By Ryan Maue.
Free publicity:
Bill McKibben’s Call to Action: “I want to tell you about an upcoming action — it looks set to turn into the biggest civil disobedience protest in the history of the North American climate movement. It will take place at the White House from August 20-Sept. 3, and we need your help spreading the word. But I want to explain the reasoning behind it in some detail, because for me it helps illustrate how some of the debate about Obama is unproductive.”
President Obama has recently been criticized by former VP Al Gore in his rambling Rolling Stone article. But apparently that’s been “unproductive” and some damage control is in order. McKibben has the perfect solution in order to lobby the President to kill the Keystone Pipeline: “We asked people who had Obama buttons in their closets to bring them and wear them — many of us still remember the shivers that ran down our spines when he said, on the eve of his nomination, that with his election “the rise of the oceans would begin to slow and the planet begin to heal.”
The opposition to the Keystone Pipeline is not terribly difficult to figure out. But McKibben deftly summarizes the ultimate stakes that liberal environmentalists face:
But there’s a bigger problem here too. Those Alberta tar sands are the biggest carbon bomb on the continent — indeed, on the whole planet, only Saudi Arabia’s oil deposits are bigger…if you could burn all that oil at once, you’d add 200 parts per million co2 to the atmosphere, and send the planet’s temperature skyrocketing upwards. Any serious exploitation of the tar sands, says Hansen, means it’s “essentially game over” for the climate. So, high stakes. And don’t think that the Canadians will automatically find some other route to send their oil out to, say, China. Native tribes are doing a great job of blocking a proposed pipe to the Pacific; Alberta’s energy minister said recently that he stays up nights worrying that without Keystone his province will be ‘landlocked in bitumen.’ Without the pipeline, said the business pages of Canada’s biggest paper, Alberta oil faces a ‘choke point.’
So, the Call to Action is summarized on a website, where you can go to sign up to join the effort: Tar Sands Action
Get your best business attire, your Obama buttons, and get ready to join Danny Glover, Naomi Klein, and NASA scientist James Hansen at the White House, and help Obama “get his environmental mojo back!”
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From a political point of view, with gas prices soaring and the President in complete reelection/campaign mode, blocking the pipeline would be a huge political gift to any GOP nominee.
@TomB (July 12, 2011 at 1:05 pm)
1. Argument from authority
EPA says so: http://www.epa.gov/oms/climate/420f05001.htm#calculating
2. Hmmm, want a real explanation? Actually, the EPA link goes through the math. One [U.S.] gallon of gas contains 2.421 kg (about 5.3 pounds) of carbon, out of the 6+ pounds that the gasoline weighs. During combustion, each molecule of carbon combines with oxygen to form CO2. The carbon atom weighs 12 units, while each oxygen atom weighs 16 units — look up their respective atomic weights. Thus, the percentage of carbon (by weight) in a CO2 molecule is 12 / (12 + 2*16) = 12 / 44 = 27%. So the mass of the CO2 formed from one gallon of gasoline is 2.421 kg / 0.27 = 8.9 kg. [The EPA includes an additional factor of 0.99, reckoning that not all of the gasoline is oxidized, but that doesn’t affect the number much.] I rounded to 9 kg, one significant digit, as the figures I was using weren’t very accurate.
It’s the extra oxygen, taken from the air, which makes the mass of the resultant CO2 greater than that of the original gasoline.
@TomB (July 12, 2011 at 1:05 pm)
…or read John B’s explanation. [Is he your brother? You have the same last name.]
If they can prevent us from getting oil, maybe they can force us into using more “green” energy. Of course, it’s less reliable and more expensive, but that will also let them create new taxes and new entitlements.
It’s win-win!
RE: frederik wisse says:
July 12, 2011 at 12:52 pm
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Read “The Death of Nature” and you will see that you are 100% correct about McKibben.
We need to stop this pipeline so we don’t buy so much oil from foreign dictators who funnel their profits to terrorists!
Nah, he’s not my brother. If he were, the explanation wouldn’t have been nearly so polite. ;>
Thanx all for clearly that up for me.
Eco loons require an eco loony response, “We honourable Canadians are cleaning up the natural oil spill than occurred in the Athabasca Basin over millions of years, it is contaminating the rivers systems and ground water and we must stop this from happening.” Save the Athabasca donate your eco-loony dollars to the good folk at Suncor and Indo- China Oil who are selflessly working to claen up this vile act of god. I doubt I need sarc on/off but think of the logos Proud Albertans cleaning up Gods Oil Spill. And of course the retort to all protestors, What you oppose cleaning up an oil spill? What kind of planet hating A-hole are you.
Hey McKibben! Wait until we burn the Orinoco Heavy Oil Belt in Venezuela. That single deposit dwarfs the total of the rest of the world’s “carbon”. If we burn it in a day that would add – I don’t know? – 2000ppm CO2?
And how about the Dalradian graphitic schist in Scotland? Loads of carbon there. Hey – we could burn all the limestone too…
@R. Gates says:
July 12, 2011 at 11:18 am
“Sounds like a good plan to keep those tar sands right where they are.”
Yes, I so totally agree, since moving the tar sand to the oil sand location for processing is just adding unnecessary cost, better it is then to leave the tar sand where it is to be processed in place in the coming future.
I have touched this pipeline before it was laid underground last year. I have spoken with several safety engineers and find the safety tests before it was put online were the most stringent ever. Boats, rail and truck is exposed to accidents. Underground pipe is very safe. Koch is laying a pipe to the eagle ford shale and Corpus 20″.
This pipe actually created a recent oil glut at Cushing oklahoma. Around 39 million barrells in tanks there because we don’t have enough pipeline from the Cushing hub to the coast.
The oil sands are near the surface and are a massive oil spill.
We spend money in Canada and export products to Canada. Sending 300 billion to the Persian gulf hurts our economy. Virtually all Natural gas in America is moved by pipeline. (Nancy Pelosi says Natural gas is not a fossil fuel)
If we are against pipelines, lets shut them all down. My dad’s land had a pipeline crossing it for 50 years sending gas to Chicago. it was removed a few years ago. it never had an incident or leak. It was removed because it was old and had some tiny hints of corrosion. That is how long they last.
Wind towers will also rust and one day be dismantled. Why don’t they prevent those from being built?
Most of the litigation on this is Sierra Club.
Lets burn all the peat at once too.
“By volume, there are about 4 trillion m³ of peat in the world covering a total of around 2% of global land area (about 3 million km²), containing about 8 billion terajoules of energy.[1]”
“At 106 g CO2/MJ,[8] the carbon dioxide emissions of peat are higher than those of coal (at 94.6 g CO2/MJ) and natural gas (at 56.1) (IPCC).”
I believe the oil sands are larger resources than Saudi – more than 500B bbls. We’ll be sliding into the next ice age before we could produce it all.
So these protesters are going to get there how? Well, if they are true to their cause then they will walk. Doing otherwise would be hypocritical.
I second that Ezra Levant’s book “Ethical Oil” is a good read and gives the reader another perspective on the issue than is usually presented by the media.
http://watch.bnn.ca/#clip348124
This is a typical example of the idiots taking over the asylum but watch it because this time there is more going on than meets the eye.
Fat chance we will watch hundreds of thousands of americans with their Obama buttons march on Washington.
Those who do are in desperate need of a lobotomy.
Gore of course backs the event and goes global to breath new life in the Global Warming hysteria but this time he will launch a frontal attack on climate skeptics, just watch his promotion trailer for that.
What worries me however is the fact that these calls for disobedience coincide with the budget negotiations where the GOP minority leader has offered to hand over the “Power of the Purse”
to Obama. The” Power of the Purse” is a formal Constitutional responsibility of Congress and handing over this control to the current President is getting as close to a Power Grab as we can get.
All Obama needs to introduce martial law is some public in the streets of Washington at the door of the White House and the Power Grab is a done deal before you know it..
http://modernsurvivalblog.com/security/a-view-of-martial-law/
For those of you who think the AGW doctrine is collapsing please wake up.
It’s just beginning and as I said, this time there is more to it than meets the eye.
The effect of the oil sands is felt out here in BC where I see many patients who work in camps in northern Alberta but live in Kamloops. I guess we’ll have to look at the “carbon footprint” of their flights to and from all of the communities that they live to Ft. McMurray. I’m told that the oil companies pick up the cost of their flights to and from their actual home every month.
What I can’t understand is why are we planning on sending oil to Texas to be refined? Wouldn’t it be far simpler to build refineries in Alberta in a location that isn’t subject to periodic hurricanes? Perhaps some of the commenters involved in the Alberta oil industry can clarify this.
The economics of using natural gas to provide the heat to extract oil from bitumen are interesting but I’m curious what the costs would be of using nuclear power to generate the steam instead. Presumably there’s a considerable capital cost to get the reactors built, but is it cheaper then over the lifetime of the reactors? My concern is that we’re using rather primitive technologies to extract the oil and it might be a good time to setup a nuclear industry in Alberta.
Living in S. central BC, I don’t see any opposition to building a pipeline across the province from Alberta. The majority of “environmentalists” here live in large cities whereas the people who actually live in the interior are well aware of the importance of resource extraction in creating wealth in the province. Incidentally, the Tides Foundation seems to be very involved in Vancouver civic politics, but locally Vancouver is seen as the moonbat capital of Canada. I’d prefer the oil to be kept in N. America to reduce N. American dependence on foreign oil, but I’m sure the Chinese are very interested in getting all of the oil they can.
Life long Albertan and oil & gas industry veteran here. 175 billion barrels of oil is really an outdated and grossly conservative figure for Alberta reserve size. There are reasonable estimates that all the oil-sands collectively may contain 2 Trillion bbls of oil in place. The 175billion i think is based on mineable (shallow) oil sands that are recoverable with the technology of the day. The truth is the vast majority of the oil in the oil sands is too deep to mine & must be drilled for. And, technology marches on so the maximum recoverable amount should be closer to 1.0 Tbl.
The counterpoints some have mentioned re NG fueling the extraction of the mined or drilled bitumen as beiing ‘counterproductive’ don’t reflect the real world situation of the massive NG reserves in Alberta and BC, the massive glut in NG production and the corresponding cheap prices make it the best option right now.
This all says nothing about Alberta’s currently booming conventional oil drilling industry….particularly with the redrilling of old zones like Cardium and Bakken. There are many 10’s of billions of barrels of high quality crude that were thought to be unrecoverable with the technology of the day. Jump ahead to 2011 and redrill these fields horizontally and stage frac them and in many cases the new wells are flowing 10 times what the original production rates were.
As to building another pipeline across BC to Prince Rupert….the natives will only moan about it until the monies they will receive reach a certain ‘threshold’…then it will be magically ok. Funny how that works eh?
“And don’t think that the Canadians will automatically find some other route to send their oil out to, say, China. Native tribes are doing a great job of blocking a proposed pipe to the Pacific.”
This is wishful thinking. Both Canadian railroad systems cross existing and proposed pipelines and run directly to Vancouver, western Canada’s largest port. Either railroad would profit handsomely leasing space for a pipeline. If worse came to worst, the railroads could run unit trains to the coast to deliver the oil.
aaaaay bruce:
wouldn’t burning all of the peat in the world lower the british isles and most of europe below sealevel.
just thinkin………
C
andy:
once the project is in action that “threshold” will majically rise.
its happened more than i can count.
C
I know I am preaching to the coure here, but if you Americans do not want our oil, there are plenty of countries that do. Maybe for the duration of this protest, we (Canada) should turn off the oil flowing to your countrie. Maybe that would help these intelectual peasents understand how important our oil is.
Woops… Choir not coure
Andy in Alberta —
Thanks for updating the estimate of recoverable oil in the sands. Although even burning 1.0 trillion barrels of oil instantaneously, doesn’t seem to yield anything close to McKibben’s 200 ppm increase in CO2.
I came upon a projection that pumping rates could reach as high as 3 million barrels per day, which translates to about 1 billion barrels per year. At that rate, it would take hundreds of years to fully exploit the fields. Can you comment on extraction rates, using your expertise in the area?
Fighting Climate change offers opportunity to boost African agriculture
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/indepth/2011-07/14/c_13985806.htm
[snip]
Judith Rodin, the president of Rockefeller Foundation, said fighting the effects of climate change could provide an opportunity for increasing investments into the agricultural, financial and medical sectors in a way that generates economic growth.
Note: the Rockefeller foundation financed Mckibben.
http://politicalcontext.org/sci-tech/2011/04/rockefellers-1sky-unveils-the-new-350-org-more-more-delusion/