[NOTE: These comments were submitted on time to the State Department, and come late to DK. They are, hopefully, worth a read.]
For myself, rejection of KXL, as a key part of the dirtiest and largest extreme oil project in history, come down to the damage to the climate for 100’s of generations. Now, in history, we need to immediately launch the cleanest and largest energy and economic transformation. These are my 10 reasons why the Final EIR (Environmental Impact Report) is wrong and bad, and that the Keystone XL pipeline is not in the national best interest:
#1: KXL will increase tars sands use. The idea that the Keystone pipeline will not increase consumption of tar sands is prima facie absurd. Why would TransCanada and the oil industry want it unless it was going to facilitate them getting their product to market? The fact that they urgently want the pipeline is all the evidence anyone needs to know whether it will increase tar sands access to markets. They want to lower the cost of transport, so they can sell it a lower price, to increase its sales. Period.
Reasons #2 to #10 below the fold.... and a poll.
#2 KXL will increase carbon emissions. Since it increases tar sands access to markets, therefore it increases carbon emissions. The 830,000 barrels a day flowing through it becomes ~125 million metric (Mt) of CO2 a year. Billions of tons over its lifetime. Without KXL, if other transport methods result in 70% of the KXL volume, the difference is on the order of 1 billion tons of carbon pollution, or 18% of the US national 2010 emissions.
For one project to make such a measurable difference is significant and a liability. There is carbon pollution from extraction of this extreme fossil fuels, its carbon-intensive processing and also the burning of the petcoke byproduct. We're shipping that out to offshore for somebody else to burn Canada's carbon, since its illegal here. Our increased carbon pollution is global.
#3 KXL will contribute to climate change. Just to complete the logic back to President Obama's criteria: the billions of tons of carbon pollution from the pipeline will significantly negatively impact the climate. That's what significant emissions increases mean. To conclude:
A) the KXL pipeline increases access to markets,
B) access to markets significantly increases carbon emissions and
C) carbon emissions significantly impact climate change .
So those three reasons are the basic climate reasons. One can question those 3 points, but based on those 3, it's clear that the pipeline should not be built. And there are plenty more:
#4 Climate Moral Leadership NOW is needed. If we declare that protection of the climate is a moral issue for our nation, then we have a moral responsibility to be moral leaders. The America that I know leads by action. It’s in our national interest is to be leaders on what we know to be the best course of action. To establish leadership on climate change, it means we must declare and act to prevent it, to avoid calamity. Taking the first steps is in our national interest. We must. We must unilaterally start the process of weaning ourselves from the largest global infrastructure and market system ever built. We must wean off of that, and begin doing something else, renewable energy, that doesn't put carbon into the air.
If we don't lead, if we don't start to do what we say has to be done, then, perhaps, it won't be done. Is that in the national interest? NO. To wait, to delay, is the killer. The costs triple. We will have to mitigate: stop our carbon pollution. Everything that we might be forced to do in thirty or a hundred years from now, we can do now or in a hundred years. But if we don't do it now, it won't matter. It literally won't matter. The chance to stop climate change is now, and now we have to say no more oil projects.
#5 Safety Costs It is certainly not in the best national interest to “run a pipeline through it”.
We can’t make it safe at any reasonable cost, and any significant cleanup will cost billions. Any lack of integrity in the pipeline could be disastrous. Any sort of corrosion or explosion or equipment malfunction due to massive flooding (see Fukushima) or earthquake could be devastating. Add to that slow underground leaks that are only discovered by a farmer happening to walk through – through where a river of oil runs, seeking water.
A pipeline runs through the Kalamazoo River, and it created little rivers of dilbit, poisonous and heavier than water. We still actually don't know if we can clean up from dilbit spills. We have not done that yet. We spent a billion dollars and haven’t cleaned it up.
Dilbit is so extremely hard to clean up once it enters the watershed, it puts at risk sources for drinking water for millions, and for agriculture and for all of the environment. We will have poisoned and contaminated our land and many fresh water wells. It's not quite Chernobyl, but having poisoned water totally sucks as a nation. That's not in our best national interest.
KXL will not be safe. Dilbit is an awful sort of substance to be transported across the continent. Safety costs factors are actually very, very good reasons to deny the pipeline.
#6 Health Impact Risks The significant hard cost to prepare and react to multiple accidents factors into safety, and there is an incalculable cost of lives prematurely ended from the exposure to strange chemicals - nobody know what those risks actually are. The risk of injury and long-term damage to the health of our population is radically increase by the rapidly expanding oil infrastructure and particularly this massive pipeline. The health risk to large populations that could be affected by contamination from this pipeline is a NO GO - a significant risk factor. Long-term exposure to even low levels of this aromatic hydrocarbons witches brew (even without drinking it, per Mayflower) is a legitimate concern. Such chemical compounds at high pressure in hundreds of miles of pipeline, risks exposure that it get into aquifers is just too great a risk because we will be leaving it for generations who literally can’t drink the water.
Health and safety-wise, we're not even sure a spill of dilbit can be actually cleaned up. On the scale of Chernobyl, we are setting ourselves up for a major Petro-nobyl.
#7 KXL FEIR is incomplete: Oil study done by oil industry analysts. The study should have independent scientific environmental, climatological experts as co-authors, if you consider the climate and environmental analysis important, which the President has said he does.
This reason is that the State Department erred in its composition of the report authors.
The authors should have been balanced - not just oil industry analyst scope. The report needed to include more detail and senior advice from scientists on environmental and climatological impacts in order to fully assess these scopes of impact. Things are not the same as they were when the original Keystone was certified. There are these factors that we now understand better and recognize that an uncontaminated environment and a stable climate are much more important.
#8 KXL FEIR is an oil-biased piece - done by oil industry analysts that have at least some general vested interest in the oil industry. Maybe not illegally – we will see. But between illegal and what's in the best interest of our country, one really should look at who these people are and their perspective. They're clearly understand things from an industry angle, and even a good faith effort could yield conclusions that don't actually match up with our overall national interest. Besides the direct vested interest question, its reasonable to look at the authors of any commissioned study and look at the final product and say, yes even though you are an expert in the industry, you're coming from a certain perspective, given your experiences within that industry (which has a certain value culture). I personally interpret this report, recognizing that it furthers the interest of the oil industry in general. That is a good reason to reject this report, and its conclusions. I conclude, with the bias in this report, that its recommendation is actually not in the best interest of this country.
#9 KXL will not provide more jobs relative to renewable energy.
The whole idea and purpose of a pipeline is to reduce the number of jobs to a minimum in order to make it more economical to transport bulk material. Other than temporary construction jobs, KXL only adds a few handfuls, on the order 30, long term jobs. So the jobs rationale is specious and trivial.
If you believe that the climate is a problem, we have to start shifting gears from jobs that produce massive amount of carbon pollution to jobs that don’t produce massive carbon pollution. The history of renewable energy is that for the same investment dollar you end up with more jobs and no fuel cost. In the long run, climate change will be very, very bad for jobs, unless you like filling sandbags during floods, or recovery work from storm damage or cleaning homes from dust storms. The best thing for jobs and the climate is to reduce emissions through making our nation more energy efficiency in homes in and commercial buildings and transportation. Installing solar panels is relatively labor intensive and so is wind turbine maintenance.
#10 KXL is a huge 30-year step in the wrong direction, a Titanic mistake.
KXL is a turning point. We turn this ship around or not. It is a dividing line, a continental divide between two futures. We know that at some point (if we believe in climate change, and follow what President Obama said: that we were going to not allow it) we have to turn the Titanic ship of this nation around. We have to stop green-lighting fossil extraction and processing infrastructure expansion. We just have to.
We can't reduce carbon emissions unless we extract and burn less carbon. This is going to be the turning point, or KXL will invest our nation into at least 30 years of infrastructure dedicated to extracting, moving and burning hundreds of millions of tons of carbon. It would be a massive step in the absolute wrong direction. KXL locks us into our demise: Thermogeddon.
We know if we keep increasing the infrastructure to burn more carbon that the temperature of the earth will keep increasing. We are radically changing the climate and it is producing more extremes of heat and rain and floods and storms, and is raising the level of the oceans. That’s escalating records at record pace at ~1 degree C. What’s going to really happen at 2 degrees C and beyond is extremely risky.
There's lots of evidence that cascade effects will kick it up and drive CO2 beyond any hope of mitigation--far beyond anthropogenic input. We are on a runaway oil train. The oil industry is out of control in terms of extracting far too much carbon, which drives us off the carbon cliff: the “far more carbon pollution than the climate can stand” cliff.
To me, this FEIR is a bad report. IMHO It says that we can and should speed up the sinking of our own ship. We're going down on the course that we are on. The gash in the side of our climate ship is about 2/3 the way through of what we can dump into the atmosphere. Yet, we are not really trying to turn the rudder away from this destructive path, or else this decision would have already been made.
KXL will drive us right into this iceberg, right into “Game Over for the Climate” territory, the results of which we is under the waterline. We literally don't have a view of what could happen beyond 2C, and that should be terrifying. The captain of this Titanic and his crew (Obama and the Administration) need to declare that we need to turn the wheel - turn the ship around. KXL might seem like one little chunk of ice. But this is the tip of the iceberg that will take us to places, conditions that no one on this planet has ever experienced before and no one should want to.
Continuing Business-As-usual policies that green-light KXL’s and such infrastructure leads ultimately to self-destruction. We have to start turning the ship sometime, somewhere. It is in our best interest NOW much more than trying to shift after the damages been done 30 or 50 years hence. Time is running out. Earlier is better. Now is in our best interest.
Now is the time to say NO to more oil, more dirty oil, oil and more poisonous dirty oil that's going to cook the world. If this country is to protect the climate, it cannot facilitate burning more carbon
Keystone XL is the pipeline to thermal hell.
That's my biggest single reason KXL is not in our best national interest.