President Obama Must Say No To Dirty Energy's Wish List

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Originally published at TomDispatch.

In our globalized world, old-fashioned geography is not supposed to count for much: mountain ranges, deep-water ports, railroad grades โ€“ those seem so nineteenth century. The earth is flat, or so I remember somebodyย 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 continentโ€™s geography. Remember those old maps from your high-school textbooks that showed each state and provinceโ€™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 forย oil.

Thereโ€™s a pickaxe in the Powder River Basin of Montana and Wyoming, one of the worldโ€™s richest deposits of coal. If weโ€™re going to have any hope of slowing climate change, that coal โ€“ and so all that future carbon dioxide โ€“ needs to stay in the ground.ย ย 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.ย ย 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 Obamaย signed offย on the project, opening a huge chunk of federal land to coal mining.ย ย It holds an estimatedย 750 million tonsย worth of burnable coal. Thatโ€™s the equivalent of opening 300 new coal-fired power plants. In other words, weโ€™re talking about staggering amounts of new CO2 heading into the atmosphere to further heat theย planet.

As Eric de Place of the Sightline Instituteย put it, โ€œThatโ€™s more carbon pollution than all the energy โ€“ from planes, factories, cars, power plants, etc. โ€“ used in an entire year by all 44 nations in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean combined.โ€ย ย Not what youโ€™d expect from a president who came to officeย promisingย that his policies would cause the oceans to slow theirย rise.ย 

But if Obama has admittedly opened the mine gate, itโ€™s geography to the rescue. You still have to get that coal to market, and โ€œmarketโ€ in this case means Asia, where the demand for coal is growing fastest. The easiest and cheapest way to do that โ€“ maybe the only way at current prices โ€“ is to take it west to the Pacific where, at the moment, thereโ€™s no port capable of handling the huge increase in traffic it wouldย represent.

And so a mighty struggle is beginning, with regional groups rising to the occasion.ย ย Climate Solutionsย 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 aย winnableย 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 titanicย fight.

Strike two against the Obama administration was the permission it granted early in the presidentโ€™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).ย ย The vast region of boreal Canada where the tar sands are found is an even bigger carbon bomb than the Powder River coal.ย ย By some calculations, the tar sands contain the equivalent of about 200 parts per million CO2 โ€“ or roughly half the current atmospheric concentration. Put another way, if we burn it, thereโ€™s no way we can control climateย change.

Fortunately, that sludge is stuck so far in the northern wilds of Canada that getting it to a refinery is no easy task.ย ย Itโ€™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 aย campaignย to block the trucks hauling the giant gear north. (Exxon has beenย cuttingย trees along wild and scenic corridors just to widen the roads in the region, thatโ€™s how big their โ€œmegaloadsโ€ย are.)

Unfortunately, the administrationโ€™s decision to permit that Minnesota pipelineย 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 Obamaโ€™s legacy as a full-on Carbonย President.

The huge oil interests that control the tar sands arenโ€™t content with a landlocked pipeline to the Midwest.ย ย 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 theย Cree and their ancestral landsย in Canada, to Nebraska farmers trying to guard theย Ogallala aquiferย that irrigates their land, and of course to theย 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.ย ย Last year, before sheโ€™d even looked at the relevant data, she said she was โ€œinclinedโ€ to do so. And why not? I mean, the company spearheading the Keystone project, TransCanada, has helpfullyย hiredย her former deputy national campaign director as its principalย lobbyist.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the political aisle, those oil baronsย the Koch Brothers and that fossil fuel front group theย U.S. Chamber of Commerceย are pushing for early approval.ย ย 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 wouldย create jobs. This despite the fact that even the projectโ€™s sponsors concede it wonโ€™t reduce gas prices.ย ย In fact, as Jeremy Symons of the National Wildlife Federation pointed out in testimonyย to Congress last month, their own documents show that the pipeline will probably cause the price at the pump to rise across theย 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. Donโ€™t delay the pipeline over mere carbon worries will be the essence ofย it.ย 

Global warming concerns,ย saidย Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg then, would be โ€œbest 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.โ€ In other words, letโ€™s confine the environmental argument over the pipeline to questions like: How much oil will leak?ย ย In the meantime, weโ€™ll pretend to deal with climate change somewhereย else.

Itโ€™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,ย toldย theย Washington Postย that, with the decision, โ€œthe Obama administration made clear that itโ€™s not going to go about its climate policy in a crude, blunt way.โ€ No, itโ€™s going about it in a smooth andโ€ฆ oilyย way.

If we value the one planet weโ€™ve got, itโ€™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: itโ€™s crude and blunt, full of mountains and canyons. Its weather runs to extremes. Itโ€™s no easy thing to build a pipeline across it, or to figure out how to run an endless parade of train cars to theย Pacific.

Tough terrain aids the insurgent; it slows the powerful. Though weโ€™re fighting a political campaign and not a military one, we need to take full advantage.

Originally published at TomDispatch.

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