Tar sands and the environment

Keystone cop-out

Once again, Barack Obama seems to have found a way to annoy everyone

  WASHINGTON, DC |

IF YOU can’t think of anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. That, more or less, seems to have been the philosophy behind the State Department’s decision, after careful consideration of the pros and cons of a proposed oil pipeline from Canada to Texas, to make no decisions until after next year’s presidential elections. Thus Barack Obama can face the voters without having passed judgment on a project that had prompted a showdown between the business lobby and environmentalists.



Businesses and the unions like the proposed Keystone XL pipeline because it would generate orders and jobs—20,000 of them, says TransCanada, the firm behind the scheme. Environmentalists dislike it because it would be filled with oil from Alberta’s tar sands, the extraction of which involves copious emissions of greenhouse gases. To bolster their case, each side has marshalled secondary arguments: that the pipeline would enhance America’s energy security by displacing imports from unfriendly places, in the case of the pros, and that it would imperil a huge aquifer in Nebraska, for the cons.

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In the end, it was concerns about the aquifer that gave the State Department its out. Many Nebraskans, Democrats and Republicans alike, were unhappy with the proposed route. The governor had called a special session of the legislature to pass a law giving the state the power to modify it. Moreover, the State Department’s own inspector-general is investigating its choice of a firm that does business with TransCanada to conduct a review of the pipeline’s environmental impact. All this, said the State Department, which has pondered the pipeline’s merits since 2008, would necessitate an extra 15 months’ review to consider alternative routes.
That is tremendously convenient for Mr Obama. He has offended environmentalists during his time in office by failing to push through a cap-and-trade scheme for greenhouse gases, as he had promised on the campaign trail, and more recently by delaying new rules to reduce smog. Activists decided to make the pipeline a test of Mr Obama’s verdancy. They recruited such celebrities as Daryl Hannah and the Dalai Lama to their cause, and earlier this month encircled the White House with sinister black tubing. Big green pressure groups threatened to withhold support from Mr Obama’s re-election bid unless he fell in line. He appears to have calculated that unions would back him regardless, and that the business lobby was probably lost to him, whereas environmentalists would respond to appeasement.
The greens’ victory is already looking rather pyrrhic, however. TransCanada this week signalled its willingness to alter the pipeline’s route, saying it will work with the Nebraska legislature to that end. It also suggested it would press ahead with the last segment of the pipeline, from Oklahoma to Texas, which may not require the State Department’s approval because it does not cross an international frontier. That would give oil from the tar sands much easier access to refineries in Texas, even if the rest of the project remains in limbo. And by defusing the concerns of conservationists in Nebraska, TransCanada is shrewdly undermining the coalition against the pipeline.
The irony of all this is that the pipeline is not nearly as important as either its defenders or critics make it out to be. On the one hand, America already imports plenty of oil from the tar sands. The impact on the environment of pressing ahead (and on energy security, for that matter) would be marginal at best. On the other hand, the economic boost from building the pipeline would be marginal too. Most of the jobs it would create would be temporary ones, in construction. The states across which the pipeline will run already have the lowest unemployment rates in the nation. And none of them is likely to plump for Mr Obama in next year’s election—making the local politics marginal too.