As he heads into his final few years as president, Obama seems to be finally taking a stand on a few things. He is going to veto the Keystone XL Pipeline. Hooray!
Mother Jones has a smart summary of why Keystone was a bad idea…economically. We knew it was a terrible idea for the environment, but people only seem to pay attention when it’s about money.
At issue on Keystone is not American oil, it is Canadian oil that is drawn out of tar sands in Canada. That oil currently is being shipped through rail or trucks, and it would save Canadian oil companies and the Canadian oil industry an enormous amount of money if they could simply pipe it all the way through the United State down to the Gulf. Once that oil gets to the Gulf, it is then entering into the world market and it would be sold all around the world… There is very little impact, nominal impact, on US gas prices, what the average American consumer cares about, by having this pipeline come through.
And sometimes the way this gets sold is, let’s get this oil and it’s going to come here and the implication is that’s gonna lower oil prices here in the US It’s not. There’s a global oil market. It’s very good for Canadian oil companies and it’s good for the Canadian oil industry, but it’s not going to be a huge benefit to US consumers. It’s not even going to be a nominal benefit to US consumers.
Not to mention that it’s a leaky tube of poisonous death rammed through the center of American agriculture, contributing further to our habit of spewing fossil carbon into our atmosphere.
Oil Spill Contaminates Montana Town’s Water Supply, EPA Says
@Reginald Selkirk #1: Just more proof the EPA is trouble!
Yeah its all about America. Fuck your neighbours. You are so good at it.
I think Alberta is doing a fantastic job of fucking itself, and doesn’t need our help at all.
When I first saw this story I just knew that there would be comments moaning about how this fucks us over in Canada. Not surprised it only took three comments.
OK… I’m confused (not an uncommon occurrence these days).
Both of the cited reports are old – the Mother Jones one is from December last year, and the CBS one is from 2012. So why the sudden rejoicing?
You frackers dare pointing fingers at us?
imnotspecial – I’m an Albertan, and fuck Keystone XL. We need to ween ourselves off of this dependence on the tarsands in particular and oil in general. The price of oil has plummetted world wide and we’re paying the price now for that lack of economic diversity. Keystone being approved isn’t going to change that.
I’m not sure what ‘imnotspecial’ is going on about, however, the Keystone pipeline has always been environmentally a horrible idea. Put a pipeline across the major aquifer providing water for American agriculture (which helps in feeding the world), I think not. A pipeline that creates fewer than 60 permanent jobs along its route, that’ll help unemployment- sure. A pipeline that sends very ‘dirty’ oil to Asia- gee, where in the world is environmental pollution the worst? The proponents touted this as a good idea through an endless series of lies because it did benefit investors of one oil company.
It was never “all about America.” It is about environmental concerns versus benefits: harm to American agriculture with the ‘value added’ increase in Asian pollution. America takes a major environmental risk for no real benefit and definite detriments, Asia gains energy but also more pollution, the world has more pollution and an oil company makes money.
The excerpt above is from a Think Progress article dated January 20, 2015. Link.
More info, dated January 6, 2015: Think Progress link.
Yes there are environmental concerns which I share, but the US has increased their production so much that oil prices have cratered. Oil is oil. Alberta oil is not dirty, the production of it might be somewhat worse environmentally speaking.
It’s also not about jobs. If the world would not want the oil, nobody would take it out and ship it.
There is something seriously wrong with the oil if it isn’t simply being sold directly to the USA market. Why would they pipe it right through the industrialized agriculture and automobile chugging heart of America, past refineries, and out into the less-rich world?
Seriously, any Canadian who thinks that this is America stifling Canada, well, it isn’t.
Then stop acting so personally wounded and special, “imnotspecial.” This is not a US vs. Canada concern. Jeez. This is a human environmental and economic concern. The pipeline is a disaster for *humans* who are not the corporate profiteers who would benefit from it. That it is not going to happen is a *good* thing. For you in Canada, and for us in the US. And for *humans* who need breathable air and potable water.
Simply because an industry would putatively “create jobs” does not mean that we are morally obligated to let those jobs be created regardless of the human or environmental consequences.
I’m disheartened to see this turned into a ginned up political tribalism fight. Please don’t.
Us? You speak for Canadians now? Tabby Lavalamp is Canadian, I am Canadian, and I really do not want someone that thinks “Your country does environmentally bad things too” is a particularly compelling argument for a pipeline speaking for me. Have you been here before? PZ and the commitariat here have generally not been all that friendly to fracking, so I am not sure why you think that is even relevant.
@imnotspecial #11:
If the world is so keen on your oil, build your own pipeline and send it over the beautiful Rocky Mountains to the Pacific terminal of lovely Vancouver.
“Might be somewhat worse”? Dude, you need to look at that a lot more closely. Getting it out is bad, moving its highly toxic and hard to clean up sludge is dangerous to people, water supplies, and agricultural lands, and almost none of the fucking money will end up in any hands but the richest few Albertans. Throw in the increasingly obvious climate change, and the need to keep those old dinos IN THE FUCKING GROUND SO AS NOT TO DESTROY OUR ONLY FUCKING HOME YOU ALMIGHTY PILLOCK, and only the most purblind liberturdian could fail to figure this out.
Oh, and ftr, also proudly a citizen of Soviet Canuckistan. Fuck Keystone, and fuck the planet-destroying fossil fuel criminals.
Okay guys you need to settle down a bit. I was just messing with PZ . He made the point that the only benefit of the pipeline would be to Canadians. My response, Oh yeah. Why with all of a sudden so xenophopic?
The only way we can reduce oil consumption is through alternative energy and less driving and flying and pleasure boating. That’s second idea is probably not going to be adopted.
Troll.
That is called trolling, and is frowned upon.
That is your inane view of what he said. You aren’t doing anything useful here, so why continue?
And fuck Harper who wants us to take us back to the hewers-of-wood and drawers-of-water economy that for a few decades it looked like we might climb out of. Now with the price of oil down, Alberta is like a big one-company* town when the market for that company’s product goes south. I hold out some hope that cheap oil and a low loonie (the high exchange rates of recent years being supported by Alberta oil exports) will at least be good for Ontario manufacturing (what little hasn’t been off-shored).
*OK, they got agriculture, too.
Because saying only Canadians benefit from a
potentiallymajor environmental disaster is xenophobia? Huh. And here I thought it was just PZ’s usual slightly sardonic style at work.Also, Alberta oil is not dirty – it’s just that the production of it might be somewhat worse environmentally speaking. Wow, you really do learn something new every day!
Or, no. I just learned again that the world is full of stupid and ignorant people.
*sigh*
(PS Technically I’m still Canadian, and I say fuck that pipeline shit.)
Robert (#15)
That, sadly, is plan B:
https://www.wildernesscommittee.org/kindermorgan
A pipeline is a single-use form of transport, and pretty much point-to-point. This pipeline would be used to take one thing from one place to another.
A road-based system, or a rail-based system, could be used by other people for other cargoes at the same time.
This news isn’t really surprising though, is it? Obama campaigned as an environmentalist, and that’s one of the things that he hasn’t backpedaled on over the past 7 years.Stephen Harper’s base is very strong in Alberta, his campaign which got him into power was funded by $2,000,000 in donations from big oil (Canada doesn’t have PACs nor SuperPACs), and Harper’s stance has long been anti-environmentalism. And I’ve heard American pundits predict Keystone to be the first likely order of business from the new Republican Senate, and Obama’s first veto, since before the New Year.
Sadly, it seems that what will likely happen is that the Republicans will just wait until the next Presidential term, where they hope one of their 15-20 members jockeying for position gets in instead. Canada does have another federal election planned for this year, but more than a few predictions have Harper winning a minority government.
@24: a rail-based system
…which worked out so well for the folks in Lac Megantic, QC, didn’t it? *If* you’ve got a liquid commodity to ship in large quantities, pipelines might very well be the safest way to get it there. The keyword there is “if”, not “how”.
fail asshole is fail.
uh, that drop in oil prices is coming from the ME underselling their own oil. mostly as a thumb in the eye to BOTH the US and Russia.
it’s got FUCK ALL to do with US production, which, btw, is ALREADY on the decline.
so much destruction in so little time.
Alberta oil is not “more dirty” than any other oil.
Alberta Tar Sands, on the other hand, is monumentally dirty, and the process of getting that “not more dirty” oil out of them thar Tar Sands is monumentally dirty.
Quite a bit worse than fracking, if one insists on a comparison, other than the location of the resource being further away from vulnerable population centers than in some cases of the cases of fracking. (Though the way Fort McMurray has been growing, not necessarily for much longer)
I wonder why the terrorists haven’t targeted the thousands of miles of existing pipes already. Seems like a no brainer to me. Terrorist, no brainer. See what I did there?
A pipeline IS safer than trucking or using rail, to transport said oil over the same route.
But the question would be, why use that route, through the heartland of American agriculture, and even before asking that one about the route, do we really want to be transported said oil from point A to that particular point B in the first place?
Alberta and BC could just as easily collaborate to build a pipeline to Vancouver and ship the oil overseas from there. Then the few thousand odd local jobs that would have gone to Americans in the building and maintenance of the pipeline would stay in Canada.
Or even build a pipeline to Houston through a different route that doesn’t go through so many environmentally vulnerable and vital areas…. (Who knows what kind of horsetrading went on behind the scenes to set the Keystone route in the first place?)
We’re being subjected to many Kinder Morgan commercials every evening here in BC. They show employees talking about how good and kind they are to their local communities, and how good their saftey record is… actually, they’re even less honest than that dishonest claim. They simply state that they’re going to continue their great safety record, but their safety record is not great at all. They’ve had multiple spills of hundreds of thousands of liters. In one case they got alarms which were set off when a spill occurred but ignored them for hours until finally the fourth alarm got someone to decide it was worth investigating (90,000 liters that time). In Burnaby (a suburb of Vancouver) 50 houses had to be evacuated when a construction crew hit a Kinder Morgan pipeline that wasn’t mapped accurately and over 200,000 liters of crude flooded a neighborhood.
Despite promising to make info available to governments, K-M has refused to provide requested info to the BC government.
Enbridge is also trying to build a pipeline across northern BC, with similar sweetness and light commercials.
Speaking as a Canadian, this is a good thing. Pipelines are disastrous for the environment. And the tar sands were a bad choice for Alberta and the federal government to hitch their wagons to.
Meanwhile, here in BC, we’re still working on shutting down on Northern Gateway and its cousins. The risk of piping Alberta oil is not worth the small amount of BC jobs the pipeline offers.
My only concern is this. The oil already moves through the U.S., only by rail and by truck. My understanding is that truck and train transport are far worse in terms of human death and property destruction than pipelines and that trucks, but not trains, are worse than pipelines in terms of amount of oil spilled (though train spills are on the rise). Interestingly, pipelines are worse than either trucks or trains in terms of damage to aquatic habitat. It seems that if pipelines could be made more reliable (they seem to leak a lot thanks to corrosion), then they’d be the best way to go. The other trouble is that the oil coming out of Canada is, if I understand correctly being transported by train along aquatic habitats, so the risk of spills affecting aquatic species is still quite high. Pipelines do seem to have less CO2 impact, though that seems to be up for debate. In essence, the cost to the environment is a wash because bad stuff happens with all modes of transport. The real decision will come down to politics as usual, which is unfortunate, because there is an opportunity to do things better than in the past and no one seems to care to capitalize on that.
There’s a reason Alberta is also referred to as Texas North; same source of money, same toxic politics, same damn hairstyles. Hell, everyone’s favourite Texan – Ted Cruz – is Albertan.
There’s also a disturbing trend of north-texans buying land on vancouver island in the forested rural mountains and immediately clear-cutting the trees and flattening the land with massive earthworks. Why buy ‘kin mountain-forest and try to turn it into flat blasted heath?
The technology that made it possible to do multiple fracs in horizontal wells* was developed by Packers Plus of Calgary, so calling USAmericans frackers is more than a bit disingenuous.
*Hydraulic fracturing of vertical wells has been going on for years without much controversy. The new ability to recover hydrocarbons from extremely low permeability formations has brought the industry into regions where it hasn’t been before and on a much larger scale. Also, since instead of one or two frac jobs per well, there may be as many as 20, the process goes on for days and uses huge amounts of fluid, mostly water.
caseyrock
With good oversight and regulation pipelines are quite safe and as environmentally friendly as a method moving large quantities of hydrocarbons can get. The likely of good oversight and regulation happening in the land of freedumb is unfortunately small. And Stephen Harper is dead set on us overtaking the USA in the race back to the 19th century.
Citation? Trucks would mostly cause spills due to accidents? Same with trains, I would think. The roads and rails are already built, although now you’re burning a lot of fossil fuels to deliver more fossil fuels. (but how much more than the pumps on a pipeline?)
Huh. That’s a strange response. In what way is reluctance to spend large amounts of money that a) gets one no net benefit to onself, and b) only gives a gratuitous benefit to an already wealthy nation condemnable? I’m not gonna buy my neighbour an extra TV for them. They’re perfectly nice people, etc, but fuck that.
I’m an Albertan who’s worked in the tar sands, and fortunately got out before deciding to drive off of a cliff. I’d invite anyone who says that it’s not polluting to go work a couple shifts up there. You’ll make a great deal of money, and you’ll get to watch the dense green boreal get converted into literal sand dunes and rainbow tailings ponds. If that doesn’t convince you, maybe the giant mutated tar sands beetles dying everywhere might convince you.
Good job, Obama, and, from an Albertan? Thank you. You don’t need that evil spine running through the core of your country.
How would Stephen Harper get to head a minority government? From his party winning the largest fraction of the vote? Hasn’t anyone in Canada ever heard of coalitions between parties?
Of course PZ said no such thing. The citation he quoted explicitly mentions Canada and THE REST OF THE WORLD. I hope the irony of someone trolling about the myopia of Americans while simultaneously assuming that references to “not America” must automatically mean just his own country is not lost here….
There seems to be a great hesitance in doing this. There was an attempt to do it in 2008 by the NDP and Liberals but it failed to happen. A significant number of Canadians do not seem to understand how our parliamentary system works and considered it something akin to a coup. There has been recent talk of another attempt at a coalition, but right now Trudeau seems to be ruling it out, but who knows what will happen in the future.
I thought that was the original plan, horribly dangerous for the environment there – and was abandoned because of too much resistance from the locals (including, perhaps mostly, First Nations). But judging from the comments here, I may simply have confused it with several other plans that have not been abandoned.
I look forward to the cognitive dissonance between the Republicans desperate fixation on KXL as their big anti-Obama symbol and their “states rights/citizen’s rights/property owners rights!” rhetoric, which should in theory apply to the landowners in Nebraska. (Of course, they won’t care, because anti-Obama trumps anything resembling principle or belief with the Republicans. Never mind that good old midwestern Murricans are having their land stolen by a foreign corporation running roughshod over local governments, something the Republicans should be spitting nails over. This whips up the base against Obama, so it won’t matter.)
What.
Full disclosure: I come from a country whose natural state, alas, is an ever-so-slightly bizarre coalition of conservatives and Social Democrats.
“Not to mention that it’s a leaky tube of poisonous death rammed through the center of American agriculture”
But those are Red States, surely Jesus will protect them.
Meh, The low cost of oil might doom the project in any event. And, in any case, they can just keep shipping it south using trucks and trains because, God knows, those never have problems.
I really do not understand it. I am sure some just don’t want to see the Conservatives out of power, but I can only assume others are simply ignorant of how things work, and think that government should be formed by the party with the most seats, no matter how small that number is, because people did not vote for a coalition, or something like that.
The reluctance of Canadians to a coalition government has also puzzled me. In 2008, even Liberal and New Democrat supporters were opposed to it. Several told me “I hate Harper but he won the election fairly”. Sadly, this view has become ingrained in the psyche and it would be political suicide for a party leader to suggest it now (hence Trudeau’s dismissal of the possibility as Travis stated). Combined with our “first-past-the-post” election system and three major parties (four in Quebec), this means that we are rarely governed by a party that has the support of the majority of the electorate.
48, Travis,
Errrr …
You do realise most of us know how our government works and that coalitions are par for the course? Going into an election we know exactly which parties are going to align under what circumstances.
50, Sili
Are you confusing minority governments, which indeed have been common recently, with coalition governments? I believe there has only been one coalition government at the federal level, during WW 2 (I believe Ontario had one about 20 years ago as well and perhaps other provinces). So I have to side with Travis on this one, I don’t think most Canadians understand the election rules.
Are you talking about Canada? Coalitions are not par for the course here at all, there has only been a single coalition government since Confederation, The Union Government 1917-1920. There have been a couple at the provincial level, but that is it.
Right, I got the wrong war for the Union government. Thanks for the update Travis.
joe321, I think you are thinking of the “National Government” label the Conservatives ran under in 1940, but that did not pan out at all, it was really just the Tories, and the Liberals won a large majority.
Citation of pipeline safety, from the Fraser Institute which is a mouthpiece of the oil industry and is thus heavily pro-pipeline:
http://www.fraserinstitute.org/uploadedFiles/fraser-ca/Content/research-news/research/publications/intermodal-safety-in-the-transport-of-oil.pdf
Between rail, truck, and pipelines, truck is the worst on pretty much every axis.
Between rail and pipelines, pipelines kill fewer people in incidents per billion ton-mile of oil delivered. But, they leak much more volume. The executive summary says they have fewer leak incidents per billion ton-mile, so pipelines are the bestest, but doesn’t explain why we should care about the number of incidents. The conclusion is more honest and mentions that it’s unclear between the two which is best, it depends on the metric.
Unspoken is the number of deaths per billion ton-miles of oil that we ended up not needing because we switched to a less oil-intensive economy. Every discussion about pipeline versus rail tends to assume that we *must* burn every drop of oil that oil companies can produce. But in fact, we *must not* burn all the oil. Rather than spending big bucks building pipelines, we could spend equal sums avoiding oil use, and we’d be ahead on all counts.
@joe321
Or math – in the last election, even though the conservatives won a majority, the majority of the population voted against them and to the left of them since their are no non-fringe political parties to the right of the conservatives. In spite of this most people (perhaps as an Albertan my sample is biased) seem to think Harper was elected by a majority. If the the Conservatives won the largest number of seats, then an even larger majority than before voted against and to the left of the Conservatives. In that situation, an NDP-Liberal coalition would be very representative of the majority. Even an NDP-Conservative coalition would be close to representative.
I live in Canada and intermittently work on engineering aspects of pipeline projects. Oil has got to go and be replaced by alternative / renewable energy sources. The conversion of our fossil-fuel based economy into a renewable-based economy could spur huge economic and technological growth. The powers-that-be obviously fight this to the detriment of all and degradation of the biosphere. The argument over which is better, pipelines or trains/trucks is irrelevant and misses the point. Hydrocarbons need to stay in the ground where they cannot pollute the atmosphere.
I don’t understand our reluctance for coalition governments either. I was rooting for a coalition in 2008 and was sadly disappointed when it did not happen. Harper sucks ass and is is a fascist wannabe and anti-science.
Agreed militant. This situation is primarily a consequence of our first-past-the-post method or choosing our members of parliament. If any thought went into this when it was established, the thinking probably was that this made stronger (i.e., majority) governments more probable. Personally, I think minority governments forces more responsible governance.
On another issue, Travis prompted me to review old election results. An interesting result was the 1925 election where the incumbent Liberals won 100 seats to 115 for the Conservatives, but the Prime Minister (Mackenzie King) refused to relinquish power since he had sufficient support of some other opposition parties.
I grew up in Wood River, Illinois, which I noticed was on the map which Rachael Maddow posted on her show. According to that map, it looked like some of the oil was proposed to be piped to Wood River, which makes sense, since there are several refineries in that little town next to the Mississippi river.
Let me tell you about growing up there. My home was surrounded by Shell Oil, Amoco Oil, Sinclair Oil (later changed the name to Clark Oil), an ammunition factory, a glassworks, a steel factory and several chemical plants.
The night sky was always lit up by the flames burning off fumes from the refineries. The water from our faucets often had a strange smell and a metallic taste. The smell in the air was strong and constantly irritating.
When I started commuting to college across the river in Missouri, I would kiss my boyfriend and he could smell the factories on my breath. I now suffer from autoimmune issues, and I know of some of my peers from that area who also have them, so I wonder if growing up in that environment may have caused them.
Of course, I’m more lucky than some. My cousin’s little girl battled leukemia, which may have been caused by benzene in the environment. There have been an inordinate number of my classmates who have died young from various cancers. One of my classmates died a horrible death when he fell into a vat of chemicals while working at one of the refineries.
There have been a number of cases of leaks from the refineries being detected in the basements of homes in the surrounding communities. The home of a friend’s parents blew up before the leak was detected.
I know from firsthand experience what it is like to grow up awash in the pollutants caused by oil refineries. I don’t want to see more generations harmed by it in Wood River, or anywhere else.
Oh yeah, pipelines. I apologize to non-Canadians for the digression!
A couple of points that I think haven’t been addressed yet:
1) My understanding as to why no pipeline to BC is twofold: getting over or through the mountains is difficult/expensive and First Nations don’t want it going through their land. From what I’ve heard the second is more difficult to overcome at this point.
2) The oil would be refined on the Gulf Coast, so it isn’t going overseas to be refined. This accounts for most of the roughly 60 American jobs created by this boondoggle.
3) There are a fair number of pipelines passing through the potentially effected area already, one more probably won’t add a lot of threat.
4) It is passing almost exclusively through red states, so at least it will be the people that want it that will suffer from any negative externalities.
5) With SA flooding the market and oil in the $50/barrel range the project makes little economic sense.
6) Already mentioned, if extracted it will be shipped to the Gulf Coast for refining anyway and a pipeline is safer and will have overall less environmental impact (if CO2 is accounted for) than rail or truck. Of course this means that most of those whopping 60 jobs for this boondoggle will accrue here regardless of whether the pipeline is built.
7) Oil is fungible, so wherever it is produced and refined the effect on price will be the same. American prices will be no more effected than global prices regardless of where it is refined.
8) This does put the Republicans in a bad place politically that can be taken advantage of in 2016. The pipeline is at best a very marginal economic good (ignoring environmental costs etc). Meanwhile, it thrashes all of their supposed concerns over imminent domain. This project requires confiscation of private property well below the price that would be asked to transfer land and easements to a foreign private company. This could be a very effective bludgeon to use against the supposed fiscal conservative in a year or so when the presidential campaign is well underway.
9) As far as environmental concerns go, even concerns strictly within the US, this doesn’t hit the top 20.
To be clear, I in no way support the pipeline, but it is a low intensity issue for me.
i think those who think that eminent domain would put the republicans in a difficult position are making an error. the error is believing that they have to be consistent in order to appeal to voters. all current evidence suggests that they do not need to be. i mean, yesterday, Obama was half-white after they’ve been saying that he was trying to start a race war for years. that’s not even counting the fact that many of Obama’s big plans (the ACA, for example) started life as republican state-level plans.
As for the federal-level Canadian politics, here are a few bits of info:
1) Coalition governments are exceptionally rare, happening only in times of national crisis, i.e. War, or other.
2) Minority governments are common in Canadian history, in fact, most of the best legislation (e.g. – national health care) was passed by minority governments when their minor partners forced them to.
3) The first two Harper governments were minority governments. That is why Harper was not able to push his full agenda through — it would have been defeated. The NDP, Bloc, and Liberals had more seats altogether, but policy differences and leadership vacuums stopped the three parties from co-operating to form a national government.
4) In 2008, the NDP and Liberals were about to defeat a Conservative budget and take over the government, and the public were read. And then that EVIL fucker Harper persuaded the Governor-General of the time, Michealle Jean, to prorogue, that is, suspend Parliament. (What did he threaten her with, I wonder? Because this was not a national crisis, this was normal politics, a minority government being defeated by two numerically-larger parties.) )This was a HORRIBLE, ANTIDEMOCRATIC precedent. When Harper called Parliament back, the politics had changed and the NDP/Liberal couldn’t cooperate.
5) The majority government that Harper finally got happened only because the leaders of the NDP and Liberals could not cooperate on things like not splitting the vote in ridings where a single NDP or Liberal candidate would have easily beaten a Conservative. I hate them for this.
6) And that is my current nightmare: that though Harper cannot break 37% in the popular vote, the NDP/Liberals, in their egotism, will not cooperate and will give that bastard Harper another government.
magistramarla – I grew up not 20 miles from you – I know that smell. Ours was not as bad, but steel mill pollutants in the air and Superfund grounds. It’s hard to understand how all-pervasive that stuff can be to anyone who hasn’t spent time in it. It’s not an acceptable cost of doing business, not if there are any alternatives.
IMHO about the most useless and dead-end thing you can do with oil is burn it. There are literally thousands of useful things, from paints and plastics to pharmaceuticals, that are somewhere between difficult and nigh under impossible produce without oil. Assuming we make it that far, long after we have shifted away from burning things to create energy to solar or fusion, or whatever, we will still need those things petroleum can most easily be used to make.
In that context, I see no advantage to racing to plunder and burn all the oil we can manage to lay out hand on. If we burn the oil from oil sands now it will soon be gone. This is stuff that is costly to extract, destructive to ship, and once burned it is gone forever.
I don’t think presidential spine growth is dependent on the length of time. GW didn’t grow a spine after 8 years, and given his disappearing act since he left office I suspect he still doesn’t have one. I think it’s more that Obama has the opportunity now to show some spine…sort of. He won’t be running again in 2 years, so he can push for anything he wants. Most of it won’t happen anyway. He can also attempt to block things, like Keystone. Though he might veto Keystone, there’s a chance Congress will override that veto, and others he might hand down. The Democrats in Congress are not more cohesive than the Republicans. Lots of Democrats will fear standing in the way of it, and some will openly support it.
@63: Much though I would have preferred to see a Lib/NDP coalition (and ever more so, as Harper continues his thuggishly theocon ways), I don’t think the GG could have done otherwise. While legally she may have had the power, I think we are used to seeing the monarchy as a ceremonial figurehead, and actually wielding that power would have brought on a backlash against an unelected Head of State interfering in democratic politics. Which is why, along with some form of proportional rep, we also need to look at reforming the role of the monarchy in Canadian politics (but that’s a can of worms that I can’t see anyone opening, any time soon).
He knew two years ago that he wouldn’t be running again. What took him so long?
grewgills@61:
The BC pipelines (there are two) are both tied up with major public opposition from both first nations and (what’s the gentle word for non-first-nations). The BC liberals never saw a way to despoil the environment they didn’t like, but the pipelines are still in trouble. The main eastward pipeline project also faces vocal opposition in Quebec and New Brunswick (and maybe in Ontario? Seems muted there).
The major problem of the pipelines is that they both reduce the cost of tar sands bitumen by $5-10/barrel, and increase capacity over what rail can ever do. The former means more oil becomes economically viable, the latter means it can be brought out faster. Today, the oil price is low; this is a shocking new development. It probably won’t be too long before the oil price zooms up again, since we haven’t exactly figured out how to eliminate oil from our economy yet. So the pipelines are viable on the medium term. The immediate economic pressure is reduced, but I bet not even that much: long-term contracts to deliver oil have been signed, and the oil companies would use pipelines to satisfy those contracts if they could, since it saves them money. New projects to increase capacity were already going on hold for lack of pipeline capacity; now they’ll be stopped for lack of economic viability, to be restarted in a few years.
A pipeline is not clearly safer, as I mentioned. Fewer people die directly in accidents, but much more oil is spilled compared to rail (trucks are horrible on all counts). The only way to win the safety game is not to play.
What are these 20 worse issues that you would prefer we talk about? This single project involves deforestation and habitat destruction, toxic emissions into air and watersheds, particulate emissions when the oil is burned, and aggravating global warming. If you care about any of those issues, then the pipeline should be on your radar, as should many others — you don’t avoid environmental problems by stopping a single project, but by stopping many.
Two brief comments:
-If Obama blocks the pipeline it is a gift to the Tories. Harper is now our man standing up to American interference.
-an eastern pipeline makes some sense. We are a net oil producer but the east of the country runs on imported Algerian oil. Eastern Canada is much more geologically stable than BC, so the risk of spills is a lot lower.
I was at a public meeting where Elizabeth May (head of Green party, one seat in the house of commons) was lukewarmly positive about this idea.
Sorry American readers for the derailing.
@ck 62
Inconsistency is a virtual requirement to appeal to base voters. That inconsistency can be used to win over the moderate voters required to win the presidency. Some Supreme Court slots are coming up soon, so winning the presidency is of paramount importance in the near term.
@numerobis 69
The reduced cost will be taken care of with increasing prices in the future when SA goes back to normal levels of production. I don’t see the long term capacity much affected by this pipeline.
As for 20 issues:
I don’t see this particular pipeline as a major contributor to any global issue. It won’t much effect global supply or price, so it is mostly a local issue for the places the pipeline runs through. I don’t see any old growth forest in the line of its US passage. If some pine trees are cut, others will be planted.
With that in mind here’s 20 more or less off the top of my head in no particular order*:
1) global climate change
2) ocean acidification
3) massive deforestation in the Americas, particularly South America
4) massive deforestation in Asia and the Pacific
5) Chinese manufacturing waste (largely offshored Western pollution)
6) economic instability in Africa, primarily sub-Saharan Africa leading to massive habitat loss
7) the ecological burden of increasing population
8) terrible fisheries management almost everywhere, but particularly in the Pacific
9) coastal and continental shelf oil exploration and drilling
10) fracking
11) coastal ecosystem loss due to building and farming
12) agricultural and manufacturing contamination of inland and near shore waterways
13) depletion of water by agriculture and increased populations in areas that cannot sustain them naturally
14) power companies sabotaging personal renewables like home solar and wind installations
15) factory farming
16) offshoring of genetic crop research to avoid safety protocols of developed nations
17) offshore (as opposed to offshored) waste dumping
18) virtually all of my local beaches having hotels built on them with the associated run off and increased usage that destroys the reef communities in those areas
19) the lack of effective recycling and watertable management on our small specks of land here in the middle of the Pacific
20) massive local opposition to rail to reduce the effect of about 1 million cars on my ~26 mile x 40 mile home in the middle of the Pacific.
I could add at least another half dozen local environmental issues that are of more concern to me.
Not numbered, but the loss of biodiversity due to several of the above practices.
* several of these are humanitarian concerns as well, but I am focusing for now on their environmental impacts
Not that I’m for Keystone in any way, but just so’s ya know…
…that Canadian tar sands oil is coming here already anyway. On our nice safe rail infrastructure. In nice safe railcars.
Railcars that weren’t designed to handle it.
It’s coming through right to the Richmond, CA Chevron refinery via tracks a couple of blocks from my house… tracks that go right along the shore of scenic San Francisco/San Pablo Bay.
So there’s still a problem.
(along the shore after having crossed a bridge after having traveled through the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta. Where a lot of our stuff is grown.)
Harper is not concerned about alot of stuff because Jesus is returning soon.
Um… wasn’t this the pipeline where the engineers in charge of the designs came out and said it was a virtual certainty — more than 90% probability — that there would be a significant leak (as in “enough comes out to create a great big toxic area”) somewhere along the way within the first ten years? I’m quite certain I read something like that months back, around the time Obama was explicitly and deliberately spending a day golfing with oil executives instead of meeting with protestors as he had suggested he might… which is why I’m sure something about this report is wrong.
carlie @#68
Mid-terms
robro – Oh. Well, that really worked out great for him.
Let me know when Obama restarts research into IFR, LFTR, and other next-gen nuclear reactors, and starts building a shitton of conventional LWRs, plus add a bunch of dollars to research into synthetic hydrocarbons from atmospheric or ocean CO2. Because that’s the best and IMHO only plausible solution we have.
I have to say that I am dismayed – not by the fall of keystone, but rather by PZ & the other commenter’s here apparent elation – most of whom are normally quite rational individuals – to what is nothing more than a complete and utter environmental loss.
The reality of keystone is that this “victory” means nothing. The past four years have been an experiment for what a keystone XL-free world looks like, and in that four years we’ve seen the Alberta oilsands growth accelerate, not slow down, with production nearly doubling over that time. Every oil company met, or exceeded, its growth expectations despite the delays in XL. World oil consumption is up, US oil consumption is UP, CO2 emissions are up. The absence of this pipeline is, and will continue to be, a total irrelevancy in regards to humanities environmental impact.
And all that extra oil flows south, to the same refineries that XL was going to service. The sole difference being that the oil travelled instead on old pipelines – most over 50 years old – and by rail. Both of those are known to be far more prone to spills than modern pipelines. So not only does cancelling keystone not mean a thing in terms of production, it also ensures that oil will continue to flow south via transportation route more likely to cause spills than a modern pipeline. In other words, there was a choice between a bad option and a less bad option, and the environmental lobby chose to lobby for the worst of the two.
Imagine if instead all the effort put into blocking keystone had gone into something actually meaningful – a few cents per barrel tax on crude entering US refineries, with the resulting funds directed at development and commercialization of 2nd and 3rd generation biofuels, for example. A few cents/barrel is far less than the daily fluctuations in crude prices, so there’d have been little impact at the pump. But that same near-invisible tax could have furnished billions of dollars per year to build and grow an industry that would replace oil and reduce the use of food sources for the production of green fuels. Instead, oil continues on and next-gen biofuels remain underfunded and underdeveloped.
Or they could have called for higher fuel efficiencies for the transportation industry, or an ending of coal export, or passed laws requiring that new power plants be built alongside an equal amount of renewable energy, or .
But hey, enjoy your meaningless victory. Me, I’m going to put my head on my desk and cry a little – both for yet another year with no movement forward on the environmental front, and for the apparent gullibility of those claiming to fight for the environment.
Enjoy your meaningless cry.
Apparently, my literary licence went over your head…now I really may cry
I think you mean literary ‘reference.’ Thus:
Nope, “literary licence” – a synonym (if colloquial terms can have synonyms) for poetic licence, artistic licence, etc, etc, etc. Essentially, stretching the truth a little for the purpose of emphasis & art.
Maybe that a concept/term not common in the US?
And maybe proper grammar is a concept foreign to my country. That last sentence should have read “Maybe that’s a concept/term not common in the US?
imnotspecial–
Why should the American government use eminent domain to seize private property from Americans to benefit a Canadian private enterprise?
And for American conservatives who support Keystone, how do you feel about the Kelo vs. New London decision? If confiscating private property for a private, for-profit enterprise is acceptable now, why wasn’t it then? Please show your work.
Comment 65. All of it.
Sili is not Canadian; he’s talking about Denmark.
Huh. They’re almost unimaginable where I come from; the idea seems to be that the opposition would shoot it down immediately. There was a minority government from 1970 to 1971 in an arrangement that was actually quite similar to a coalition, then the governing party called early elections – the slogan was to let them work –, and then it won those elections so thoroughly that it formed a majority government alone (another extremely rare occurrence).
There’s been a concentration government only once, in 1945, when the country was recreated and the ruins were still smoking. That means that all parliamentary parties (only three existed back then) participated in government.
What.
ImagingGeek: Imagine if instead all the effort put into blocking keystone had gone into something actually meaningful – a few cents per barrel tax on crude entering US refineries, with the resulting funds directed at development and commercialization of 2nd and 3rd generation biofuels, for example. A few cents/barrel is far less than the daily fluctuations in crude prices, so there’d have been little impact at the pump. But that same near-invisible tax could have furnished billions of dollars per year to build and grow an industry that would replace oil and reduce the use of food sources for the production of green fuels.
To our current Republicans, unfortunately, no tax increase is near-invisible — however small it might be. The same goes for interest rate increases. They’re already on record as dead-set against the president’s proposal to raise taxes on the wealthy (like always) and on banks, and they even oppose his plan to make community colleges free. (One railed against the federal government “taking over colleges.”)
When it comes to subsidies, they fight like tigers to keep the oil-industry subsidy going but generally block subsidies for alternative-energy research.
Blocking KXL is a symbolic victory, and as such not entirely worthless. I don’t doubt the oil will flow in older pipelines and by rail, absent KXL. But it should be more expensive therefore. And maybe the resulting spills will spur a backlash.
Grewgills:
You’re quite the asshole. http://www.popularresistance.org/calling-lakota-allies-to-defend-sacred-ground-from-kxl/
@David Marjanović 87
That was in reference to the possible nixing of commuter rail initially slated to connect West Oahu to Honolulu and planned to extend further with future development planned around rail stops to reduce commuter traffic and the associated gridlock and pollution.
@Iyeska 89
Given that personal insult is the first place you went with response, back atcha.
Yeah, I don’t understand what anyone would have against that.
And you have nothing to say about the point? Not even “oh, I managed to overlook that, sorry”?
Grewgills, if you’re going to say ignorant things here, you’re going to be called on it. Iyeska is a Lakota woman herself, so your statement that the pipeline would only inconvenience people who wanted it anyway, which she refuted with evidence of people fighting against the pipeline – along with a reasonable response, given your place in 400 years of North American whites ignoring First Nations people, when we weren’t just wiping them out body, mind, and culture.
Listen twice as much, and pronounce upon matters you don’t know about…well, never, if you want to avoid being treated ‘harshly’.
1675 cars per square mile does seem like alot.
imaginggeek #84:
Just a mistake on my part: I assumed you were making reference to the passage I quoted, since it fitted what you said so well, Pyrrhic victory, six years etc.
imaginggeek: the oil industry keeps complaining about lack of capacity constraining their growth. True they were able to grow a lot anyway, but all analysis I’ve seen is that pipelines would have allowed greater growth.
As for pipelines being cleaner, the oil industry claims otherwise, as I pointed out above: rail spills about half as much oil as pipelines do.
So go weep all by your lonesome, I’ll cheer.
grewgills:
The first three issues you think we really should be working on are all related to the pipelines project. Pipelines means increasing the amount and the rate at which we can recover oil, which of course we’ll burn (plus, the extraction itself emits a lot of CO2, because the energy used is largely produced with fossil fuels). And it means clearing forests, in the Americas.
So by your own argument, Keystone XL is related to what you say you care about.
We can’t oppose global warming and ocean acidification, but only in the abstract. We win by making progress on a thousand fronts.
@David Marjanović 91
The opposition voiced is that if rail is built more people will move out West and people on the North Shore are afraid that if building is begun rail will extend up there and it will become another suburb of Honolulu. I can sympathize with some of the keep the country country folks, but rail and focusing future development around rail lines will help congestion, reduce reluctance on cars, and will focus development along rail lines helping to keep some country country. With near 1 million people on a rock this size it is remarkable that we have any country left.
@nuberobis 96
The contribution of the pipeline to issues 1 and 2 is minimal. The oil will eventually be extracted, the pipeline will at most impact when. On issue 3, do you have evidence of any old growth forest it will pass through. So far as I have seen it is mostly passing through relatively new near monoculture forest. Even so, it wouldn’t be a large contributor. I think the project is a net negative, but a relatively small one. I’m happy enough to see it nixed, but I would rather see the limited political capital spent on something that would make a bigger difference.
@CatieCat,
Calling me an asshole isn’t going to get a reasoned response from me. It isn’t about my feelings or as so many here like to say my fee fees. I simply don’t care to engage constructively with people that don’t care to engage constructively with me. Feel free to shout me down for that, but if you do I won’t be engaging.
I’d like to see ‘political capital’ quantified. Just a bit. Then pricing for ‘bigger difference’ things we could afford in terms of our current ‘political capital budget.’ After all, it’s such a limited resource, every little bit of conservation helps. So what gives us the most bang for our political capital buck?
teehee
So, Grewgills, you’re a sea lion, then. Understood. And if your oh-so-civil questions happen to rest on eliminationist premises, no one’s allowed to call you an asshole for it, cause that’s worse than being an asshole.
Strange, I could swear I’ve heard that ‘logic’ before…oh right, every bigot ever, who says that calling out racism is a racist act. At least now I know who you stand with.
chigau @101: indeed, chance would be a fine thing.
@numerobis
Last I checked, the major cause of deforestation is clear cutting for additional farmland – not for space for pipelines. Clearing space for pipelines? That sounds ridiculously implausible, and I don’t feel the need to fact check that. Why would you need to clear that much forest for a pipeline? Why would you want to? It would be a waste of money to clear entire forests for a pipeline.
@CaitieCat 102
I didn’t ask a series of questions, I answered a question from numerobis @69. I haven’t pestered the person that responded to part of my answer. I haven’t followed them to another thread or anywhere else with questions or commentary. I have simply refused to engage them in argument or discussion. Either you have fantastically poor reading comprehension, you have no idea what a sea lion is beyond being something or someone you disagree with, or both. You then tacked on an implication of bigotry to your steaming pile of nothing, presumably thinking it strengthened your inane response. You’ve shown nothing in your comment other than smug sense of self righteousness. Feel free to continue this in the thunderdome, but I will be ignoring it.
@chigau 101
Congratulations on another content free comment. Do you win something after ten of them?
EnlightenmentLiberal #104:
Let’s say we need to go through a thousand Km of forest, and we need to clear a twenty–metre wide path through it. That’s 20,000 m² before we even think about access roads, maintenance facilities and all the rest.
Which part of this maths-for-11-yr-olds was ‘ridiculously implausible’?
Hey Grewgills. You’re on the wrong fucking blog, you useless douchenozzle. It’s against the rules to seize on the use of profanity or insult (not slurs) as an excuse to avoid addressing the substance of the remark containing said profanity/insult.
Deal with it or fuck off.
When I start to get long winded, I really need to just send up the Sally Signal, to get it said with more punch per word than I could ever manage. Thanks, Sally, as usual.
Oh my, some poster is having their fee-fees hurt due to “bad language”? What part of this is a rude blog don’t they understand? If you don’t want to be talked to in a rude fashion, take your posts somewhere else where gentle treatment is the norm.
Shucks, thank you CaitieCat! I actually have to say that using Twitter a lot has helped me improve my punch per word ratio. ;)
I’m @sallystrange if anyone cares to follow. I mostly RT cool things from other people.
@Daz 106
The proposed pipeline is ~1900km passing through NE Montana, central South Dakota, and Eastern Nebraska. All of the land it is passing through appears to be sparsely wooded with no apparent old growth forest. There are some issues with the pipeline, but deforestation isn’t a significant one of them. If someone is concerned about deforestation in the US, the Pacific Northwest is much more threatened. On a global scale, palm oil plantations in Indonesia are a deforestation threat many orders of magnitude greater and that is being done for the (nominally in this case) green cause of biofuels.
@Sally 107
If those rules are anywhere other than in your head I’d like to read them. I’ve searched the site and that doesn’t seem to be posted anywhere. Until then I’ll respond to the comments I choose to and ignore the ones I don’t. Have a lovely day.
Grewgills,
First of all, it’s not necessary for them to be written down for them to be real. They’s in my head, yes, but also in the heads of all the other commenters here. They are what you might call social norms. Another word for social norms is unwritten rules.
Second of all, the particular rules to which I’m referring are RIGHT FUCKING HERE. https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/rules/
Right at the top of the page on the left hand side.
It says:
The linked bolded text is something you DESPERATELY need to click on.
Thanks for this perfect demonstration of how cuss words and explicit insults are not at ALL necessary to be a rude, insulting asshole. Iyeska was right about you.
@Daz 106
20,000 m² is about 5 acres. A single medium sized housing development will routinely take out more. By contrast Indonesia lost 1,705,027 acres of forest annually from 2006 to 2010. The US at this point is slowly increasing forest cover. Unfortunately much of that is monoculture or near monocultures of pine, eucalyptus, and other forests grown to be harvested. On the bright side, that is replacing wood being harvested from other sources.
Another stat for scale, every year in the US disposable chopsticks imported from China cost ~76,000 trees (mostly cottonwood, birch and spruce). Assuming closest reasonable spacing (4’x6′), that is about 42 acres a year for disposable chopsticks from China in the US alone.
@Sally
I read the rules before I commented. You seem to have missed the “But aspire to be charitable at first” bit. I’m here to engage in interesting discussion on topics that interest me as a way to get away from the stresses of day to day life. I am not obligated or obliged to respond to anyone or anything that I don’t want to. Neither are you or is anyone else. As you said, “Deal with it or fuck off.”
All of this is off topic and should probably be moved to the thunderdome if you for some reason wish to continue.
Grewgills #111:
And at the point, you lost me. For starters you’ve managed to ignore two provinces in Canada, and for second I’m not concerned about deforestation specifically in the US.
You also might want to check the questions I was actually addressing.
I pointed why one would clear that much forest for a pipeline. The questioner seemed to have mistakenly assumed that a long strip of deforestation would be somehow less damaging than if the same area were stripped in a nearer-to-square shape, as useful for farming. (Not to mention that long clearings like roads are also more disruptive to animal migration.)
Grewgills #114:
As pointed out above, I was responding to a generalised question. I also used 1,000 Km as an easily-parsed figure, for an example, so pointing out that it would only use five acres or so is kinda missing my actual fucking point. I also plucked ’20 metres’ from the air in the same spirit; given the need for heavy machinery access, some sort of maintenance road and so on, I suspect it’s actually quite a conservative estimate at that. and five acres here for this, ten acres there for that… they all add up.
So start a campaign against disposable chopsticks, chip-forks and the like. I’d sign. ‘Someone, somewhere, does it even worse,’ is neither a reason to or excuse for doing it oneself. For any given ‘it.’
@Daz
The portions of Manitoba and Saskatchewan it passes through are also lightly forested with no apparent old growth forest. There are some good reasons to oppose the pipeline. Deforestation in the US, Canada and/or globally are not among the significant reasons.
If there are land migration routes that the pipeline disrupts that would be a valid point in opposition. I’m not aware of any and a quickish googling didn’t turn up any.
I don’t support congress attempting to bypass the normal regulatory procedures to fast track approval, but I think some of the environmental concerns of this pipeline vs continuing with the status quo shipping of the tar sands oil are overblown. As I said above, it doesn’t break my top 20 environmental concerns.
Grewgills #117:
You’re talking about ‘a pipeline.’ I’m talking about ‘pipelines in general,’ since that was the nature of the questions I originally responded to.
@Sally
I read the rules before commenting my first time here and again before my previous comment to you. The “rule” was from your head and funnily enough isn’t one you follow when responding to me. I’ll note you also gloss over “But aspire to be charitable at first.”
I come here for interesting discussions on topics that interest me. I feel no obligation to respond to anyone here I don’t want to. Neither should you or anyone else. As you said, “Deal with it or fuck off.”
Anything more on this entirely off topic bit should probably be moved to the thunderdome.
@Daz 118
Fair enough. To that point, I think pipelines should be considered on a case by case basis taking into account the various environmental, health, fair use, and economic concerns. The last of those is least important in my calculations, but the opinions of our elected officials often disagree with me on that.
How sad that Grewgills never quite stopped himself in his self-righteous puffery long enough to realize that his lack of charity–towards the people living in the path of the pipeline, that is–is precisely what earned him (in part) the label “asshole” this time around.
But Sally! He was so polite about his assholery. And you can’t expect him to hear, from way up high on his trusty charger Privilege, anyone who won’t properly doff their cap and be nice to him in voicing their objections to his eliminationist rhetoric.
And it’s not assholery if you don’t use naughty words, just like it’s not racism if you don’t say the n-word, or burn a cross, or lynch someone.
I mean, there are standards, you know. Are we not civilised here?
Yup, choosing not to engage with people whose behavior I don’t like when taking time to destress from the day is quite the sin. On the bright side, I have given a few of you time to harp on one of your favorite topics.
As for eliminationist rhetoric, the original comment was directed at republicans that supported the project. I didn’t realize that was a group you were intent on preserving.
And Catie,
I see you still don’t know what sea lioning is.
Note, it is about continuing intrusive attempts to engage, NOT choosing not to engage. You can add eliminationist rhetoric to the terms you apparently don’t understand as well. I’m done with the lot of you on this topic. I’ll engage in on topic discussion, but not on this. Feel free to take your last pot shots.
And in your zeal, you disappeared the Native Peoples who have on fait, ben fighting against it. Since then you’ve just been digging deeper and deeper.
If, on the other hand, you weren’t an over privileged turdwaffle, you’d have responded to Iyeska’s link by reading it, realising what you’d done, and apologised for your stupid privilege-blinded error, instead of having a hissy fit over your hurt feelings that one of the people you disappeared called you a name.
And if you can’t see past your own privilege to get that, and your ally stance is tied to whether the people you hurt are nice enough to you, then you really, really don’t belong here.
But, by all means, i am sure you will go and rent a pinniped-capable backhoe. You’re getting too deep to throw the dirt out of the hole anymore.
Asshole.