The Keystone XL Pipeline and Climate Change
Most of us who pay attention to the key environmental issues of the day have some opinion on the legitimacy of the Keystone XL pipeline. At the risk of oversimplifying:
• Hard-core environmentalists say the approval of the project means, in the words of Dr. James Hansen, “game over for the environment,” as the release of that huge amount of previously sequestered CO2 into the atmosphere will cause an unprecedented level of climate change.
• The “drill-baby-drill” crowd sees the pipeline as a requirement to ensure that American economic interests continue to thrive in the 21st Century.
• A few intellectuals, e.g., Robert Rapier, with whom I’ve had occasional talks, take a detailed scientific tack that shows that the project itself has essentially zero net impact. Rapier (and several of my colleagues who have studied the living bejesus out of this project) point out that the oil will eventually go somewhere, that the actual effect won’t be as great as most people think, etc.
But could it be that our response to the project is symbolic? Eewww. Did I just write that? Doesn’t the dubbing of a certain action “symbolic” imply, on an actual scientific level, that it’s meaningless? Normally, I suppose that’s true, but I wonder if it’s so here.
Maybe it’s time that we as a civilization said, “We cannot continue to extract the dirtiest form of energy that was bestowed upon the Earth over the last hundreds of millions of years, and burn it here in the blink of an eye, catapulting the CO2 concentrations of the Earth’s atmosphere to the highest levels it’s seen in the last 15 million years — when we know that the last time carbon dioxide levels were apparently as high as they are today — and were sustained at those levels — global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today and the sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher. Maybe we need to draw a line in the sand right here, and say that we simply won’t stand for it, regardless of whether it’s the Chinese, the Japanese, the Canadians, or the Americans who become the short-term beneficiaries of the tar sands in Canada.
Indeed it’s possible that this gesture would be merely symbolic. But I’d vote for it in a heartbeat.
