January 6, 2015 – The Boston Globe
The pointless fight over Keystone
By Joshua Green
On Wednesday, Republicans will inaugurate the new Congress by taking up a Senate bill to approve the Keystone XL pipeline that would connect oil producers in Western Canada to US refineries on the Gulf Coast. The House will vote on Friday. In the six years since TransCanada Corp. first sought US approval to build the pipeline, the debate over Keystone has, somewhat strangely, become one of the central fights in US politics. It’s about to get even bigger.
Several years ago, liberals looking for a cause to rally around settled on Keystone because the oil it would transport, extracted from tar sands, is especially damaging to the environment. James Hansen, then the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, famously declared that if the pipeline goes forward and Canada develops its oil sands, “it will be game over for the planet.”
Conservatives seized on Keystone because it offered a clear example of liberals privileging the environment above the jobs the pipeline’s construction would create, an effective political attack in a lousy economy. President Obama’s anguish over whether or not to approve it only added to the appeal.
As a result, Keystone has attained tremendous symbolic importance for both Democrats and Republicans. But this is the opposite of how it should be — the political fight has become completely divorced from reality. The pipeline’s actual importance to oil markets, the economy, and the environment has steadily diminished. Whoever wins, the “victory” will be pointless and hollow.
The liberal claim that blocking Keystone would limit Canadian oil sands development, or even slow Canadian oil exports to the United States, has turned out to be wrong. Over the last four years, Canadian exports to the Gulf Coast have risen 83 percent. Last year, US oil imports from Canada hit a record high. This year, Canadian oil producers expect shipments to double.
One way producers achieved this is by expanding old pipelines and building new ones, such as the Flanagan South pipeline, which can transport 600,000 barrels a day of heavy crude. At the same time, the Canadian government has approved two new lines as a fallback to Keystone — one running east to the Atlantic, the other west to the Pacific — that avoid the United States entirely. Collectively, these projects dwarf Keystone’s 800,000 barrel-a-day capacity. “Keystone is kind of old news,” Sandy Fielden, director of energy analytics at RBN Energy in Austin, told Bloomberg News. “Producers have moved on and are looking for new capacity from other pipelines.”
Read the full story here: http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/01/06/the-pointless-fight-over-keystone/6rqGhuo80hpdnIKNdt7YkO/story.html
