One of the great benefits of climate change is the opening of the Arctic, making available vast new supplies of fossil fuel, most recently highlighted by a substantial mutual exploitation agreement between Russia and Exxon.
Seriously, of course this is awful. It won’t even lower the cost of fossil fuels significantly because it will be such a small slice of global oil production, and even that slice will take years to serve. More importantly, when (not if) some pipe cracks open under the ice in the middle of the four-month night, they (whether Exxon, Rosneft, Shell, BP, or whoever) will be totally helpless. Well, I mean the crews on the rig will be helpless. The lads and lassies back at corporate HQ will be doing the usual bang-up job of manufacturing reasons why no one could possibly have seen this coming.
The U.S. should at least try to stop this. Unfortunately, we don’t have much influence over either Russia or Exxon, and one major reason is that we have no serious national program for reducing fossil fuel use ourselves. We really can’t castigate Putin for their arctic adventures when we recently approved Shell poking a few 4,000-foot holes into the seabed off Alaska’s north slope), and all signs point to our imminent (and tragic) approval of the Keystone XL pipeline to bring very heavy oil from Canadian tar sands to Houston refineries.
If you haven’t noticed (which would be reasonable, considering the scant attention it’s paid in the mainstream media), the Keystone XL pipeline is the reason our foremost climate scientist James Hansen, agitator Bill McKibben, and activist celebrities like Darryl Hannah have been getting arrested in front of the White House. The White House? Aren’t the good guys in charge? Why aren’t these demonstrators over at the House of Representatives, protesting climate change deniers? Well, because we seem to have moved from an administration that denied climate change and let oil companies do whatever they wanted to an administration that supports climate science and lets oil companies do whatever they want.
There are two likely explanations for the administration’s lack of resistance to these potentially catastrophic developments. First, the price of gasoline is heading toward $4/gallon, and anyone opposed to drilling and pipelines is attacked on that basis (no matter that neither arctic drilling nor the tar sands will have any real impact on gas prices.)
Second, in the middle of a deep recession and with staggeringly high unemployment across the country, politicians may have finally realized that voters want them to do something about jobs. Unfortunately, Keystone XL has a well-oiled publicity machine bragging about the 20,000 jobs they say they will “create.”
This analysis is wrong. Simple arithmetic shows that energy efficiency programs aimed at reducing our need for fossil fuels will create more jobs than any pipeline, since the money that will go to Canada to pay for the oil would instead stay within the country and go to workers in weatherization programs, wind turbine factories, or electric car development efforts. This arithmetic was developed by Democratic Party policy wonks over decades, but their understanding seems to no longer be operative.
If this foolishness continues, arctic seals will soon find it much easier to see the oil-soaked polar bears trying to sneak up on them. On all other fronts, these projects are bad news in both the short and long term. Oil spills will darken the Arctic, or even Montana, and the ongoing increases in greenhouse gas emissions will ensure that the ice and the food chains we all (seals, polar bears and humans) rely on for our survival will soon be irrevocably altered or gone.
Photo credits: [Keystone Pipeline] U.S. Dept. of State | [Tar Sands Protesters] Ben Powless / tarsandsaction.org
