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.

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.