The tar sands of Alberta.
Since the Republicans won their Senate majority and increased their House majority in November, it's been obvious that one of the first items of business in 2015 would be yet another vote on uprooting the nearly half-century-old process for approving international pipelines. They want to take it out of the executive branch and hand that role over to Congress.
Approving the northern leg of the tar-sands-carrying Keystone XL pipeline is the sole reason behind this. The new Senate majority leader, Kentucky's Mitch McConnell, promised shortly after the election that a vote on the much-disputed pipeline would be the first item of business in January.
Sure enough, Lisa Murkowski, who is the new Senate Energy Committee chairwoman, will preside Thursday over that panel's latest vote on pipeline approval.
Backers will no doubt call this a jobs bill despite the State Department's environmental impact statement, which says that while some 42,000 directed and induced temporary jobs will be created during the two-year pipeline construction period, only 35 jobs will be permanent. Naturally, the Republicans don't mention this paltry result in all their caterwauling about the benefits of Keystone XL.
There's little doubt this latest bill will pass. Republicans picked up nine Senate seats in November, giving them a total of 54. Desperate for whatever votes she could attract in the Louisiana Senate run-off, Democrat Mary Landrieu failed late last year to get the 60 votes needed to approve changing the approval process for international boundary-crossing pipelines. But she did get 13 other Democrats to go along with the measure. While five of them, including her, lost their seats, that still leaves eight Democratic votes for approving Keystone XL in the Senate. The House doesn't need any Democratic votes, although it will certainly get a few, as it has for past Keystone XL bills.
President Obama hasn't said whether he will haul out his veto stamp when the bill makes it to his desk. Although close observers long thought that the president would approve Keystone XL, recent hints have indicated that he may not. His veto, however, if it is forthcoming, is unlikely to be an outright rejection of the pipeline but rather a rejection of taking the decision-making authority out of the executive branch's hands.
The administration is waiting to announce a decision based on what happens in the Nebraska Supreme Court. Their ruling, which could be announced this week or months from now, will determine whether an altered route for the pipeline through the state was approved in line with the state constitution. A state judge said last year that it wasn't.
There's more story on the pipeline below the fold.
Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, third-ranking Democrat in the Senate, said Sunday on CBS’ Face the Nation that Democrats will offer several amendments to the Republican bill, including requiring that the northern leg of Keystone XL be built with U.S.-manufactured steel, that the bitumen transported by the pipeline and refined in Texas not be exported and that wind and solar projects also be approved. Even if these amendments were to pass, Schumer said he would recommend that Obama veto the bill. Overriding a veto takes 67 Senate votes, and that seems more than Republicans can obtain.
The pipeline, which would run from Alberta to refineries on the Gulf Coast of Texas, is designed to carry 830,000 barrels a day of diluted bitumen from the Canadian tar sands. Some tar-sands petroleum already makes its way into the United States, headed for Midwest refineries via other pipelines and, to a much lesser extent, by rail. Some also is being transported from those pipelines to the southern leg of Keystone XL, which was completed last year from Cushing, Oklahoma, to Port Arthur, Texas.
Even among those who seek reductions in the burning of fossil fuels to curb greenhouse gas emissions, it's been argued that opposition to the pipeline—more of which was seen over the weekend—is wasted effort because tar-sands producers will find other ways to move their product. So, they say, protests don't matter.
In fact, however, other proposed tar-sands pipelines—like those that would move bitumen east or west across Canada—are also under attack. As Naomi Klein wrote in The Nation in late November:
2. Tar-sands pipelines are protest magnets. Supporters of Keystone frequently claim that if the oil doesn’t go south through the United States, it will simply be piped west, through British Columbia, and make it onto tankers that way. They might want to pay closer attention to what is going on west of the Rockies. Since November 20, more than sixty people have been arrested outside of Vancouver as they attempted to block the expansion of a tar-sands pipeline owned by Kinder Morgan. Further north, Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline, another would-be tar-sands escape route, is even more widely rejected. Indeed, opposition to increased tanker traffic along their beloved coastline has united British Columbians.
So what about east? Well, on November 21, the premiers of Ontario and Quebec signed a joint agreement that erected a series of obstacles to TransCanada’s proposed Energy East pipeline, which, if completed, would carry tar-sands oil to the East Coast. The move came in response to strong opposition to the project in both provinces.
Some members of the “it doesn’t matter” camp point out that tar-sands oil is getting out anyway through the existing infrastructure. This completely misses the point that Keystone XL has always been linked to plans to greatly expand the amount of heavy oil being extracted. And the capacity to transport that oil isn’t there, which is why, when Statoil nixed its mine (reportedly worth $2 billion), it cited “limited pipeline access” among its reasons.
One term we're unlikely to hear mentioned on the Republican side of the aisle during the upcoming debate on Keystone XL is "global warming." The carbon footprint of the extraction, processing and burning of tar-sands petroleum is larger than for conventional oil. Building a fossil-fuel infrastructure with a 50-year lifespan for this dirty oil is beyond foolish when the need for sharply and quickly curtailing greenhouse gas emissions is so obvious.
But then the new Congress has just added more climate-change deniers to its roster. To these newbies and the existing crew of deniers already elected, matters such as the survival of species and of civilization itself makes no never mind.