core sector communique

Rush-Hour Read: Should the Keystone XL Oil Pipeline Be Approved?

Posted on Thursday September 29th by Daniel Lippman

What’s the right balance to strike between growing the economy and protecting the environment? That’s at the heart of a fierce debate about whether the U.S. government should approve a controversial $7 billion oil pipeline between Canada and the U.S. The State Department is holdinghearings this week in states across the Midwest to get feedback from residents who live near the proposed pipeline, which would run about 1,700 miles from Canada down to Texas.

Supporters of the plan say with the U.S. economic recovery still limping along, the project would provide much-needed jobs to Americans. Michigan GOP Rep. Fred Upton, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, told CNBC in July that the project should be approved by the government for its economic benefits.

According to the Department of Energy, this one project will “essentially eliminate” oil imports from the Middle East. It will create more than 100,000 jobs and strengthen our relationship with a close ally and trading partner. A project like this should be a no-brainer, and there’s simply no good reason it has been stuck in the State Department’s red tape for nearly three years.

But opponents argue that building the pipeline would provide a major boost to dirty tar-sands oil from Alberta province, Canada’s “Texas”. It takes tremendous amounts of energy and water to extract that type of oil from the ground.

Over the summer, hundreds of people protesting against the pipeline were arrested in sit-ins in front of the White House. This is how environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben describedhis views on Keystone to NPR earlier this month:

“This pipeline is a bad idea. The tar sands at the far end of it are the second biggest pool of carbon on the Earth, and if we burn them, if we burn them in a big way, as NASA’s Jim Hansen said, it’s essentially game over for the climate,” he said. Hansen is a NASA climate scientist who was among the protesters arrested.

For McKibben, this really is the moment of truth, akin to what Brazil did 15 years ago, when it took serious steps to preserve the Amazon rain forest.

As the Economist magazine reported recently, environmentalists are not the only ones who are raising questions about the project. Some residents and politicians from the states where the pipeline would run are worried about the damage that could be done to their land by any potential oil spills.

“I’m not a tree-hugger,” insists Susan Luebbe, a lifelong cattle rancher, “but if I have to buddy up with tree-huggers to stop this, then so be it.”… Environmentalists dislike the project chiefly because it would increase America’s imports of oil from the tar sands of Alberta. … People like Mrs Luebbe, in contrast, are against it for fear of what an accident might do to her livelihood. If the viscous mixture of bitumen and oil in the pipeline spills on her land, she asks, “Who’s going to eat my beef? I couldn’t even sell this ranch.”

The State Department is expected to approve Keystone XL by November and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently told Bloomberg News he was “confident” the pipeline partly because “the need for energy in the U.S. is enormous, the alternatives for the U.S. are not good, on every level.”

But environmentalists, miffed with President Obama over other policy setbacks like smog rules and climate change, are still holding out hope that it will be blocked. As one expert told the New York Times:

“The whole policy debate has dramatically increased in stature from a year ago,” said Anthony Swift, a policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which is against the pipeline. “People would not be protesting, let alone getting arrested, for something that is a foregone conclusion.”

From http://www.infrastructurist.com/