Stickybuffalo.com

A few more notes on the now-postponed Keystone XL pipeline.

First, I love our neighbors to the north dearly, and would in fact like to go live among them. Nothing against Canada. But I do not love the international oil industry, and I certainly don’t love the revolting corner of it occupied with boiling tar sands into petroleum plus vast amounts of carbon pollution even before the resulting petroleum is burned. Oil is a bad choice of fuel source for a lot of reasons; oil from tar sands is even worse.

Which gets to a second point about this “ethical oil” concept that Canada, or at least its oil industry flacks, like to go tooting about. Canada is a peaceful, friendly democracy, unlike so many of the world’s other petrostates. So America should source as much of our energy from the Canucks as possible, they argue, given that we’ll presumably be sourcing it from repressive and/or anti-American regimes, otherwise. There are two problems with this.

One, of course, is that it presents a false choice, in a couple of ways. There’s the fact that oil supply and demand are, obviously, a global market; just as Canada threatens to send its oil to China if we don’t approve the Keystone pipeline, the “unethical” oil of other petrostates will be purchased by other economies if it isn’t purchased by us. It’s still in some sense nice to be able to say “well, at least it isn’t our money going to prop up a medieval theocracy, e.g.,” but if the end result of oil bought and sold is going to be about the same either way, the actual utility is minimal even from an “ethical” perspective.

There’s also the fact that we have options other than just “import oil from Canada” or “import oil from somewhere else.” Yes, certainly, we’re not going to eliminate our need for petroleum in the short term, but 1) building this pipeline isn’t going to provide more oil in the short term, either, given the timeline of construction. Even if Obama were replaced by J.R. Ewing, Canadian oil would not magically begin flowing through Nebraska tomorrow. Meanwhile, 2) fossil fuel industry mouthpieces always nod sagely about “tomorrow’s energy challenges” and then declare “but any practical substitute for coal/oil/etc. is at least 20 years away;” how long have they been saying that, by the way? An actual solution to what are already today’s energy challenges isn’t going to be reached by continually making more investments in yesterday’s energy industries. Basically, the idea that increased exploitation of the tar sands will help “solve” our oil-dependency problem is about as valid as a meth addict’s belief that some more meth will “solve” his or her meth-dependency problem. Both ideas are valid “solutions” in a sense, after all, so long as you don’t see any problem beyond “I need more of this stuff right now.”

For those with more perspective than a meth addict suffering from withdrawl, however, the problem of America’s oil dependency obviously has a lot more to it than the question of where to find our next short-term fix. Like, oh, the threat of runaway climate change resulting from unrestrained combustion of fossil fuels. In the CBC article linked above, a former ambassador to Canada called the pipeline delay “”catastrophic” and TransCanada’s CEO said a failure to approve Keystone XL would be “a tragedy.” What fucking planet are you living on, sirs? Get a fucking grip! If you want to use words like “catastrophic” and “tragedy” in relation to the oil industry, I submit that a much more appropriate use would be in describing the vast “negative externality” of the greenhouse gasses released from your products, and the dangerous transformation they’re beginning to make to our planet even now.

There is absolutely nothing “ethical” about sticking future generations with the expenses and instability which will result from unchecked greenhouse warming when it is in our power to do otherwise. Thus, unless someone magically converts all of our cars and trucks to some sort of zero-emission combustion technology, there is no such thing as “ethical oil.”

As for the idea that “this pipeline will create jobs,” give me a fucking break already. Does anyone have the slightest clue how an economy actually works, or is pretty much everyone just conceiving of “job creation” as some kind of magic process which conveniently happens to result from activities which they (or those whom they identify with, politically) like, while any activity they disapprove of is simply a wasteful boondoggle? I tend to suspect the latter; Uncle Paul has recently noted how Republicans can’t say enough about the job-creation potential of government spending so long as the spending is on “defense” contractors, and this seems to be much the same situation. One might object that the oil industry will be paying for the pipeline (if that is the case), but then this is the same oil industry which receives enormous tax-break largesse even while raking in windfall profits, to say nothing of the hidden subsidies society pays for in bearing the cost of all those negative externalities. So, no, there’s no “free” job-creation here, either, even if we accept for argument’s sake the proposition that “jobs” are in and of themselves a good which we need to create rather than a means to divide up the effort of creating other things which we actually want and the benefits from them.

Either way, if we’re looking for some sort of big project that will create jobs and provide more secure and “ethical” energy resources, and we’re stuck with the fact that any such project will involve costs to society one way or another, we still have a lot of options which will fit these criteria while being a whole fuck of a lot smarter than a tar sands pipeline.