New York Times editorial says no to Keystone XL tar sands pipeline

Today, the New York Times editorialized that Secretary Hillary Clinton should not permit the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.  The pipeline would carry nearly a million barrels of oil from northern Alberta all the way to the Texas coast for refining, cutting through the American heartland and one of the nation’s most important aquifers, the Ogallala.  It would be the third such dedicated tar sands pipelines to be permitted in as many years, adding to an overcapacity of pipelines to import tar sands into the United States.  While it commends the State Department for doing a deeper review of the environmental and other impacts of the pipeline, it says that ultimately the pipeline permit should be denied because “the environmental risks for both countries are enormous”.  The editorial concludes, “Moving ahead would be a huge error. From all of the evidence, Keystone XL is not only environmentally risky, it is unnecessary.”

This is very big news for those of us working on the tar sands and clean energy issues. The editorial, the first on this topic for the New York Times and one of the first in any major U.S. newspaper, will help elevate the debate about whether Canadian tar sands, the dirtiest oil on the planet, has a place in our clean energy future.  While that debate has waged furiously amongst environmental groups, native peoples, and the major oil companies and governments of Alberta and Canada for many years, it has yet to burst into full view of the public and decision makers.  This editorial, which so clearly enunciates the risk of expanding our reliance on tar sands oil, will no doubt be seen as contributing to the turning point in the debate over our energy future as our country struggles to move away from its deep addiction to oil.

Last week, the President committed the United States to a plan to reduce our dependence on imported oil by one-third in the next decade.  Even though Canada is a close neighbor and ally, he made it clear that reliance on oil from our friends in the Western Hemisphere was a short –term goal and that, ultimately, we had to find new and cleaner ways to fuel our cars, trucks and other modes of transportation.  The President said, “The United States of America cannot afford to bet our long term prosperity and security on a resource that will eventually run out. Not anymore. Not when the cost to our economy, our country, and our planet is so high.”  Reducing our dependence on oil – especially high carbon oil like the tar sands – has huge implications for stemming global climate disruption.

In his speech, President Obama called American ingenuity our greatest natural resource.  We couldn’t agree more. We are seeing more growth in wind and other renewable energy sources than in any other forms of energy.  But we also have an American political system that is heavily dominated by corporate contributions to sitting politicians that makes breaking free of the status quo extremely difficult, even in the face of mounting evidence that our dependence on oil is squeezing the air out of our economic system and our planetary life-support system. 

The New York Times editorial catalogues the many ills of tar sands oil – damage to one of the last great intact forests on our planet, the Canadian Boreal, from strip mining tar sands oil (the oil is so dense it has to be dug out or heated to extreme temperatures to be pumped out), the extremely high energy and water requirements to produce oil from what is dug or baked out, the enormous greenhouse gas emissions associated with this extraction, and the devastating impacts on the ecology, wildlife, and air and water quality in both the region surrounding its extraction and along the pipeline routes and in refining communities thousands of miles away. 

And, as Thomas Lovejoy said to me after hearing a presentation from our colleagues from the Canadian Pembina Institute, “I trust that in one hundred years we will look back at what we were willing to do to extract the last drop of fossil fuel and realize our folly”.  But the reality is that there is so much entrenched power in the oil industry and its defenders that the folly – or really desperation - of digging up a pristine forest far to our north for a dirty, tarry oil is sometimes hard to see.   

But that’s where the debate over the Keystone XL pipeline comes in.  It has become a defining point – a line in the sand so to speak – regarding our energy future.  Do we strive to create new forms of energy and reduce our dependence on oil – whether from the Middle East or Canada – and lesson its impacts, as our President said, on our economy, our country, and our planet?  Or do we build another massive pipeline with all its attendant risks?  As the editorial points out, there are those in Congress that argue the pipeline would free us from higher oil prices and turmoil in the Middle East, but the reality is that the price of Canadian oil has shot up with the turmoil, just as oil everywhere else in the world has, because we are tied to a global system and because Canada does not cut us any special deals.

To quote the President again, “All of this means one thing: the only way for America's energy supply to be truly secure is by permanently reducing our dependence on oil. We have to find ways to boost our efficiency so that we use less oil. We have to discover and produce cleaner, renewable sources of energy with less of the carbon pollution that threatens our climate. And we have to do it quickly.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has asked for additional reviews of the impacts of the pipeline. We hope that this editorial, in her hometown newspaper, will encourage her take a deep look at the impact of building this pipeline, from the more “local” issues of the upstream devastation in Canada and very serious risks to our groundwater resources and public health in the U.S. to the impact on moving our planet to a whole new energy paradigm and quickly.

For those of you who have read the British Booker Prize winning author Ian McEwan’s book “Solar”, you’ll know that the entire book is based on this struggle, between a game-changing technology for harvesting the power of plant photosynthesis set against drilling in riskier, more difficult places. In the book, he references the oil industry’s new push to recover oil from the tar sands and deep water drilling as the oppositional threat to investment in new, planet saving technologies.  In our view, the stakes are really that high.   And thanks to the New York Times, there will hopefully be more people that agree with us after reading this editorial over their Sunday breakfast.   

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