Please, Mr. President, just say NO to Keystone XL pipeline

Completing the Keystone  XL pipeline is a bad idea for so many reasons.

If fully built, this 1,700-mile pipeline, running north-to-south down the center of the country, would carry extremely polluting petroleum from tar sands deposits in Alberta, Canada, down to the Gulf of Mexico.

We love the way Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation, described the pipeline: "The Canadian oil industry is sitting on top of a tar sands carbon pollution bomb and Keystone XL is the fuse needed to light it."

At the end of January, the  State Department released its final environmental impact statement. Fortunately, the report acknowledges that the tar sands pipeline dramatically increases carbon pollution, the equivalent of putting almost six million new cars on the road. This is the last thing we need.

It's not just the huge carbon footprint of a potential pipeline that we're so concerned about. It's also threats to drinking water throughout the center of the country, namely, irreparable damage that could be done to the the Ogallala aquifer by a leak in the pipeline.

Bear in mind that this would be a pipeline through America, not to America. The pipeline would be built to get tar sands oil out into the international market.

A word of caution

It would be naive to assume that a decision by the President to stop the Keystone pipeline permanently would mean that the tar sands would stay in the ground, sparing the world of all those intense heat-trapping emissions. Global energy markets are hungry for fossil fuels, even though these fuels are under-priced: The true costs of fossil fuels (such as increased public health costs due to increased incidences of asthma and other diseases, and infrastructure replacement and insurance costs from extreme weather events like Superstorm Sandy) are externalized. This means the price of fossil fuels is kept artificially low by the so-called "free market" system.

So, the proposed Keystone XL pipeline is a big mess -- figuratively right now, but we'd be inviting a literal mess, and a huge one, if we finish building the pipeline.

And what about wildlife? The State Department report says that operations of the pipeline would threaten 15 federally-protected endangered species, including whooping and sandhill cranes, bald eagles, and swift foxes.
 
It's now up to President Obama to stop the pipeline from being built. In fact, he has a much larger responsibility: He should be leading the country away from the further development of any fossil fuel resources, promoting truly clean resources (wind and solar) and energy efficiency and conservation. 
Do it, Mr. President: Just say no to the Keystone XL pipeline and a future built around fossil fuels.

Joy Bergey is federal policy director for PennFuture and is based in Philadelphia.