The current civil disobedience actions centered on the Keystone Tar Sands pipeline project are a harbinger of much more to come. It’s appropriate that they come as a new memorial to Martin Luther King is being unveiled.
Bill Mckibben notes that these actions are changing the dialogue at a critical moment on this issue.
Canada will double its current tar sands production over the next decade to more than 1.8 million barrels a day. That rate will mean cutting down some 740,000 acres of boreal forest — a natural carbon reservoir. Extracting oil from tar sands is also much more complicated than pumping conventional crude oil out of the ground. It requires steam-heating the sands to produce a petroleum slurry, then further dilution.
One result of this process, the ministry says, is that greenhouse gas emissions from the oil and gas sector as a whole will rise by nearly one-third from 2005 to 2020 — even as other sectors are reducing emissions. Canada still hopes to meet the overall target it agreed to at Copenhagen in 2009 — a 17 percent reduction from 2005 levels by 2020. If it falls short, as seems likely, tar sands extraction will bear much of the blame.
Canada’s government is committed to the tar sands business. (Alberta’s energy minister, Ronald Liepert, has declared, “I’m not interested in Kyoto-style policies.”) The United States can’t do much about that, but it can stop the Keystone XL pipeline.
The State Department will decide whether to approve or reject the pipeline by the end of the year. It has already delivered two flawed reports on the pipeline’s environmental impact. It should acknowledge the environmental risk of the pipeline and the larger damage caused by tar sands production and block the Keystone XL.
Doubling production to 1.8 million barrels per day will not make up for the declines in other major fields this decade anyway. The folks that think the tar sands will fix our peak oil problem haven’t looked at the projected production capability numbers for Alberta.
As far as liquid fuels, we should have continued intense investment and R&D in algal biodiesel following the Carter administration (also other biofuels produced from marginal land or waste products).