Guest post by Steve Goreham
Originally published in The Washington Times
On Friday, the Department of State released a 2,000-page draft review of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline project. If approved, the pipeline will carry up to 830,000 barrels of oil per day from oil sands in Canada and the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota and Montana to Gulf Coast refineries. The review did not recommend approval of the pipeline, but raised no major objections, concluding that the project was “unlikely to have a substantial impact” on the climate or oil sands production. Nevertheless, the same-day outrage from liberal politicians and environmental groups was caustic.
The report found that the $3.3 billion Keystone XL project would create 42,100 US jobs during the two-year construction period. In addition to construction of the pipeline, new electrical transmission and power substations would be required. The project would generate an estimated $65 million in use and sales taxes for traversed states.
If approved, Gulf Coast facilities would refine more oil from Canada and the northern US and less from the Middle East. Keystone could potentially replace 45 percent of the oil imported from the Persian Gulf. At $90 per barrel, this would supplant $27 billion in annual payments to Saudi Arabia and Gulf Coast nations with payments to Canada and US citizens.
Van Jones, CNN contributor, raised fears of an oil leak, calling Keystone the “Obama pipeline” and saying that a leak “could be the worst oil disaster in American farmland history.” Proper environmental care must be taken, but Americans know how to build pipelines. The proposed 875-mile pipeline would add to the 55,000 miles of U.S. crude oil pipelines that have been operating for decades. The lower Great Plains region over the Ogallala aquifer is already crisscrossed by tens of thousands of miles of pipelines. The report concluded that potential oil leaks were unlikely to affect groundwater quality in four major aquifers.
However, oil leaks are a red herring issue. The keystone pipeline battle has always been about the ideology of Climatism, the belief that man-made greenhouse gases are destroying Earth’s climate. Proponents of the theory of man-made warming warn that mankind’s tiny contribution to a trace gas in our atmosphere, carbon dioxide, causes extreme hurricanes, droughts, floods, snowstorms, rising seas, polar bear extinction, and other projected calamities. Canadian oil sands have become a lightning rod for climate activism.
Congressional representative Henry Waxman issued a press release, stating “The draft impact statement appears to be seriously flawed. We don’t need this dirty oil. To stop climate change and the destructive storms, droughts, floods, and wildfires that we are already experiencing, we should be investing in clean energy, not building a pipeline that will speed the exploitation of Canada’s highly polluting tar sands.”
Greenpeace Executive Director Phil Radford said “…it’s just untrue that piping oil from the Tar Sands will not have a devastating impact on our climate. To fulfill his promise to the American people to address global warming, the President must say no to the Keystone Pipeline.” But the State Department draft review points out that Canadian oil sands will be mined, regardless of whether the pipeline is built or not.
The review estimates that if Keystone is not built, oil sands production will be only 0.4 to 0.6 percent less that if the pipeline is built, or less than 0.83 million metric tons of CO2-equivalent emissions annually. This difference equates to less than two hours of U.S. emissions, a negligible amount. Seventy-four million US housecats annually cause an estimated 196 times this emissions volume. Why isn’t Greenpeace urging President Obama to ban cats?
If not through Keystone, mined oil will be transported by rail, truck, or planned pipelines in Canada. Last month, the China Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) completed the purchase of Nexen, a major producer of oil from Canadian sands, for $15 billion. CNOOC would not have purchased Nexen without assurance by the Canadian government that the oil can be harvested.
Mr. President, it’s your decision. On one side is the common-sense choice of more jobs, economic growth, reduced dependence on Mideast oil, and a negligible increase in greenhouse gas emissions. On the other side is Climatist ideology. Which will you choose?
Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the new book The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.
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Why isn’t Greenpeace urging President Obama to ban cats?
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They can ban my cats when they pry them outa my cold, dead hands!
Howdy Duke
“What good is an additional 830,000 BPD when refinery capacity has been in a steady decline since 1982…” I can see two elements.
1. The additional petroleum will have a downward influence on world market prices.
2. Regardless, I’d rather our balance of payments shift toward Canada and Mexico than continue to Saudi Arabia and other hostile nations.
The rate of population growth in North America is very small and our need for transport fuels grows slowly. We could use more refining capacity, I’m sure. Even more, we could use some rollback in stupid regulations that bottleneck our current capacity so badly.
Ian H (at 4:25 am above) chides the previous commentors for making possibly unjustified predictions of global cooling.
Yes and no. While climate is reasonably modeled as a chaotic system which could go up as easily as down, the principle of ‘regression to the mean’ does affect the odds. If you believe (as most do) that the climate has warmed some and that it’s not ALL an artifact of bad measurements and overly aggressive ‘adjustments’, then the recent warming is a deflection upwards. To the extent that the upward deflection was random rather than systemic, it is unlikely that the random factors will exactly repeat and less likely that they will align even further in the upward direction.
Catastrophic dogma…no wonder nothing gets resolved.
Reading Izen and Turchynsky just makes me shake my head. Wishful thinking and demagoguery have their place, I suppose. But reality should intrude sooner or later. The Oil Sands are the size of Scotland? Well, the developed part is about the acreage of Toronto, and I don’t see Greenpeace chaining itself to the CN Tower until someone comes up with a reclamation plan for the greater Toronto area.
I was working in the environmental assessment side of things in the oil sands in the mid 1970s, with the objective of assessing baseline conditions so that we would know what it all had to be returned to. The EIA work we did at the time stands up to scrutiny today. So does the actual reclamation of mined out areas. Turchynsky’s polemic is unburdened by facts on the ground.
Reality? North Americans depend on oil and gas. The choices of whether some of that energy should come from the Middle East or North America have consequences, both environmental and geopolitical. We can deny reality, but we can’t avoid the consequences of denying reality.
Dave Turchynsky…I DONT HAVE ANY “KIDS”…so its YOUR PROBLEM not mine.
And you are “fuelling” YOUR problem BY HAVING “KIDS”. YOU are the responsible (or irresponsible and selfish) party here. Why the hell should the rest of us be deprived of anything for YOUR “kids”? You tell me.
Not that I suppose your armies of CO2 emitting, fuel using offspring are going to spend all their time in the Canadian industrial North.
What kind of idiot makes such facile “arguments”?
…BTW Dave Turchynsky…we dfont all share your 19th Century bourgoise outlook. In my opinion one of the most beautiful things on Earth is Bagger 288. I hope one day to see it in personand the work it can accomplish.
…BTW if the developed part is the size of Scotland, that doesn’t mean its big, it means that on the scale of the real world beyond the claustrophobic paramaters of an Environmentalists little minds its very, very small.
Forget the pipeline. Forget cats. If only we could harness the power of Manns jaw.
meowww
Dave Turchynsky,
Do you seriously think the country of Canada does not require the “tarsands” people to return the land to a pristine state? Seriously? That is showing so little faith in your Government. If that is the only issue you have with the “pipeline” why don’t you go talk to the people of the Government and make sure regulations are done correctly. I happen to know a thing or two about regulations and the first thing to remember is that companies nowdays in North America (excluding Mexico where we already get a large amount of oil ironically enough) are forced to return the land to a natural state. This is just a fact.
So instead of spreading lies about the regulations of Canada, perhaps you oughta take a trip up there yourself and see their “returned” land yourself? After they are done with it, the water is often cleaner and in this case a natural oil spill is cleaned up. What is NOT to like about this arrangement? I think you are either listening to the wrong people or you just don’t care to learn the truth, but you should stop scaring yourself with those lies and STOP repeating them. Think of the poor kitty cats after all…everytime someone lies on the internet, God kills a kitten, right?
I just got this in my inbox. The envoros are uusing a ‘federally protected invertebrate’ to try and stop the pipeline:
Dave Turchynsky says:
March 5, 2013 at 5:12 am
We don’t think it’s right to leave the largest toxic mess in human history to be cleaned up by future generations just so a few fat ass executives can abscond with extortionate profits.
Suncor Energy has made lots of folks money over the years. Not just “a few fat ass executives”. And abscond means to run away and hide as from the law so how did all the fine folks in the stock market make money if the “fat ass executives” took all the profits. Absconding with the profits would require a large conspirancy to accomplish.
And has been mentioned already the “toxic mess” is being cleaned up.
I saw a couple walking their 5 dogs the other day and i know they have 2 cats also. I bet they are members of greenpeace and sierra club.
If Obama says no I expect the “Mini Keystone XL” to be proposed. It will stop about 50 miles south of the border, use rail to bridge the gap and require no State department approval.
And eventually saner heads will rule and the gap will get closed.
EternalOptimist said:
March 5, 2013 at 12:22 pm
If only we could harness the power of Manns jaw.
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I believe the jawbone of an ass was used to good effect in the past.
Van Jones, CNN contributor, raised fears of an oil leak, calling Keystone the “Obama pipeline” and saying that a leak “could be the worst oil disaster in American farmland history.”
I am astounded that Van Jones has this level of credibility including a Job at CNN.
He was forced to resign as Green Jobs advisor from the administration after being exposed as a Communist and one who signed the petition accusing Bush as being involved in the 911 attacks.
He is quoted as saying:
“
I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th [1992], and then the verdicts came down on April 29th. By August, I was a communist. (…)
“
I met all these young radical people of color – I mean really radical: communists and anarchists. And it was, like, ‘This is what I need to be a part of.’ I spent the next ten years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary.”
These are the people attempting to stop the pipeline?
How do they get such influence with the MSM?
Since cats are bad for climate,we must ban them. ( from “An Inconvenient Pet”)
An example of CatAlGoracle thinking.
While environmental fat cats get rich from the donations of the converted, energy poverty still runs rampant in the developing world.
Those who support these kinds of “environmentalists” are anti-progress and anti-human, plain and simple.
A housecat named Princess who highly disliked her picture being taken.
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I think she just has a sceptical look on her face.
exponential mathematics is easy and requires basic formula. We are running out of fossil fuels. Our fresh water is declining. Our arable land is desertifying. Turns out the “oil reserves that will last hundreds of years into the future”, touted by the fossil fuel mogels, was based on former usage amounts and not factoring in exponential human population growth. We continue to blow toxins into our atmosphere and melt ice at increasing speeds. Yet some of us choose to listen to lay-people who work for corporations to provide science and mathematical formula. This is either naivete, or full-on fear. We have had effective reliable
contraception since 1964, but due to religion and unsustainable cultural scripts, our global population continues to soar. We must begin to face reality or we will destroy our own species along with increasing numbers of our fellow species. We have doubled our human population since 1950. Instead of throwing muscle behind developing alternative energies, and providing free and freely available contraception for all human beings,we continue to allow conventional greed and dysfunctional power structure to hold sway. We can not eat nor drink money. If the religious would stop fighting efforts to allow contraception to be free and freely available, we could slow down the use of finite natural resources. But as long as people believe
a god or gods will save our very special behinds from global collapse, we will not take responsibility for our self-induced problems. We might very well destroy our own species through greed and aggression, delusion, and hubris. Nature does not care what any of us think, or how any of us feel.