Updated Jan. 31, 2014 6:41 p.m. ET
The Obama Administration has spent 1,960 days studying the potential impact of the Keystone XL pipeline project—nearly five and a half years, or 1/20th of a century. The fifth environmental report on the pipeline that the State Department published late Friday afternoon ought to be the last word, unless President Obama decides to bow again to his rich green funders.
The latest 11-volume "Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement" concludes that the pipeline from the Canadian border to interconnections in Nebraska for the Gulf of Mexico would have no marginal effect on climate or oil and gas development in the Alberta oil sands. The reality is that these natural fossil-fuel resources will be extracted anyway, at the same rate, whether or not Mr. Obama decides to let the pipeline be built.
Pipes prepared for Keystone XL lie in a field in Gascoyne, N.D., in April. Reuters
Economic reality waits for no man. The only difference is how the oil is transported, and the green protestors should be chaining themselves to White House fences to get Mr. Obama to sign off as soon as possible. The hilarious irony is that the anti-Keystone campaign is creating more carbon emissions. Their political lobbying is harming the planet by their own standards.
The State Department constructs an alternative scenario in which the Keystone XL is not built and the oil reaches refineries via rail and tanker. That results in 27.8% more greenhouse gas emissions. If the oil is distributed instead by train to the network of existing pipelines, that's a 39.7% carbon increase. Transporting by rail directly to the Gulf of Mexico, as some operations are now doing, means a 41.8% increase.
As oil production has increased to exceed existing pipeline capacity and environmental objections to pipelines have multiplied, railroad oil transportation has surged. In 2009, major U.S. freight railways originated a mere 9,500 carloads of crude. In 2012, that rose to nearly 234,000 carloads and likely originated around 400,000 in 2013. This is a not-so-great development if you happen to live in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, where an oil freight train derailed last year, killing 47.
Then again, this entire exercise was never really about the Keystone, or this or that quibble with Volume Seven's Appendix D: "Waterbody Crossing Tables and Required Crossing Criteria for Reclamation Facilities." The green lobby wants an entirely symbolic political sacrifice to its climate-change religion, and the Keystone happens to be handy.
The showdown has been a revealing window into the shifting power within the Democratic Party from workers to big-money Nob Hill environmentalists. The State Department says the project will create some 42,100 jobs ("direct, indirect, and induced"), many of them union jobs. But Mr. Obama has cared more about the lobbying of San Francisco billionaire Tom Steyer, who is threatening to cut off Democrats if Mr. Obama approves the pipeline. Talk about feeding the 1% while trashing the middle class.
State will now determine if Keystone is in the national interest, but everyone knows this is Mr. Obama's call. He ought to tell Mr. Steyer to run for Congress and defeat the Keystone through argument and persuasion rather than buying off Democrats with campaign contributions.
Source: Top Stories - Google News - http://ift.tt/Lyichs
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