The most important protest of our times

Over the past month or so there have been some public protests in the U.S. concerning the pivotal issues of our times. I have been meaning to bring one of these to your attention for some time, and have been waiting for the opportunity to bring all the complexities of this topic together. This protest garnered some coverage in the media, but is not on the radar screen of most people. At the end of September a protest against the pipeline took place on Parliament Hill, but the most impressive popular action was a sit-in in Washington D.C. where people (including James Hanson, who needs no introduction because I have blogged about him before) were been willing to get arrested in order to voice their opposition to this project.

On the surface, the proposed KeystoneXL pipeline would simply carry tar sands from Alberta to refineries in Texas. What could be wrong with that?

From a nationalistic perspective, this is a short-sighted move. Canadians have always been the "drawers of water and hewers of wood" for the British, and then for the Americans. It is always easier to just ship the raw material south to make a quick buck than to add value to it in Canada and then export the resulting product. Even Peter Lougheed, the former premier of "Saudi Alberta" thinks that the tar sands should be refined in the province and not pumped all the way to Texas to be upgraded there. Heck, for the cost of such a pipeline you could build a new refinery in Alberta and see more profit on the first day of operation than by pumping the "black gold" to Texas.

In defending the need for such an arrangement, the proponents of the pipeline claim that this will (parroting a phrase that every American President since Jimmy Carter has repeated) "reduce America's dependence on foreign oil". This worn-out meme is doubly irrational. First of all, in case I missed the memo, Canada is still a separate country and therefore the oil from Alberta is necessarily foreign oil. Secondly, the reason Texas is the destination is that it is a large port from where the refined tar-sand-gasoline can be shipped by boat to the highest payer. Proponents claim that building the pipeline will lower the price of gasoline in the United States. It is fascinating to watch people delude themselves into thinking that it is a good idea to pump petroleum 2,673 kilometers to Texas so that a different form of petroleum can be shipped a similar distance to gas stations in Chicago and Boston - at a below-market rate. For all the jingoism of "jobs for America" and "FREEDOM" nobody seems to have realized that by seeking assurances that the tar-sands oil will only be used within the lower 48 states, these politicans are effectively cornering themsleves into a socialization of the oil industry. You can be sure that the minute the Chinese want to pay 1 cent more per gallon, the oil companies who own the refineries in Texas are going to want a publically-funded subsidy if they must only sell their product domestically.

However, all the above is merely incidental to the real reason why this pipeline must never be built. If the Keystone XL project is approved, it is game over for our climate.

The significance of the Keystone XL pipeline in terms of confronting climate change is hard to overstate. If society cannot draw the line here, against a form of energy that is so inefficient to extract that it is only profitable when natural gas prices are low enough to make boiling the bitumen out of the sand worthwhile*, then there is no limit to the rationalizations and justifications we will come up with in order to keep the status quo going. We will burn every last drop of oil we can get our hands on even if we have to run the drilling rigs in Antarctica with solar panels.

There is so much oil in Alberta's tar sands that its consumption will put a vast amount of CO2 into the atmosphere, increasing its concentration past the 450 ppm that is generally considered to be the point at which irreversible feedback effects will be triggered. To be absolutely clear, the benign term "irreversible feedback effects" is actually a terrifying prospect. It means that we will have lost the battle against climate change and that there will soon be place on this planet for much fewer than 7 billion people. Agriculture in the southern U.S. and Europe will cease, the tropics and oceans will be a dead zone, and coastal cities will be abandoned. Once the feedbacks start, no amount of recycling or electric cars will stop the Earth from becoming too toasty for us. Consider that Venus, our "sister planet" has an atmosphere that is 96% CO2 and its surface temperature is 467 degrees Celcius. Nobody is saying that is what will happen here, but it is an example of what a really nasty greenhouse effect can do.

So the protests against Keystone are not a NIMBY complaint arising from vague personal values ("I don't like how windmills look"): they are a fundammental test of what we as a society consider to be progress. If the pipeline gets built it will be as a result of the inability of our political and economic processes to factor in anything beyond short-term gain. The actions on the ground will overwhelm any efforts to stop the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations because no amount of legislation will be able to reverse the effects of burning the oil held in the tar sands. We will lock ourselves into a retrograde version of the future by creating an environment over which we will have lost control. An environment that is so hostile to modern society that the future will be very Hobbesian (a lifestyle that is "solitary, nasty, brutish, and short").

Finally, the protest against the Keystone XL pipeline is related to the Occupy Wall Street movement that is receiving a lot of media attention. Both are expressions of popular frustration at the bias in our society towards short-term gains at the expense of the common good. While Occupy Wall Street protests against (among other things) the bailout of the banks (which puts their debt on the backs of citizens), the protest against the Keystone pipeline is against the offloading of the risk and damages associated with unrestrained climate change onto future generations. A gross simplification is that corporatist power sees the common good as something to be exploited (or at best ignored) in order to achieve short term monetary gains (by transferring bad debts onto taxpayers in the case of Wall Street, and by externalizing the societal costs burning all that oil).

We have to change the dialog from more vs. less to how to all lead rich lives without mortgaging the future.
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* = The "return on energy invested" or ROEI of the tar sands is only 3 or 4 times, which is about the same energy intensity as cabbage. Sure the resulting gasoline goes boom in your car's engine, but the amount of energy used to create that gasoline is almost as great as the energy in it. So the net amount of energy is a wash. The tar sands are in many ways an arbitrage business that simply trades one form of energy for another.