KXL: A bad day for tar sands means a good day for climate sanity

He did it. He said he would and, to our great relief, he did. That is to say that last evening, President Obama vetoed the bill that Congress sent to him which would have greenlighted the development of the Keystone XL pipeline. (Read the Washington Post coverage.)

I'm feeling both great relief and a sense of celebration. Extraction and processing of Canada's tar sands, and then shipping them through a highly risky pipeline through the heart of the U.S. mainland only for all of the resulting fuels to be sent overseas, has been called "the dumbest energy idea ever." I agree.

Why would this country take all the environmental risks for so few jobs (35 permanent jobs) and no new energy sources for domestic consumption (don't believe those who say otherwise)?

Huge thanks to the President for seeing sense and vetoing this bill -- as he had been promising to do.

  Lena Moffitt and NWFers gathered at the White House to thank

 Pres. Obama just hours after he vetoed the bill.

A big shoutout to my good friend and colleague, Lena Moffitt, who is federal policy manager for National Wildlife Federation's Climate and Energy Program, and has led on this issue for years.  (PennFuture is proud to be NWF's Pennsylvania affiliate). When I heard news of the veto from Lena yesterday afternoon and asked her reaction, she said with a big smile, "The President's building a climate legacy, and there's no room for KXL in it!"

I was late waking up to the threats of this ridiculous pipeline proposal; it wasn't until about three years ago that, thanks to savvy, insightful folks like Lena who were way ahead of me, I learned just how daft this pipeline idea is. Thank you, @LenaMDC, for opening my eyes. (Read the guest blog post that Lena wrote for us back in December, in which she exposes the flaws in the economic arguments in support of the pipeline.)

We can't relax just yet -- the President will still need to reject one more permit request.  We're certainly hopeful that President Obama will stick to his guns and kill this pipeline for good.

Joy Bergey is PennFuture's federal policy director, based in Philadelphia. She tweets @joybergey.

It’s time to reject Keystone XL, Mr. President

PennFuture closely coordinates its federal advocacy work with the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) -- we're their state affiliate, after all. Lena Moffitt is NWF's manager of federal policy for climate and energy. She writes a guest post this week about the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Lena has my personal thanks, since reading a piece she wrote several years ago opened my eyes to what a horrible idea this pipeline really is. Thanks for your leadership, Lena.

We've been fighting the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline for nearly six years now - and

Joy Bergey and Rob Altenburg (PennFuture), Lena Moffitt (NWF),
and Chelsea Harnish (Virginia Conservation Network) left to right

the case for rejection is stronger than ever. While, yes, the Nebraska Supreme Court still has to decide whether the pipeline’s route through the state is legal or not, once that decision comes down, the time for “review” will be over and the time for rejection will be upon us.

In June 2013, in his historic climate speech at Georgetown University, President Obama said that Keystone XL would not be found to be in the national interest if the project “significantly exacerbate[s] the problem of carbon pollution.” Over the past year, it has become increasingly evident that Keystone XL would have a significant impact on destabilizing the climate, and should therefore be rejected. Since the State Department released its Final Environmental Impact Statement in January 2014, reality has demonstrated that Keystone XL is, in fact, key to expanded tar sands developments. Unlike the State Department’s erroneous conclusion, tar sands expansion is not inevitable and is, in fact, dependent on several key factors. Over the past 11 months, we’ve watched a natural experiment unfold, demonstrating what happens when a few key factors turn against the industry’s favor. These factors are detailed below:

1.  The price of oil plummeted well below the State Department’s estimates. And without high oil prices, extremely expensive tar sands projects quickly become uneconomical. *
2. Tar sands oil is not being transported by trains to the extent the State Department predicted. Rail remains an expensive, logistically difficult alternative that has not filled the place of needed pipeline capacity.
3. Other pipelines (alternatives to Keystone XL) remain on hold and face increasing opposition, both in Canada and the U.S. From Enbridge’s Northern Gateway, to TransCanada’s Energy East Project, to the Portland-Montreal line, tar sand pipelines face mounting opposition and legal battles wherever they are proposed.

In the face of these three factors, tar sands developments are slowing down. In 2014 alone, three major tar sands projects have been canceled or indefinitely put on hold - Shell’s Pierre River, Total’s Joslyn North, and Statoil’s Corner project. These three projects had the potential to produce 4.7 billion barrels of bitumen over their lifetime, which would have cumulatively released 2.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The fact is that with oil prices low, tar sands producers’ profit margins are narrow, and they need cheap pipeline transportation options to get their product to market (transporting tar sands by rail is between 40 percent and up to 150 percent greater than pipeline transport). This means that a major, dedicated tar sands pipeline like Keystone XL, which would lock in cheap transportation for tar sands to the Gulf Coast, would be hugely beneficial to this industry, triggering other projects to move ahead.

And in fact, even the State Department’s FEIS indicated just that. The State Department considered several “scenarios” in its analysis and, under a scenario that looks like what reality has turned out to be – one with low oil prices, low transport of tar sands via rail, and constrained pipeline options – Keystone XL would, in fact, have “substantial impact on oil sands production levels,” and, thus, on the climate.

While the State Department deemed this scenario “unlikely” in February of this year, it is this very scenario that reality has borne out in the interim 11 months. Simply put, even the State Department’s FEIS indicates that Keystone XL will have a significant impact on the climate under circumstances like those we are seeing today.

Given this, along with the President’s resurgent leadership on climate lately (releasing first-ever limits on carbon pollution from our power sector, announcing an historic deal with China to reduce our nations’ economy-wide emissions, sending Secretary Kerry to Lima to forge a global climate agreement), the President is well positioned to seize yet another leadership moment for protecting the climate by rejecting Keystone XL. We certainly hope he does.

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* WTI (a crude oil benchmark price) has lost around 40 percent since June. Many tar sands producers are cutting back capital expenditure as a result.


Joy Bergey is PennFuture's federal policy director and is based in Philadelphia. She tweets @joybergey.

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.