GREEN Reactor: Keystone Cops and Flops

When people of my age were kids, our 3 or 4 channels of TV would fill afternoon and weekend slots with old movie shorts like The Three Stooges and Laurel & Hardy.  Typically they’d include “silent” shorts featuring the Keystone Cops – a gang of incompetent policemen who’d pursue criminals or attempt to do public services, but to disastrous results. However it wasn’t unusual that after all the tumult, they’d still get their man.

The Keystone “bitumen” (obscure term for “sandy thick unrefined oil”) pipeline that is proposed to cross America seems to be following a similar script.  It’s to be fed from a disastrous super-project in Canada where the politics of money have obliterated the reality of the harm being done. Parts of the pipeline erstwhile in place have already experienced catastrophic spills.  US government agencies evaluating the project have been duped into hiring the “bad guys”.  And a Faux News caricature of a news service continues to back it with sometimes humorous, often hilarious but always inaccurate and misleading narrative.  Keystone Cops indeed.

But like those Cops of the comedy reels, this Keystone may very well end up succeeding.  If you define success as screwing America and the world. Unfortunately for most of us, those who will profit from the Keystone Pipeline define success just that way.

You’d think that the list of negatives would immediately disqualify such a boondoggle:

• Bitumen is the dirtiest – in the sense of “impacts to air pollution and climate change” – oil to attempt to capitalize on. It takes considerably more energy getting it from the ground to refineries and then to refine it than most other energy sources.  Until oil shortages ran up what people will pay for oil, there was no profit in it.  At those high prices, they can do better than break even,  so Big Dirty Energy is embracing it, regardless of the impacts.
• The whole concept of “mining tar sands” to get at this ungodly resource is an abomination – even worse than blowing up pristine mountain-tops to mine coal. If we support this scourge by facilitating the transport of the resulting sludge to refineries, it will speed up the impacts to air pollution and climate change that tar sands mining is already foisting onto the earth.
• Bitumen wreaks havoc on pipelines – Canada’s tar-sands pipelines have had 15 times as many spills as other oil pipelines.  When diluted (with other oil products) into “dilbit”, the problem may be reduced, but dilbit spills are horrendous.  A 2010 pipeline spill in Michigan made its way into the Kalamazoo river – and has yet to be cleaned up.  A major pipeline spill in Arkansas this year flooded a neighborhood and its noxious fumes forced wide scale evacuation and also entered the waterways.
• Despite widespread claims of how the Keystone XL pipeline across the USA would bring down gas prices, expert studies show that it will not affect prices at the pump.  Even with these facts clearly spelled out, Keystone backers continue to make the claim.
• Despite repeated claims by Faux News and others that the pipeline would lead the US to “energy security”, the facts are that any resulting refined oil would merely become a component of the international oil market.  Our oil prices would still rise with any significant disruption of the supply ANYWHERE.
• The scope of the pipeline will have it forcing a LOT of people off their lands to make way for it.  There have been many protests – even from those not especially “green” — about this alone.
• The mining of the tar-sands consumes an incredible amount of clean water.  And the pipeline itself will cross many watersheds critical to the survival of large swaths of humanity.

Of all the wondrous Keystone Cops claims – ahem – Keystone Pipeline claims by Big Dirty Energy and its (usually paid) fans, the one made loudest and most often is that it’ll ADD JOBS.  Of course those very same fans fight against every other job-creating proposal out there — e.g., badly needed fixes for highways and other infrastructure.  So it’s REALLY hard to take their earnest chants seriously.  Indeed, a closer look shows just how ludicrous the claims are.  After a short-term construction period (where new TEMPORARY employment would not even reach the level of that for a few highway repairs, the net increase in long-term jobs would probably be in the range of a few DOZEN. Such a deal!

So this should be a no-brainer, right?  Barack Obama, who has spoken at length about his desires to protect the environment, reduce carbon emissions and promote renewable energy policies, is about to make that call.  It’s in the bag, isn’t it?  Maybe not.  You see, he asked the State Department to look into the situation not long ago and they came back with the ludicrous assertion that Keystone XL would not be a net negative impact to climate change.   It appeared that Obama had himself some cover for a case where he could cite that study and “all those new jobs” and then make the Canadians happy by giving it his okay.  It’d be a tremendous flip-flop.

But it turned out that the State Department had mysteriously hired a group that worked for the Alberta tar sands project itself, blowing a big hole in the veracity of their study, and thereby Obama’s potential “excuse”.  But probably more importantly, a massive groundswell of public outcry from all sectors has arisen.  This decision is under massive scrutiny.

Recently Obama seems to be signaling he’ll reject it.  He’s citing the study that debunked the “job creator” claims.  He’s stated (at his State of the Union address a few months back) that he won’t let it contribute to climate change (which it WILL do if it goes forward).  The stars appear to be aligning.

Barack will make this call in the near future. Until then we must all do everything we can to keep the heat on.  There must be no Keystone Flop.