical environmental problem.

There are other obstacles to taking a sensible approach to the climate problem. We have preciously few representatives in Congress with a background or interest in science, and some of them display an active contempt for the subject. As long as we continue to elect scientific illiterates like James Inhofe, who believes global warming to be a hoax, we will lack the ability to engage in intelligent debate….

… The evolution of the scientific debate about anthropogenic climate change illustrates both the value of skepticism and the pitfalls of partisanship. Although the notion that fossil-fuel combustion might increase CO2 and alter climate originated in the 19th century, general awareness of the issue dates to a National Academy of Sciences report in 1979 that warned that doubling CO2 content might lead to a three-to-eight-degree increase in global average temperature.

Then, in 1988, James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, set off a firestorm of controversy by testifying before Congress that he was virtually certain that a global-warming signal had emerged from the background climate variability. At that time, less was known about natural climate variability before the beginning of systematic instrumental records in the nineteenth century, and only a handful of global climate simulations had been performed. Most scientists were deeply skeptical of Hansen’s claims; I certainly was. It is important to interpret the word “skeptical” literally here: it was not that we were sure of the opposite, merely that we thought the jury was out.

At roughly this time, radical environmental groups and a handful of scientists influenced by them leapt into the fray with rather obvious ulterior motives. This jump-started the politicization of the issue, and conservative groups, financed by auto makers and big oil, responded with counterattacks. This also marked the onset of an interesting and disturbing phenomenon that continues to this day. A very small number of climate scientists adopted dogmatic positions and in so doing lost credibility among the vast majority who remained committed to an unbiased search for answers.

On the left, an argument emerged urging fellow scientists to deliberately exaggerate their findings so as to galvanize an apathetic public, an idea that, fortunately, failed in the scientific arena but which took root in Hollywood, culminating in the 2004 release of The Day After Tomorrow.

On the right, the search began for negative feedbacks that would counter increasing greenhouse gases: imaginative ideas emerged, but they have largely failed the acid test of comparison to observations. But as the dogmatists grew increasingly alienated from the scientific mainstream, they were embraced by political groups and journalists, who thrust them into the limelight. This produced a gross distortion in the public perception of the scientific debate. Ever eager for the drama of competing dogmas, the media largely ignored mainstream scientists whose hesitations did not make good copy. As the global-warming signal continues to emerge, this soap opera is kept alive by a dwindling number of deniers constantly tapped for interviews by journalists who pretend to look for balance.

While the American public has been misinformed by a media obsessed with sensational debate, climate scientists developed a way forward that helps them to compare notes and test one another’s ideas and also creates a valuable communication channel. Called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, it produces a detailed summary of the state of the science every four years, with the next one due out in [2014]. Although far from perfect, the IPCC involves serious climate scientists from many countries and has largely withstood political attack and influence….

Emanuel concluded his discussion on a somewhat hopeful note: “The extremists are being exposed and relegated to the sidelines, and when the media stop amplifying their views, their political counterparts will have nothing left to stand on. When this happens, we can get down to the serious business of tackling the most complex and perhaps the most consequential problem ever confronted by mankind.”

We pray for this day to come soon. We note, with sorrow, that Emanuel wrote those hopeful words in 2007. And six years later, the media is still amplifying the pronouncements of discredited spokesmen claiming to rebut mainstream climate science. And whatever our political views, we will all equally bear the consequences of an injured climate system.

Let us work and pray for the national will and global resolve to protect our Father’s beloved planet while we can still make a meaningful difference -- for ourselves, and for God's  most vulnerable people and creatures.

Thanks for reading, and may God bless you.

J. Elwood

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