One of the recurring arguments in favor of Keystone XL—the hard-fought “bullet pipeline” that would create a direct link between the Alberta oil sands and the Gulf of Mexico—is that its defeat won’t keep oil in the ground or keep carbon out of the atmosphere. Canada exports 2.7 million barrels of oil every day, most of it strip-mined or melted from the vast deposits of oil-rich sand and clay under the forests of northern Alberta, and the United States is the country’s best customer. “This is oil that’s going to be produced whether or not there’s a Keystone pipeline,” the former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz told Ryan Lizza in an article for the magazine last September. “Get over it!”
Shultz is right, up to a point. Under the current Canadian and U.S. energy policy, cancelling Keystone XL is unlikely to prevent further development of the notoriously energy-intensive Alberta oil sands. In an article published on Wednesday in Nature, however, an interdisciplinary group of eight Canadian and U.S. scientists argues that probability is no excuse for complacency. Rather, they say, the threat of an increase in oil-sands production is all the more reason to reform the energy and climate policies of both Canada and the United States.
Keystone XL is only one of several proposed pipelines that would transport crude oil from Alberta to North American ports. Last week, the Canadian government granted provisional approval to the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipelines, twin pipelines that would transport crude oil from Alberta to the northern coast of British Columbia and import natural-gas condensate in the opposite direction. Four other major oil-sands-pipeline projects are under consideration in Canada.
Each proposed pipeline has its own corps of vociferous opponents, and the critiques are almost identical: new pipelines will cause more local environmental damage and more global climate change. “It’s official. The war is on,” Stewart Phillip, president of the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, told hundreds of Enbridge protesters, who gathered in downtown Vancouver last week. But each pipeline project is being evaluated more or less in isolation. Canada’s National Energy Board, which regulates pipelines, specifies that its decisions will not consider “downstream” use of the oil transported by proposed pipelines. (This spring, the board turned down twenty-six climate scientists who asked to testify on the climate impacts of yet another pipeline—the Trans Mountain—which would run from Alberta to Vancouver.)
“We keep sliding down the slippery slope, saying, ‘One more plan won’t hurt,’ ” Thomas Homer-Dixon, a professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario and a co-author of the Nature article, told me. “We’re not keeping an eye on the larger problem.”
The larger problem, according to all major models of the world’s future energy use, is that in order to keep average global temperatures from rising more than two degrees Celsius—to stave off the worst effects of climate change, that is—Alberta’s oil-sands production must be stabilized or reduced. Yet oil-sands production has doubled in the past decade and is predicted to double again during the next, and expensive new pipelines and other infrastructure solidify that prediction. The Canadian government has acknowledged that it will almost certainly miss its 2020 greenhouse-gas-reduction target by a wide mark, primarily because of the oil sands’ enormous carbon footprint. “There’s a fundamental contradiction between Canada’s energy policy and its climate policy,” said Homer-Dixon.
The authors of the Nature article call for a moratorium on North American oil-sands development until the U.S. and Canada have agreed on a binational strategy for limiting carbon emissions. “Reform is needed now,” they write. “Decisions made in North America will reverberate internationally, as plans for the development of similar unconvenÂtional reserves are considered worldwide.”
Given the gulf between Obama and the Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, on climate policy, speedy reform seems unlikely at best. But, without it, the domestic fight over Keystone XL could be, from a climate perspective, largely symbolic. Earlier this month, when Hillary Clinton made a book-tour stop in Toronto, the CBC broadcaster Peter Mansbridge asked her about the future of Keystone XL. She declined to comment, citing her involvement with the project as Secretary of State, but said that she would “love to see” a binational climate-change plan. “Canada and the U.S. are an energy powerhouse—the decisions should not be made one by one,” she said. “There should be an over-all effort to plan how we can do everything, from coördinating our electricity grids to doing much more to fight climate change.”
Photograph: Sue Ogrocki/AP.