Keystone Round-up

Yesterday the President announced that his decision on the Keystone XL Pipeline would be delayed until after 2012 (read: the election) and that a more thorough State Department review is called. for. The pipeline would open up Canadian tar sands for import and domestic consumption in the United States. Environmental organizations have been protesting this for months, via high-profile tactics that nonetheless received disproportionately low-profile attention in the media. Some really, really smart people weigh in:

Michael Levi at NYT:

For green groups, the shortest route to blocking fossil fuel development appears to be leveraging local opposition. Many will seek to turn this not only against the Canadian oil sands but against United States oil production and coal exports, too. At the same time, they will find themselves increasingly appealing to the federal government for help in overriding local opposition to wind farms, solar plants, long distance transmission lines and other critical pieces of zero-carbon infrastructure. These two endeavors will conflict. 

Levi's point here is insightful. His chief criticism is that in order to block the pipeline and protect the climate, enviros had to triangulate with NIMBYs. The ends may justify the means, but will groups like 350.org and NRDC pay a price in credibility when combatting NIMBYism that just so happens to be targeted at clean energy projects? (See last year's round-up on Cape Wind.)

Levi expanded at his blog at Council of Foreign Relations:

Climate change won’t be addressed by rejecting a series of new projects – an effective approach will require positive change. I’m not referring to the endless debate over whether climate advocates need a “positive” message rather than a “negative” one. I’m just stating a simple fact: those who want serious action on climate change ultimately need to change the laws, and doing that will require sixty votes in the Senate and a majority in the House. Neither anti-Keystone style tactics nor the coalition assembled to oppose the pipeline will make that possible.

Bill McKibben at 350.org was quite celebratory, but I suspect Levi will be disappointed by his reaction:

In the meantime, since federal action will be in abeyance for a long stretch, we need to figure out how best to support our Canadian brothers and sisters, who are effectively battling against proposed pipelines west from the tar sands to the Pacific. And we need to broaden our work to take on all the forms of ‘extreme energy’ now coming to the fore: mountaintop removal coal mining, deepsea oil drilling, fracking for gas and oil. We’ll keep sending you updates; you keep letting us know what we need to do next.

Bryan Walsh weighed in at Time's Ecocentric blog, with a good round-up of coverage and some further cautionary optimism:

If the climate movement is going to make a real difference, it needs to mobilize the same level of popular and political passion towards developing renewable energy, spending more government money on energy research and development and passing climate legislation. This is hardly a secret—there were protests and campaigns for the climate bill in 2009 and 2010, and McKibben's own 350.org campaign is about a lot more than just stopping fossil fuel development. But I've rarely seen the sheer energy towards technocratic policies like cap-and-trade or renewable energy mandates that I've seen when visiting Americans who are vehemently opposed to hydrofracking, for example. Protests and passion may have helped stop the Keystone pipeline, but will it be enough to build a new energy economy?

Geoff Styles has a can't-miss look at the math of breaking our "addiction to oil" at his blog Energy Outlook:

Taking all these considerations into account it's not realistic to imagine that we could break our addiction to oil to any great extent for at least another decade. In the interim, we should certainly pursue all options that could alter the feasibility of such a shift in the years ahead, in a manner consistent with the fiscal constraints we face. I'm also not oblivious to what that implies for greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, though I would point out that our use of oil in transportation is neither the worst emissions offender, nor the easiest high-emitting segment of the US energy economy to tackle in that time frame. In the meantime, we are committed by virtue of scale, infrastructure and fleet requirements to burn many billions of barrels of oil over the next few decades, from wherever they may come. In that light, the administration's decision on the Keystone XL pipeline could prove to be a costly misstep, no matter how much political pressure they were under to withhold approval.

If the #NoKXL victory paves the way towards less carbon infrastructure and more clean energy, sweet. If it paves the way towards uninhibited NIMBYism, then we'll be faced not only with a greater energy challenges but a lamentable shift in our ability as a society to build the future. Even if Keystone is a victory, it represents one victory of many thousands needed to secure a clean energy future. Keep truckin'.