President Obama said this week his administration will not approve the Keystone XL tar-sands pipeline from Canada into the US unless it can be determined that the project will not significantly increase carbon pollutants that are involved in climate change. That sounds promising, although some observers said Obama left himself wiggle room on the subject. But if existing circumstances are any indicator, the pipeline's rejection on the basis of Obama's new standard ought to be a slam dunk.
In May the New York Times ran a story on a three-story hill of Canadian tar-sand wastes being stored by a Koch brothers firm on the Detroit riverfront. These wastes are left over from refining of tar sands delivered from Canada via other, existing routes. The Keystone pipeline will extend to the Gulf Coast and increase US imports of this dirty raw material, as reported here: https://www.nytimes.com/...
The Times story notes that tar sands "waste...is burned as a fuel." And that waste is very, very dirty. Read on for more past the noxious black carbon cloud.
Reported the Times:
The Environmental Protection Agency will no longer allow any new licenses permitting the burning of petroleum coke in the United States. But D. Mark Routt, a staff energy consultant at KBC Advanced Technologies in Houston, said that overseas companies saw it as a cheap alternative to low-grade coal. In China, it is used to generate electricity, adding to that country’s air-quality problems. There is also strong demand from India and Latin America for American petroleum coke, where it mainly fuels cement-making kilns.
In short, Canadian tar sand imports are already creating petroleum coke waste in the US after refineries turn the raw material into oil. The coke waste is so dirty it can't by law be burned as fuel in the US. So outfits like Koch are shipping the waste to China and other countries, where it can still be burned, producing relatively large amounts of C02 greenhouse gases.
Keystone XL will expand those piles of waste here in the US, where they are suspected of causing environmental damage simply by being left to lie around in huge piles, as in Detroit. Not to mention the highly deleterious burning of the wastes after they're shipped overseas -- using other carbon-emitting fuels to do it. We're all on the same planet, so exporting these wastes is not getting rid of the problem whatsoever, merely hiding its effects temporarily.
Of course, all this doesn't even take into account the groundwater and air pollution already occurring in the Canadian tar sands regions where this stuff is extracted, and where 80 million tons of coke waste already is in temporary "storage." Nor does it take into account the general effects of C02 emissions coming from tar-sands refined fuels that eventually will be sold and burned.
Bad news, all the way around, unless you're someone like the Koch brothers and you make a sizable percentage of your billions in annual revenues selling carbon to be burned -- including some of the most polluting carbon compounds around, which the US government officially regards as highly polluting waste products.
The only other argument left in the "let 'er rip" rhetoric of so-called conservatives is that if the US doesn't build the XL pipeline, Canada will try to ship the raw tar sands extracts directly overseas, causing just as much if not more pollution but killing jobs at home. But that prospect already has been stymied by opposition within Canada. British Columbia earlier this month rejected a wholly domestic version of Keystone XL that would deliver the black stuff from Alberta in Canada's interior to the country's Pacific coast for export. See: http://www.pri.org/...
One noticeable difference: Sixty percent of British Columbia residents oppose a 600-mile-long tar-sands pipeline coming through their province. They're worried about environmental damage. But polls here show two thirds of Americans support the much longer XL pipeline proposal running from Alberta to the Gulf Coast. Why the difference? The way news media in the two nations cover the story, probably. But here's another explanation from http://www.socialistalternative.org/...
More Americans than ever support taking action to stop global warming, and a recent poll by the Pew Research Center shows a 69% majority saying that there is “solid evidence” of global warming (4/2/13). Why, then, did that same poll show 66% of Americans in favor of building the Keystone XL pipeline, with 23% opposing it? Why was there a recent rally of the building trades where over 1,000 union members demonstrated in favor of the pipeline? It is not because working people don’t care about the environment. It is because, in this economic crisis, working people are in a difficult situation that big business wants to exploit.
Workers shouldn’t have to choose between putting food in our children’s mouths and ruining the world for our grandchildren. We need jobs; we need a future. This is a warning to the environmental movement: If it wants to win, if it wants to become a mass force within society, the environmental movement must place the demand for green jobs – at union wages and benefits and with rehiring and retraining where needed – front and center.
All in all, Obama's pronouncement would seem to bode well for environmentalists. Unless, of course, logic and science take a back seat to more profiteering by fossil-fuel companies -- whose owners are themselves now wealthy fossils -- and by short-term political considerations. Keep your fingers crossed and your carbon in the ground.