New York Magazine ^ | Jonathan Chait
The State Department today released its long-awaited environmental impact
analysis of the Keystone XL pipeline. The analysis is key because President
Obama announced last summer he would not approve the pipeline unless it was
found to have no significant impact on climate change. And that’s what the
analysis finds. It argues, as many other analysts have concluded, that if we
block the pipeline, Canada will just ship the oil out by rail. So, what public
policy reason is there to block the pipeline? There really isn’t one. Indeed,
the environmentalists' obsession with Keystone began as a gigantic mistake. Two
and a half years ago, the environmentalist James Hansen wrote a blog post
alerting his readers to the pipeline, which he concluded would amount to “game
over” for the climate, as it would lead to the burning of enough new oil to moot
any effort to limit runaway greenhouse gases. His analysis was based on a simple
back-of-the-envelope calculation that turned out to be wrong in several
respects, the most important being the assumption that blocking the pipeline
would keep the oil in the Canadian oil sands in the ground.
The anti-Keystone movement was an accident. I recently argued that it was a
huge mistake. Numerous allies of the environmental movement replied that it did
make sense, after all. (See Joe Romm, Matthew Yglesias, Charles Pierce, and Ryan
Cooper. All of them insisted that Keystone is indeed a good issue for
environmentalists to organize around because it’s easy for people to understand.
As Yglesias put it, “You sometimes need to focus on slightly eccentric issues
that happen to have good organizing attributes.”)
Cooper mockingly asks readers to envision a protest where organizers shout,
“What do we want?” “More stringent carbon dioxide emission regulations on extant
coal-fired power plants!” “When do we want it?’ “After the extraordinarily
complicated rule-writing process over which the president has no direct
control!” It certainly may be easier to get people excited about opposing a
pipeline. It may also be hard to get people excited about favoring new
regulations.
But if your goal is to limit greenhouse-gas emissions, you need to have a
strategy designed to advance policies that limit greenhouse-gas emissions.
Stopping Keystone doesn’t do that. EPA regulations would. Would blocking the
Keystone pipeline make it easier for Obama to issue tough regulations on
existing power plants, and to negotiate an international climate treaty in 2015
after such regulations bring us into compliance with our reduction targets?
I don't see how. I think it would feed criticism by opponents that Obama is
captive to environmentalists, even to the point of following their quixotic and
marginal obsessions. Approving Keystone might give him more credibility to
defend tough regulations. It's not guaranteed, of course. But the intuitive idea
is for a movement to organize around the issues that matter, not the issues that
are easiest to explain. Building a movement by misleading people is a strange
choice
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