Friday, as everyone in Washington knows, is the day announcements are made that are meant to go unnoticed. This goes double for Good Friday, which is probably why the Obama Administration chose that occasion to reveal that it was, once again, putting off a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline, which would run for seventeen hundred miles, from Alberta to Nebraska. The Administration cited ongoing litigation over the pipeline’s route through Nebraska as the cause for the delay, but, in the week since, no one, it seems, has bought this explanation.
“This is yet another laughable reason to delay a project that the federal government has been scrutinizing for more than five years,” the Washington Post’s editorial board opined on Wednesday. The delay is likely to push the decision beyond the midterm elections, which, presumably, is the point. Of course, it also means that Keystone XL will remain a divisive campaign issue through November. Last week, Alison Lundergan Grimes, who is challenging Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for his seat in Kentucky, became the latest red-state Democrat to announce her support for the project.
“We need to finish the Keystone XL pipeline and consider other vital infrastructure projects that will benefit Kentucky,” Grimes said. What exactly she meant is unclear, since, as the Louisville Courier-Journal observed, the pipeline “would not cross through Kentucky.”
It’s difficult to applaud the Administration for simply dragging out the Keystone decision. Temporizing is rarely a sign of political courage, and the fight over the pipeline has lasted for so long that it’s threatening to undermine other, really vital projects; for instance, it now seems that divisions over Keystone may prevent passage of a Senate bill designed to encourage energy efficiency, which has garnered rare bipartisan support. (The bill’s primary sponsors are the Democratic senator Jeanne Shaheen, of New Hampshire, and the Republican senator Rob Portman, of Ohio.) And yet, on balance, the Administration’s stalling has to be celebrated. Certainly, it is better than the alternative advocated by, among many, many others, McConnell, Grimes, and the Post’s editorial board.
One of the strange things that has happened during the years that the debate has raged on is that pipeline advocates have increasingly accused pipeline opponents of waging a meaningless battle. Thus the Post could claim this week that its support of the pipeline “does not mean we like burning dirty oil sands crude.” According to the editorial board, the “economic rewards of extracting Canadian oil” are so great and the “options for getting it out of the country” are so numerous that it really doesn’t matter if the pipeline gets built; even if it doesn’t, the crude from the oil sands is still going to get extracted and burned. Constructing the pipeline, by this logic, would have no real-world consequences, for, as the Post put it, “symbolic gestures … have no impact on climate change.”
But, if this were, in fact, the case, wouldn’t pipeline advocates be the ones guilty of waging a purely symbolic fight? If the oil-sands crude—which comes in a semi-solid form that has to be strip-mined or, quite literally, baked out of the ground—is going to be extracted anyway, then why even bother backing the pipeline? Just to show friendship for our northern neighbors?
The truth is that, if there were economically attractive alternatives for getting oil-sands crude to refineries, the Canadians wouldn’t be pushing for Keystone XL in the first place. But there aren’t, and so they are. An article in Thursday’s National Post cites a report by a Calgary-based energy-research firm that concluded that, if Keystone is not built, Canada (and more particularly the province of Alberta) will lose six hundred and thirty-two billion dollars in revenue over the next twenty-five years. No one would call six hundred and thirty-two billion dollars a purely symbolic loss. Meanwhile, another recent report, by Maximilian Auffhammer, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, concluded that “not permitting Keystone XL will keep at least 1 billion barrels of Alberta heavy crude in the ground.” Once again, a billion barrels are hardly symbolic.
Pipeline proponents are right to say that not building Keystone is not going to solve global warming. As the Post’s editorial board pointed out this week, what are needed are “smart, economy-wide policies such as carbon taxes, which meaningfully and permanently cut demand for carbon-heavy fuels.” (Such policies, it’s worth noting, would make Keystone an even less attractive project, as they would raise the price of oil-sands crude.) But in the absence of “smart, economy-wide policies” building the pipeline is still a dumb idea. It would encourage more consumption of a particularly environmentally destructive form of fuel.
K. C. Golden, policy director for the group Climate Solutions, recently outlined what he calls “the Keystone Principle.” It goes as follows. To avoid truly catastrophic climate change, the world needs to avoid new, long-term capital investments that are going to “lock in” dangerous levels of carbon emissions. A project that clearly fails the Keystone Principle test is Keystone itself; the pipeline, Golden notes, is “both a conspicuous example of this kind of investment and a powerful symbol for the whole damned category.” Which is why delaying Keystone is better than at least one of the obvious alternatives.
Photograph by Rick Wilking/Reuters.
