Take a look at this video, from NASA http://youtu.be/...
Keystone XL will do one thing for certain. It's not just about how many temporary or permanent jobs it will create. It's not just what it will do to the price of gasoline at the pump. It's about how it will make conditions shown in the above video worse.
More below the Orange Omnilepticon.
The Senate narrowly avoided passing a bill to push Keystone through - but KXL will be back. Boehner and McConnell have promised it. They are oblivious to the long term consequences of going after some of the dirtiest fossil fuel out there (as is Mary Landrieu) The NASA video above, courtesy of this Scientific American article explaining it, shows we can not pretend this isn't a global phenomenon, or ignore who is responsible.
Winds play a major role in ushering CO2 around the planet just as they do storms. You’d even be forgiven for believing the animation simply shows clouds.
But beyond the obvious seasonal cycle that hints at CO2, there’s also another sign you’re watching something other than storms swirling around the globe. Long tails of CO2 extend from the U.S., China and Europe, the world’s three largest emitters. The deep reds and purples show the highest concentrations of emissions coming from these locations as well as the pooling of CO2 in the Arctic throughout the spring.
Emissions from rainforests in central Africa and South America also show up due to forest fires of both natural and human causes. But ultimately, it’s human emissions that have thrown a pretty finely-tuned system out of whack.
It's not just that KXL would facilitate continued reliance on fossil fuels when all indications are we need to get off them as quickly as possible. It's how the oil to fill that pipeline would be extracted that's especially outrageous. Andrew Nikiforuk at the NY Times explains in an Op-Ed what it entails.
Bitumen, the low-grade petroleum in Canada’s tar sands that would be carried by the pipeline to the United States, emits an estimated 17 percent more greenhouse gases overall than an average barrel of crude refined in America, according to a report earlier this year by the Congressional Research Service.
But for a vast stretch of western Canada’s boreal forest, the fight over extracting bitumen has already been lost. The question is, how much more will we lose?
Since the mining frenzy for this garbage crude took off in 2000, nearly two million acres of this ancient forest have been cleared or degraded, according to Global Forest Watch — a swath more than six times the size of New York City. If Keystone XL and other proposed pipelines are approved and bitumen production grows, much more forest will be lost.
...Basic mathematics underscores the absurdity of this brute-force enterprise. A study last year found that one unit of energy was required to produce the equivalent of five units of energy from the open-pit mines. For steam-extracted deposits, the ratio was roughly 1 to 3. As the Canadian economist Jeff Rubin put it several years ago, “when you’re schlepping oil from sand, you’re probably in the bottom of the ninth inning in the hydrocarbon economy.”
emphasis added
Read the whole thing - the description of the damage done to the land and water is appalling - and despite extraction industry PR, it's not something that can be remediated away. And we all know examples of what the promises of the fossil fuel industry are worth. That little thing called accountability? Just paperwork errors. They're very attentive to local objections to their operations.
NPR has been trying to make sense of why KXL is arousing so much passion, in a rather confused manner at times. The transcript fails to capture the inanity of the actual piece that aired, with one correspondent claiming that if we didn't get the oil from Canada, we'd probably be getting it from "less-friendly Venezuela". Environmental concerns are mentioned - but not really spelled out in any great detail. Robert Siegel asks why this one pipeline is such an issue, when there are already thousands of miles of pipeline in America. (No mention of how often they leak, break, etc.) It's clear from the audio at the link that this is just another political fight to these guys, no more important than any other. Fair and Balanced false equivalence.
Never mind the horrendous environmental damage already taking place. Never mind the consequences for Climate Change. It's not just what the KXL would do to the planet; it's that the whole thing makes less and less economic sense. There's currently a glut of oil on the market; gasoline prices are at record lows. The costs of extracting tar sands oil are so high, there simply may not be any profit in it. There are a myriad of sound economic as well as environmental reasons to abandon KXL. And yet those demanding KXL be built have abandoned all logic.
Charles P. Pierce has the best framing I've run across on this so far. I will quote the opening paragraph, and strongly recommend following the link to Read The Whole Thing.
Our old friend, the Keystone XL pipeline, the continent-spanning death-funnel that would bring the world's dirtiest fossil fuel down through the most arable farmland in the hemisphere and to the refineries along the Gulf Coast, and thence to the world, has revealed in itself an incredible capacity to make people act stupidly. It has moved beyond being a public policy issue among the ascendant Republican party, and within the movement conservatism which is that party's only remaining animating force. It has moved beyond being a financial windfall for the plutocrats whose money has been rendered the lifeblood of our politics, on both sides, but especially among the Republicans, who share a few more of the plutocracy's ultimate goals than do the Democrats. Among the Republicans, and among their most fervent political zealots, the pipeline has become an ideological fetish object, something to which fealty must be paid, a measure of loyalty and devotion to every other part of the political faith, a lasting symbol of triumph over the other side, like the steles erected in Mesopotamia or the pyramids. Its essential utility, its negligible economic impact, the environmental peril presented by the toxic goo it will carry through the fragile breadbasket of the country, the demonstrable bad-faith and neglect of the foreign corporation that will benefit from it, the blatant disregard of all potential (and, I would argue, inevitable) catastrophes inherent in the project -- all of these are beside the point. The Keystone XL pipeline must be built because it is the Keystone XL pipeline. The Keystone XL pipeline must be built only so that the people who oppose it are defeated. The Keystone XL pipeline must be built because it is no longer a construction project, it is an article of the conservative faith.
emphasis added