America's 1,700 Mile-Long Climate Denial

Here comes Keystone XL. That seemed to be the consensus after the long-awaited Final Environmental Impact Statement or the country's most controversial oil pipeline was released last week. The media trumpeted the report with a curious hook: the multibillion dollar, 1,700 mile pipeline won't do much damage to the climate.

Here's USA Today's headline: "State Dept.: Keystone XL would cause minimal climate impact." Andthe Wall Street Journal's: "Keystone XL Review Sees Little Impact on Climate." Even the New York Times blares "Report May Ease Way to Approval of Keystone Pipeline" because it allegedly would satisfy Obama's requirement that the project not be a drag on the climate.

All of which is curious because one of the nation's most respected climate scientists, Dr. James Hansen, formerly NASA's chief climate boffin, has called Keystone XL "the fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet." Light it, and torch a stable human environment for the foreseeable future, his argument goes. Canada's oil sands are one of the largest stores of trapped carbon dioxide in the world; to burn it all, in concert with our current fossil fuel diet, would loose enough heat-trapping gases to ensure runaway—or "catastrophic"—global warming. By one estimate, the Keystone XL will emit more carbon pollution annually than all of Greece combined.

So how did the US State Department—which carried out the study—manage to disagree so much with one of the nation's leading climatologists? It hinges, primarily, on the conclusion in the FEIS that "approval or denial of any one crude-oil transport project, including the proposed project, is unlikely to significantly impact the rate of extraction in the oil sands."

In other words, the State Department decided that if the US doesn't approve the Keystone XL, all of that oil will find other ways to port cities and eventually into the veins of the planet's automobiles. Oil trains and tanker trucks and other pipelines will supposedly pick up the slack, and the same amount of carbon will burn no matter what. The oil sands may be a carbon bomb, but it's got plenty of potential fuses; Keystone is just one of them.

This is and always has been a pitifully fatalistic argument about the tar sands; it's as if oil extraction were some unstoppable force of nature, an elemental and economic inevitability that humans or their policies are helpless to challenge. Sure, burning through the entire tar sands may spell generations-spanning disaster for the global climate system, but someone's bound to do it, somehow.

Before we address that remarkably dystopian premise, I should note that other federal agencies have come to different conclusions: The EPA has officially challenged the State Department's findings, pointing out that the economics of rail and truck transport are a lot more dubious than the State Dept. thinks.

The EPA argues that the idea that the oil industry will simply and just as effectively embrace alternatives to the pipeline "is not based on an updated energy-economic modeling effort… This analysis should include further investigation of rail capacity and costs, recognizing the potential for much higher per barrel rail shipment costs."

As the Washington Post's Bradford Plumer explains, this is due to three main factors: shipping by rail will likely be more expensive than the State Dept. believes, it will likely be more difficult to secure the required rail infrastructure, and the pipeline won't be moving as much crude as forecasts assume—the report is overly rosy towards the oil industry's prospects, in other words.

So the notion that this Canadian crude is somehow destined to be pulled out of the ground is flawed, even on purely economic grounds. Still, that conclusion doesn't address a more basic fact, and another heaping, perversely unfactored social and environmental incentive to cancel the pipeline: preventing more runaway, hard-to-counteract effects on an already fragile climate, effects that will linger long after all that oil is burned, if it is.

All of the above economic analysis doesn't take into account the fact that if we were running a rational society, making decisions based on what would best benefit the sustainability and longevity of the human project at large, taking adult responsibility for our actions, then leaving all of the oil sands in the dirt would be the hands-down best option. According to industry statements, the tar sands contain 170 billion barrels of proven reserves. That's approximately 17 percent of "the world's remaining carbon budget," as the climate advocacy group 350.org puts it, "or about 1/6th of what we have left to burn" before we pass the tipping point and load the atmosphere with a civilization-threatening amount of greenhouse gases.

In order to buy the State Department's line, then—and that of a long list of other pro-Keystone allies, from Congressional Republicans to the editorial board at the science journal Nature, too—you have to discount the ultimate threat it poses. You have to deny that there exists a fundamental choice that we have yet to make: to allow the climate impacts to happen at all, in the first place.

There are droves of people who are not willing to do that. The Keystone may not technically be the very last, final straw that breaks the planet's carbon-loaded back. It may not be the end-all carbon bomb that Dr. Hansen warns us of; he was likely speaking in generalities.

But the Keystone unequivocally represents the embracing of an idea: We actively want and need a massive enough amount of oil to pose an existential threat to large chunks of our civilization. We are not ready to embrace alternative technologies and fuels that have been proven adept at replacing an oil-dependent society. We're willing to light the fuse, even when we're not 100 percent sure it won't be the one that finally melts the permafrost and the methane-storing clathrates and that makes Earth a whole lot more Venus-esque.

In the interest of seeing future generations grow up on a planet that still contains Florida and an Arctic ice cap, tens of thousands of people have turned out—in Washington DC, in Canada, in Texas—to protest the construction of the Keystone XL. Grist's David Roberts has commented on the influence of such social and political movements, and argued that tar sands extraction is anything but inevitable. "The world is not a spreadsheet. It contains friction, physical and temporal limitations, politics and competing interests. Nothing is inevitable," he writes. "If activists can block Keystone, yeah, there are other possible routes to get the tar-sands oil out. So … activists will fight those, too."

Obviously, activists could lose those fights, and the tar sands could get built. But they are fighting to remind us all that it's impossible to exclude the climate from the heart of the equation. They are fighting to stop a glacial kind of climate denial, and to remind us that there is still a chance to overrule economic forecasts and the oil industry's profit motive. There's a fairly straightforward choice at the heart of all of this, they're saying, and so let's begin the project of making that choice, rather than denying that it even exists.