Over-Hyping the Keystone Pipeline

Sometime in the next decade, President Obama will decide whether to approve the Keystone Pipeline. This is intended to bring oil from central Canada, much of which comes from tar sands, to the US. Activists on both sides of this issue have taken all sorts of dramatic stands -- viz., some Republicans in Congress have suggested making approval of the pipeline a condition for raising the debt limit. But is it really that important?

The State Department has released their Environmental Impact Statement on the project, and it concludes that the impact on greenhouse emissions would be small:

The new State Department report concludes that the process used for producing the oil — by extracting what are called tar sands or oil sands from the Alberta forest — creates about 17 percent more greenhouse gas emissions than traditional oil. But the report concludes that this heavily polluting oil will still be brought to market. Energy companies are already moving the oil out of Canada by rail.

“At the end of the day, there’s a consensus among most energy experts that the oil will get shipped to market no matter what,” said Robert McNally, an energy consultant who was a senior energy and economic adviser to President George W. Bush. “It’s less important than I think it was perceived to be a year ago, both politically and on oil markets.” The new State Department analysis took into account the growing global demand for oil and the rapidly growing practice of moving oil by rail in areas where pipelines have not been built. “Given the anticipated outlook of oil prices and the cost of development, no single project will likely affect the rate of extraction,” said a senior State Department official.

And if the oil is going to market anyway, using pipelines saves energy compared to trains and reduces the risk of accidents.

Environmentalists really ought to be focusing on the President's proposed regulation of CO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants. Phasing out coal-generated electricity would have an impact a thousand times greater than blocking one pipeline. And one person who understands this is the President:

Privately, people close to Mr. Obama say that although he is committed to building a climate legacy, he does not see the pipeline as a central part of that effort. Instead, the president is moving forward with a set of Environmental Protection Agency regulations on coal-fired power plants, the nation’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.

I suggest a strategy of approving the pipeline and then using the resulting hubbub as cover for quietly releasing the final power plant regs.