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Three Strikes and You’re Hot: Time for Obama to Say No to the Fossil Fuel Wish List
In our globalized world, old-fashioned geography is not supposed to count for much: mountain ranges, deep-water ports, railroad grades -- those seem so nineteenth century. The earth is flat, or so I remember somebody saying.
But those nostalgic for an earlier day, take heart. The Obama administration is making its biggest decisions yet on our energy future and those decisions are intimately tied to this continent’s geography. Remember those old maps from your high-school textbooks that showed each state and province’s prime economic activities? A sheaf of wheat for farm country? A little steel mill for manufacturing? These days in North America what you want to look for are the pickaxes that mean mining, and the derricks that stand for oil.
There’s a pickaxe in the Powder River Basin of Montana and Wyoming, one of the world’s richest deposits of coal. If we’re going to have any hope of slowing climate change, that coal -- and so all that future carbon dioxide -- needs to stay in the ground. In precisely the way we hope Brazil guards the Amazon rainforest, that massive sponge for carbon dioxide absorption, we need to stand sentinel over all that coal.
Doing so, however, would cost someone some money. At current prices the value of that coal may be in the trillions, and that kind of money creates immense pressure. Earlier this year, President Obama signed off on the project, opening a huge chunk of federal land to coal mining. It holds an estimated 750 million tons worth of burnable coal. That’s the equivalent of opening 300 new coal-fired power plants. In other words, we’re talking about staggering amounts of new CO2 heading into the atmosphere to further heat the planet.
As Eric de Place of the Sightline Institute put it, “That’s more carbon pollution than all the energy -- from planes, factories, cars, power plants, etc. -- used in an entire year by all 44 nations in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean combined.” Not what you’d expect from a president who came to office promising that his policies would cause the oceans to slow their rise.
But if Obama has admittedly opened the mine gate, it's geography to the rescue. You still have to get that coal to market, and “market” in this case means Asia, where the demand for coal is growing fastest. The easiest and cheapest way to do that -- maybe the only way at current prices -- is to take it west to the Pacific where, at the moment, there’s no port capable of handling the huge increase in traffic it would represent.
And so a mighty struggle is beginning, with regional groups rising to the occasion. Climate Solutions and other environmentalists of the northwest are moving to block port-expansion plans in Longview and Bellingham, Washington, as well as in Vancouver, British Columbia. Since there are only so many possible harbors that could accommodate the giant freighters needed to move the coal, this might prove a winnable battle, though the power of money that moves the White House is now being brought to bear on county commissions and state houses. Count on this: it will be a titanic fight.
Strike two against the Obama administration was the permission it granted early in the president’s term to build a pipeline into Minnesota and Wisconsin to handle oil pouring out of the tar sands of Alberta. (It came on the heels of a Bush administration decision to permit an earlier pipeline from those tar sands deposits through North Dakota to Oklahoma). The vast region of boreal Canada where the tar sands are found is an even bigger carbon bomb than the Powder River coal. By some calculations, the tar sands contain the equivalent of about 200 parts per million CO2 -- or roughly half the current atmospheric concentration. Put another way, if we burn it, there’s no way we can control climate change.
Fortunately, that sludge is stuck so far in the northern wilds of Canada that getting it to a refinery is no easy task. It’s not even easy to get the equipment needed to do the mining to the extraction zone, a fact that noble activists in the northern Rockies are exploiting with a campaign to block the trucks hauling the giant gear north. (Exxon has been cutting trees along wild and scenic corridors just to widen the roads in the region, that’s how big their “megaloads” are.)
Unfortunately, the administration’s decision to permit that Minnesota pipeline has made the job of sending the tar sand sludge south considerably easier. And now the administration is getting ready to double down, with a strike three that would ensure forever Obama’s legacy as a full-on Carbon President.
The huge oil interests that control the tar sands aren’t content with a landlocked pipeline to the Midwest. They want another, dubbed Keystone XL, that stretches from Canada straight to Texas and the Gulf of Mexico. It would take the bitumen from the tar sands and pipe it across the heart of America. Imagine a video game where your goal is to do the most environmental damage possible: to the Cree and their ancestral lands in Canada, to Nebraska farmers trying to guard the Ogallala aquifer that irrigates their land, and of course to the atmosphere.
But the process is apparently politically wired and in a beautifully bipartisan Washington way. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton must approve the plan for Keystone XL because it crosses our borders. Last year, before she’d even looked at the relevant data, she said she was “inclined” to do so. And why not? I mean, the company spearheading the Keystone project, TransCanada, has helpfully hired her former deputy national campaign director as its principal lobbyist.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the political aisle, those oil barons the Koch Brothers and that fossil fuel front group the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are pushing for early approval. Michigan Republican Congressman Fred Upton, chair of the House Energy Committee, is already demanding that the project be fast-tracked, with a final approval decision by November, on the grounds that it would create jobs. This despite the fact that even the project’s sponsors concede it won’t reduce gas prices. In fact, as Jeremy Symons of the National Wildlife Federation pointed out in testimony to Congress last month, their own documents show that the pipeline will probably cause the price at the pump to rise across the Midwest.
When the smaller pipeline was approved in 2009, we got a taste of the arguments that the administration will use this time around, all masterpieces of legal obfuscation. Don’t delay the pipeline over mere carbon worries will be the essence of it.
Global warming concerns, said Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg then, would be "best addressed in the context of the overall set of domestic policies that Canada and the United States will take to address their respective greenhouse gas emissions." In other words, let’s confine the environmental argument over the pipeline to questions like: How much oil will leak? In the meantime, we’ll pretend to deal with climate change somewhere else.
It’s the kind of thinking that warms the hearts of establishments everywhere. Michael Levi, author of a Council on Foreign Relations study of the Canadian oil sands, told the Washington Post that, with the decision, “the Obama administration made clear that it's not going to go about its climate policy in a crude, blunt way." No, it’s going about it in a smooth and… oily way.
If we value the one planet we’ve got, it’s going to be up to the rest of us to be crude and blunt. And happily that planet is pitching in. The geography of this beautiful North American continent is on our side: it’s crude and blunt, full of mountains and canyons. Its weather runs to extremes. It’s no easy thing to build a pipeline across it, or to figure out how to run an endless parade of train cars to the Pacific.
Tough terrain aids the insurgent; it slows the powerful. Though we’re fighting a political campaign and not a military one, we need to take full advantage.
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35 Comments so far
Show AllWhat lies and frauds are you thinking of?
As usual, you once more outdo yourself in displays of stupidity. This is another example of a post so steeped in ignorance and ineptitude that it really deserves no comment. You have the understanding of the issues you repeatedly weigh in on of a gibbering ape. And the irony is how consistently you accuse people like "Mr. McKibbert" of being divorced from reality, "Utopian", and self-indulgent, while your own point of view, once one wastes the energy decoding your incompetent writing skills, reeks of narcissistic posturing that fails to disguise a shockingly dim comprehension of things you feel compelled to comment on.
Forget him. His (or her) only purpose is to foster defeatism and despair.
Good response!
I was getting ready to rip this idiot a new one when I read your post and realized you had done a good job already.
But one totally idiotic thing warrants coment:
"Because the rest of the world is not participating nor are they willing to go back to the horse and buggy economy"
This ignorant stupid typical insular Texas-USAn seems to be unaware that it is only the USA that is not taking serious the threat of AGW and thereby becoming a global pariah and laughingstock. From Spain to China, large renewable energy projects and de-carbonization of the economy are underway.
And I always find it laughable that the detractors always present the "horse-and-buggy" as the only alternatvie to the personal automibile. Actually, even in the "horse and buggy days" - the latter half of the 19th century, only farmers and rich poeple used horses and buggys. Everyone else rode electric trolleys and steam trains - which went everywhere one would want to go, and communities were designed so evrything was a short walk away. They spent, on average, far less time going to work, buying necessities or visiting friends than a modern suburban USAn does in his car.
USans have been brainwashed - both mentally, and physically through a breathtakingly inefficient sprawling infrastructure designed to force poeple into cars. They think the automobile is a "convienience" when actually, even before considering its horrible impacts on the environment and human death and injury, it is an enormous, expensive inconvienience.
"the horse and buggy economy Mr. McKibbert apparently envision's as he suggests no alternative fuel sources to replace what he wants to limit."
He was probably assuming you were smart enough to know them already.
It's way past time but he won't.
With all due respect likeitornot, you're a moron. Utopian visions guide the imagination to manifest the sanity that is lacking in this dysfunctional reality that we all find ourselves in. The tired canard that any serious change will throw us all back to the suffering days of the "horse and buggy" allow people like you to shoot from the lip instead of offering creative solutions to a very real threat. McKibben has been doing his part to sound the alarm, and in this article points out yet again that our government, in addition to the American Way of Life, are some of the biggest threats to life on Earth. The fact that Bill calls for an insurgency, with the inherent risks from our police state and record of vicious persecution of environmental activists, is behind the "sky is falling" rhetoric you accuse him of.
In the twisted minds of the capitalist class, it is "utopian" to suggest that we live in the environment in which we evolved.
In their minds, the environment is a subset of the economy.
In reality, the economy is a subset of the environment. If we destroy our ecosystem, there will be no more profits.
As well as very little life as we know it on this planet.
Good point Earth Pope. The truth is feasible alternatives already exist and are implemented to a certain degree around the world. I for one generate all the fuel I need from a wind turbine that produces hydrogen to power my car, heat my home and generate surplus electricity. Admittedly the initial costs were high, but that is only because we live in a fossil fuel society that has refused to commit to change.
Bill McKibben is hardly 'Utopian' as he is merely laying out the pathway to irreversible destruction of the planet. He is quite right to say that the battle with be 'titanic' as a few special interest groups lay sway over considerable segments of the population as well as controlling established institutions of power and the mainstream press. People for example in Alberta have bought the false argument that the pipeline will create jobs and improve their lives and as a result have overwhelmingly elected the corporate lackey that Canadians are now stuck with as their Prime Minister.
If the general population of the U.S. hadn't been so effectively lulled into a peaceful, ignorant bliss by corporate America, a campaign of sabotage against coal mining and pipelines would begin along with political assassinations of the culprits responsible for our demise. The occasional misguided wacko who flies an airplane into the IRS office or walks into an office and guns down innocent people would have had a far more effective and lasting impression if they had chosen to go after the Koch brothers, Rush Limbaugh or Paul Ryan. That is what the face of real revolution would look like.
In the meantime Big Oil can openly taunt it's opposition as we appear defenceless against their wealth and power. Times could change though as more and more people wake up to the options we have to derailing this runaway freight train disguised as prosperity for all.
I get a bad feeling the McKibben is gearing up to confront fossil energy projects across the U.S. I'm worried that that strategy will backfire. People that live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, and alternative energy is uniquely sensitive to disruption. We have to admit that so many people in America don't take this AGW issue seriously, in part, because they hate 'hippies' and 'hippy solutions'. On this and other websites, you can read their barely-contained rage at all things 'liberal'. The GOP has successfully made AGW into a political issue when it is not. The solutions to AGW are no more 'communist' than the fossil-fuel perpetrators. The issue has been 'framed' by Faux News, etc, and it is that framing we must attack. Again, there is nothing uniquely 'liberal' about AGW or its solutions. As long as taking a stand on AGW defines one as 'liberal', too many people in America will turn away. That means that efforts to 'force' a confrontation against fossil fuel projects will actually reinforce people's prejudices against AGW solutions.
The greatest asset AGW believers have right now is the weather. We need to play that up and hammer home that worse is yet to come. The scientists will say, repeatedly, that that is 'unscientific'. So be it. People across America are getting hammered by the weather right now, and that makes them uniquely sensitive to our arguments. We need to make the link to things that matter in their lives, like high food prices, high gasoline prices, etc. We need to point out that this entire process of disruption is just starting.
Finally, we need to point out that we are in a unique period in history, where
1) we need a new energy infrastructure (to deal with AGW and peak oil)
2) we need to put millions of Americans back to work so that their consumption will stimulate the economy.
In the short term, this means MORE government debt due to higher infrastructure spending. Yet, spending on energy infrastructure is actually investment, and typically pays back seven times the original investment.
Politically, you are awash in folks who think the opposite. Already, they do so for partisan reasons having nothing to do with logic or science. How are they going to respond to news that AGW-greenies are disrupting fossil-fuel projects? With nationalistic partisan fury. They already hate AGW because they know its correct, but it appears to attack deeply held faiths in capitalism, individualism, and 'Manifest Destiny'. It actually doesn't, but thats part of the 'framing' job Faux and big oil have done on America. I understand your passion, but you should know big oil may be playing your passion against you.
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That (one sentence) you berated __ubrew__ for is not (all) that he posted. It was his (opening sentence)... You have taken it out of context to his entire commnets, which are very credible.
I was going to reply to (Likeitornot), but it isn't necessary. You guys did it well enough.
I will say Bill McKibbon was ignored and his (350.org) is history. We will never, ever, see 350 ppm of atmospheric Co2... If we live to 2014, we will very likely see 400 ppm or higher and methane levels are already the highest during the past 40,000 years and steadily and very rapidly rising.
There are viable alternatives to coal and oil fired power plants world wide,,, and nuclear... If we'd replace the fossil fuel power plants with geothermal and solar we could continue to live pretty much as we have enjoyed for the past 100 years.
Nature could handle the Co2 we emit from vehicle use, nature cannot handle all of the Co2 we emit and a high percentage is from power plants and mining the coal. Burning coal is also destroying our oceans and very critically important sea life, coral reefs and phytoplankton with acidification.
We either stop it or we suffer the (very dire) consequences... That's how it is... We can also continue to develop cleaner running vehicles and reduce our personal carbon footprints without losing our standards of living and in fact impove it with a much cleaner atmosphere.
Tax breaks should be given for builders and buyers of new homes that are heated and cooled with geothermal and have solar for (at least) heating water.
It could be done.... Could be !... We'll see.
And here's a bit of news from The Aspen Environment Forum hosted by The Aspen Institute and National Geographic. Here are the statement's of executives from one of the biggest corporations on the planet, one of the biggest polluting corporations ever. The article appeared in the Glenwood Springs Post Independent on June 1. The oil guys do accept the fact of climate change; they also admit to the reality of a changing paradigm. We either wrest control of this situation, climate change, from the cold dead fingers of greed and capitalism now or we will all cook in a witch's brew of toxic slim and this planet will be nothing more then a question in the minds of what ever is left alive.
http://www.postindependent.com/article/20110601/VALLEYNEWS/110539979/1083&ParentProfile=1074
Total world energy consumption: 15 terawatts. (1500 gigawatts).
Energy Earth receives from the sun: 120,000 terawatts. (120 million gigawatts)
(Science, May 13, 2011, p 805)
In other words, the sun is providing us with about 8,000 times as much energy as we currently use.
We'll never be able to convert anywhere near all of that energy into electricity, but we'll never need to. If we managed to make use of just one four thousandth (0.025%) of it, we'd have twice as much energy as we currently use.
The common refrain that wind and solar power are inherently too wimpy to compete with nuclear and fossil fuel is unfounded. It's not a matter of physics or technology. It's just a matter of will.
Yes. likeitornot, we all have to realize that taking a criticizing position on what Bill writes may feel good, but he is not utopian in his writing but hitting major points of contention; things we must acknowledge first, then we build a plan on how to fight it. Horse and buggy days are not on the picture, but a future based upon the courageous type of thinking that exhorts us to fight this madness, or just sit back and try and convince yourself there was nothing you COULD do, while the seas rise, the sky turns to crud, the Amazon burns, and we all choke. No thanks; I'll take Mc Kibbens words and apply them wherever I can.
Aw heck, folks, they're gonna do what they want to do no matter how we protest, it seems, and the way we've screwed up Mother Nature, we're all gonna die anyway. Believe it or not, I was always an optimist! But I truly do believe we've gone too far. As I once heard, "Do not peer too far." I think we'd be scared to death if we did!
In other words, JZYLDY,
you're an optimist until it gets hard and then you collapse into despair and depression. Please get some help and stop doing that; it's not useful. By saying that I don't mean to be snide or imply you're any less healthy than the rest of us. Geologically speaking, and even in terms of humans' time on Earth we're facing the imminent collapse of civilization and destruction of most life. We need to take the most massive, rapid and radical action in history at a time 90% of the human race is economically, socially and geographically unable to do anything, and 90% of the rest are paralyzed by fear, grief, rage and species-wide PTSD. We're all going to need some counseling before this is over, and we owe it to ourselves and the rest of the biosphere to get it—whatever we need to keep going as long as we need to keep going, and to be as effective as we possibly can be.
No one knows how far is too far; not you, not me, not McKibben or Hansen. The only way to be sure we're doing everything we can is to do everything we can til the moment we give up our last breath. None of us will know for sure that the world has been saved before we die; most of us won’t know while we’re alive if it's on its way to irrevocable destruction. We can’t let that stop us or even slow us down for one day.
Here's an idea whose time has come!
“Speaking of history, here's an idea. I propose we set up a wiki to serve as the "Climate History Book" as in, "will you go down in history as a climate hero or a climate criminal?" Every politician who knowingly shirks his/her responsibility for the sake of getting re-elected should be prepared to go on record with that position in the Climate History Book. Likewise every climate denialist. Come Judgment Day, and by that I mean the day when our children and grandchildren ask us what we did to protect their futures, back in the time when catastrophic climate change was still preventable, the record will speak for itself."
Source: “Countdown to 2012: The Road to Rio 20+” by Kelly Rigg, Huffington Post, May 31, 2011
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kelly-rigg/rio-climate-summit_b_868894.html#postComment
I also recommend:
"Climate Truthers: Why Global Warming Deniers Are Conspiracy Theorists, Not Rational Skeptics" by Sahil Kapur, Huffington Post, May 31, 2011.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sahil-kapur/climate-truthers-why-glob_1_b_869294.html
Another excellent essay:
“Are you a genuine skeptic or a climate denier?” John Cook, Skeptical Science, May 30, 2011
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Are-you-genuine-skeptic-or-climate-denier.html
They are already shipping coal across the Pacific from several ports. Every week there are several large trains carrying this one item heading up along I-5 between Portland and Seattle, headed for ports and ships to China. The amount on the way is staggering.
WHEN IN A HOLE--STOP DIGGING.
President Obama's current approvals of environmental damaging projects, such as a pipeline from the Canadian Oil Shales (the most destructive means obtaining fossil fuels) and coal mining in the Powder River Basin, eclipse his feeble efforts toward vital environmental reforms such as renewable energy and conservation.
The links between carbon pollution and the rising frequency of severe meteorological disturbances, marine life destruction from ocean acidification, coastal inundation , and increasing tropical diseases --are now as certain as science can be. As the worlds greatest contributor to carbon pollution, our leadership in its mitigation is essential.
President Carter understood this, and pursued meaningful programs for mitigating the environmental and related economic problems that now threaten us. For this he was rewarded with vilified by special interests who successfully replaced him by an administration willing to eradicate his reforms.
If Mr Obama seizes this opportunity to pursue the Carter reforms, history will treat him well--even if it also costs him re-election. Otherwise he will be remembered as the president who allowed the special interests to continue their destruction of our planet, while increasing the rift between those most responsible for pollution and those most affected by it.
I wish McKibben would run for President on the Green Party Ticket. That might force Obama's hand on environmental issues.
Gee, how many strikes are we on, now? Bill, I think you left out few couple digits.
Arithmetic is too lowly a subject to bring into a discussion about our planet becoming unlivable, but I still wish to note that 750 million tons of coal is the amount burned in the world every 4 months.
Another inappropriate observation: life was thriving before and during the time when plants extracted from the athmosphere the carbon we are putting back in.
I think you're a bit off, scribe. And your math is wrong, too. It seems Earth's atmosphere reached its current oxygen level somewhere between 1.5 billion to 400 million years ago, at least 50 million years before the carboniferous period, when most of the carbon was sequestered. And it had been increasing for about a billion years before that. It was during the carboniferous that our current atmosphere (more or less) was created by the interaction of all the parts of Gaia--life and its non-living components.
Civilization needs a certain low level of CO2 and we're beyond it now. Massive forest growth and subterranean processing of dead trees sequestered enough carbon to create the conditions needed to have the world we grew up in and we need to consciously repeat the process right quick.
www.answersincreation.org/free_oxygen.htm
Yes, the conclusions are nonsensical (long days, etc.) . but the report of the science is accurate as far as I can tell.