WASHINGTON – In the mishmash of speculation and assumptions that have driven the U.S. national debate over the Keystone XL pipeline, there is one undeniable fact no American wants to talk about.
Neither the Keystone project nor the oilsands would exist were it not for America’s uncontrolled addiction to oil.
Pipelines don’t cause climate change. Nor do oilsands. Consumption of oil does.
Yet throughout the debate over Keystone, this truism has been lost on Americans. Opposition to Keystone XL is primarily based on the claim that it will facilitate the expansion of oilsands development and therefore hasten climate change. This too is not true.
The only forces that will facilitate the expansion of the oilsands are the market forces dictated by demand and consumption. If, tomorrow, Americans cut their consumption of oil by a mere seven per cent, which is the percentage of its daily supply coming from the oilsands, every one of Alberta’s 127 operating oilsands projects would be forced to shut down.
So who are the honest brokers in this debate?
Nebraska ranchers are first in line. They flat-out say they don’t want the pipeline because they fear it will contaminate their land. The pipeline’s owner, TransCanada, is not far behind. The company has rightly argued that this is not a climate change issue because they don’t produce a single barrel of oil. They just freight the stuff to market.
Environment groups such as the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth have hitched their wagon to the Keystone XL debate as a tool to raise U.S. awareness of climate change. The issues of consumption and emission reductions have failed to move Congress or the American public. So they have turned a debate over climate change into one over a pipeline.
“It has captured the public imagination, which is not that hard when you see images of what is happening in Alberta,” Ross Hammond of Friends of the Earth said in an interview. “You see stories of what is happening to First Nations people, you see the resistance to the pipeline in Nebraska by Republican ranchers. So it’s become a climate battle.”
This is standard activist and political strategy. Find a whipping boy that captures the imagination and use the narrative and the energy it produces to galvanize public support for the real issue. It’s fair game.
Last week’s environmental impact study on the Keystone XL moved the pipeline from the economic and scientific to the political stage. It is now in the hands of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and President Barack Obama, both of whom appear committed to climate action.
Together, they will decide if the pipeline is in the national interest, which basically means the political interest of Obama and the Democrats.
Despite Canada’s flood of advertising here in Washington highlighting the U.S.-Canada friendship, it’s doubtful Obama cares if his decision rankles Canadians. It’s also doubtful he will worry about awarding a victory to a Conservative government that is his ideological opposite. With mid-term elections in November and his party desperate to hold the Senate, he cares only about how his decision affects his Democratic base, which is laced with environmentally conscious supporters, who are watching him closely.
“Was campaigning against the Keystone a mistake? Absolutely not,” Hammond said. “There are hundreds of thousands of people around the country now mobilized to act on climate. Hopefully, the political people in the White House see that.”
But what has the hammering of Keystone meant exactly? American daily consumption of oil – 18.55 million barrels a day – remains more than China, the U.K., France, Germany and Canada combined. New EPA restrictions on emissions do not promise a reduced consumption rate. Consumption continues its robust progress. This is the nation that just increased tax incentives to commuters who drive their cars while reducing them for public transit users.
So, what it means is abundantly clear. Obama’s struggle over Keystone XL essentially is an act of tilting at windmills. Keystone is not the adversary. It is the myth.
In the jack-in-the-box politics of America, the question is where will this myth lead. Will killing Keystone inspire a roused America to address the issue of their addiction? Environmentalists are betting on that outcome. But just as easily, it could create a whole new myth that leads them to believe the opposite: “Problem solved, time for that second car.”
