TC Energy scraps Keystone XL pipeline project after Biden revokes key permit
reuters.com
reuters.com
Alex Blumberg: ...and, [pipeline company] Enbridge says, stopping the pipeline won't stop the development of tar-sands oil. The oil will just travel in less safe ways, like by rail.
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: But Tara says that argument is missing the entire point.
[Attorney and activist] Tara Houska: The idea is always like, you know, we're replacing old ones that are leaking. How about instead of replacing them and expanding them—which is what you're actually doing—you decommission the old one and pull it out of the ground and clean up the earth that you've contaminated?
Ayana: I like that option better.
Tara: And there's always, like, this premise of, well, it's gonna get shipped anyway. No, it's not. Like, that's the whole point. No, it's not. Your industry is on its way out. And that's the point. And we all know that. You can't sit there and say, "Oh, well, it's gonna go by rail or it's gonna go by ship anyway. No, it's not. The tar sands are on their way out. And that's the reality.
Fuck underpaying for carbon emissions. There need to be some current winners made into losers if we pretend to be humans that care about the future of humanity.
Blocking pipelines is not a logical way to achieve that cost increase. That would simply make oil more expensive because it's now less safe/efficient. That does not actually cause the externalities to be priced in like a tax could achieve.
Would be funnier to let them build the pipeline, and then not let them use it.
I think this is purposely confusing two different arguments.
Nobody can deny that oil use is becoming less and less attractive and that is a good thing for everyone.
But if it is "on the way out", what's the need for blocking the pipeline? The need is that actually there are still significant usages of oil remaining even though it's "on the way out".
So those significant remaining usages actually DO add validity to the argument that blocking the pipeline will cause additional demand for oil trains/tankers. Otherwise there wouldn't be a need to take any action at all.
Pushing the transportation demand to trains/tankers is a GOOD thing, it makes everything visible and obvious and it prevents the oil company from hiding the factors that make this reserve the pile of flaming dogshit we all know it to be.
It's economics. Shipping by pipeline is cheaper per gallon than shipping by rail/truck/ships. Even accounting for the huge capital costs to build the pipeline in the first place, once a pipeline is secured the marginal costs of shipping additional gallons is so much lower there would be more prices at which it would be profitable to extract tar sands oil versus if the tar sands extractors have to also account for the increased marginal costs of rail/truck/ships.
Tar sands extraction has already seen mass stoppages when the Saudis flooded the supply chain with oil and dropped the oil costs below what was profitable. (Tar sands extraction is worse for the environment than classic oil drilling and thankfully at least some [though never enough] of those externalities are at play in its costs versus oil drilling.)
Right now the price is up again and tar sands work probably is going back into place and it probably will still be shipped by rail/truck/ship. So the short term problem is the same.
But stopping a pipeline today keeps the pipeline from being a fully depreciated asset for oil sands five/ten/fifteen years from now when the supply/demand curve potentially invert and oil is super cheap again (because demand is way down). The higher marginal costs on shipping especially matter then, because potentially it stops tar sands extraction from again being profitable in far more frightening high supply/low demand periods. In that case it should mean less supply gets put onto the market, especially from high cost extraction techniques such as tar sands.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment
We do not need this oil in particular, there's more than enough other oil, so there's no foregone conclusion that we are going to extract these tar sands.
Further, the need for stopping this particular pipeline is that we are not transitioning quickly enough, and it's a bad capital allocation that hurts our ability to make the investments we do need.
The pipeline isn't being installed to lower the carbon load of bringing the oil to market, it's only there to reduce costs, which means that there will be greater amounts of that oil brought to market, versus cheaper oil from other sources that don't require as much energy intensity. The pipeline only exists for these particular oil investors to profit, instead of other ones in other parts of the world.
what is amazing about this decision is that there was no rush to the courts for an injunction, no reliant interests. the company doesn't even put up a fight. I wonder why that is?
The existence of a pipeline only proves 2 or 3, it doesn't necessitate 1.
"We were told or otherwise made to believe your industry should stop doing what it's doing. Therefore, you should stop doing what you're doing." ("I know the future. You don't exist. So you might as well stop existing now.")
The irony is this person has no idea of "the reality." If the reality was that the pipeline served no purpose, had no value, it would not have gone through the lengthy process it's already been through. And if tar sands oil had no value, it wouldn't be retrieved.
But it will be. It will be retrieved and it will be transported, somehow, for the simple fact that people and industries use it. And if you choose a costlier method of transport, then people will feel those costs. Simply saying "No, it's not gonna go by rail or go by ship. Because I said so." is blind arrogance.
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2021/06/10/tar-sands-compa...
The oil will still be extracted. It will still be transported to the entities who use it.
The point of the pipeline was to lower the cost of moving oil, which would have accordingly increased oil production.
The goal of environmentalists is to make oil production as expensive as possible. Increasing the costs of transportation is part of that.
If you don't like oil, there's an easy solution, stop buying it.
It would be there if we wanted to make the necessary infrastructure investment. Currently everyone's looking at amazing new battery technology to enable electric transportation, but that isn't the only way to get there. We could be electrifying the interstate highway system so that cars can get power directly from the roads, and only need batteries for short local trips.
If we had wanted to enable electric transportation, say, forty years ago that would have been the only option. It would have been expensive but we could have done it. Now, batteries are good enough that we have a choice, but I still think electrifying the highways ought to be something we're seriously thinking about doing.
Electric roadways aren’t mutually exclusive to a credit either. I think putting solar roofs over roadways might be interesting for energy use and keeping the roadway safer. On sensitive areas you might keep the roads from getting snow and ice buildup in the winter.
So I agree that it would have made more ecological sense to say "sure, build your pipeline, but we'll take a steadily increasing cut for every gallon that goes through it, and we're going to spend it on developing solar/hydro/nuclear"
If the pipeline is still profitable, great! The net environmental impact will be positive. If not... tant pis
These have very tangible effects not only on wildlife but humans who say are getting their water from a contaminated water table.
"And yet you live in society and participate in its processes! Clearly this invalidates everything you have to say"
My criticism is not that people criticize things well failing to be paragons of virtues. My criticism is that i dont think removing pipelines will improve the situation (if anything it makes it worse). Reducing dependence on oil is the answer. That doesn't mean going cold turkey overnight, but it is the thing that should be concentrated on.
I feel like attacking the pipeline to fix climate change, is kind of like trying to fix the drug problem by attacking safe injection sites. It might feel like a victory in some sense but its not actually improving anything and is probably actually increasing harm.
A majority of Americans support the right to choose [1], a path to amnesty for undocumented persons [2], restrictions on firearm purchase and ownership [3], moving off of fossil fuels and treating climate change like the threat it is [4], a wealth tax on people with a net worth of over $50m [5], the expanded voting rights in HR 1 [6], etc. etc. etc.
Sorry I know I'm overreacting, but I think a lot of people are unaware of how dire the situation really is. If we truly lived in a democracy, we'd be moving towards at least some of these things.
[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/05/06/about-six-i...
[2]: https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000177-d4f4-dd7d-ab77-fcfd4...
[3]: https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000178-cfbd-d112-a97e-ffbde...
[4]: https://morningconsult.com/2021/04/27/paris-agreement-climat...
[5]: https://www.businessinsider.com/over-half-americans-see-weal...
[6]: https://www.filesforprogress.org/datasets/2021/4/dfp-vox-hr-...
Why do Americans use so much energy? Because it's cheap as a result of excluding the externality of pollution from the price.
Why do Americans generate so much waste? Because there's no reasonable way to avoid it other than to never purchase any goods that are:
- over-packaged
- packaged in non-sustainable packaging
- created/manufactured in wasteful processes
...because the externality of waste generation isn't factored into the price.
Why do Americans ship such a huge percentage of goods using fossil-fuel-fueled transportation? Because for years we didn't build rail in service of propping up the automobile industry, and because the externality of pollution from car exhaust isn't factored into the transportation price.
There are plenty of people who diligently split their trash, compost, glass, paper, plastics. There are plenty of communities that charge by the pound of unrecyclable waste. There are plenty of subsidies for installing solar panels, and energy companies giving credits for green energy generation (and other programs, like offering to provide only green energy for a premium). After years of this, we still have a huge problem. Individual action isn't the answer. It was always a smokescreen pushed on us by fossil fuel energy companies to avoid taking responsibility themselves.
If someone can afford solar panels and an electric car (or don't need a car to get to work), more power to them, but that doesn't describe the vast majority of society.
But that is another discussion. The real point is in the first R of the hierachy of the three R's : Reduce, Re-use, Re-cycle. No need to compensate huge use of energy, if you're not using the energy in the first place.
Some of the things we do in our household to reduce energy / CO2 / oil footprint (by decreasing order of impact):
* own a house that is well insulated
* instead of heating it, put on a sweater
* instead of using an A/C, close shutters during hot parts of day during hot season
* go on holiday by train or car
* own a tiny car, that is 10 years old (we have two boys)
* use the car only for exceptions (I bring the boys to school in a bus, train for work)
* no red meat, very little other meat
* buy less stuff
* recycle packaging / paper
* when we buy stuff, take into account packaging (reusable bags for rice, pasta, nuts, chocolate, etc)
Does this eliminate our footprint? No. But we are using, by my account, 20% that of an average American household. Can everyone do all of this? No, probably not. Buying a well-insulated house is expensive. Not everyone can use public transport. But if everyone made an effort, the world would be a different place today.
It doesn't matter if only you reduce.
Nearly everyone can do something to reduce their footprint.
We need to encourage more small changes and avoid bashing people for not doing a complete lifestyle redesign straight away.
Just to keep it concrete, there’s huge benefit to reducing meat consumption - and you can still capture a lot of that benefit without going 100% vegan.
Rail can transport anything. Containers, tankers, even rocket booster segments.
Yes, we're absolutely taking a short term hit, but investing in general purpose infrastructure that can be adapted for new technology and demands is a good thing. The continental rail network started off with coal powered steam trains, then diesel, now diesel-electric and even some pure electric locomotives. Maybe this century it will evolve past fossil fuels as well.
So yes, cancel the pipeline, but in its place invest in the safety and reliability of rail networks.
There's a reason pipelines exist, and that is in their simplicity of transporting the product efficiently. Sure they can't transport anything else, but I don't think too many rocket boosters would be traveling to remote areas in Canada.
Nitpicking to make a point: Employing people and paying them well is not just an expense; it has some enormous benefits.
If the goal is to pay people, then just pay people, no need to do it in a roundabout way of forcing an inefficiency into the system.
Employing people is great gain only if they do something productive. If you can employ less people that is greater gain because those others can do something else useful.
A poorly paid person will have a smaller car, smaller house, use less electricity and gas, and throw away far less trash.
In fact, wealth is very strongly correlated to environmental impact. Sure, rich people might be buying electric cars and recyclable coffee cups, but it nowhere near offsets the bigger house with A/C...
Now to be fair, oil pipelines are usually safer still. But the solution here is obvious; stop using oil.
Sure, but will we see rail transportation of oil blocked in a similar manner? Otherwise we might just be making our current uses of oil less safe and efficient for nothing.
I think this needs to be achieved some other way, like through carbon taxes, not by blocking pipelines.
> Sure, but will we see rail transportation of oil blocked in a similar manner? Otherwise we might just be making our current uses of oil less safe and efficient for nothing.
No, we won’t see our rail transit of oil blocked because it should not exist. The oil should be left in the ground.
If you want to go back to a pre-industrial society, sure.
Ask the town in Quebec that had many people burned alive from a oil train derailment how safe it is.
The Lac-Mégantic rail disaster occurred in the town of Lac-Mégantic, in the Eastern Townships region of Quebec, Canada, at approximately 01:15 EDT,[1][2] on July 6, 2013, when an unattended 73-car freight train carrying Bakken Formation crude oil rolled down a 1.2% grade from Nantes and derailed downtown, resulting in the fire and explosion of multiple tank cars. Forty-seven people were killed.[3] More than 30 buildings in the town's centre, roughly half of the downtown area, were destroyed,[2][4] and all but three of the thirty-nine remaining downtown buildings had to be demolished due to petroleum contamination of the townsite.[5] Initial newspaper reports described a 1-kilometre (0.6 mi) blast radius.[6] ~ Wikipedia
The world’s poorest people won’t suddenly be able to afford all this oil infrastructure if the richer nations stop consuming it. Especially if doing so reduces economies of scale.
2. From a global warming perspective, there is no such thing as an ethical jurisdiction to emit carbon from. Carbon is carbon, and it affects us all whether or not it comes with other forms of pollution.
We should be decommissioning pipelines, not building new ones.
That doesn't seem to be correct. Maybe you mean spill incidence is higher when transported by rail? Table 9: https://imgur.com/a/3uIKVZc -- this makes it very clear that total volume spilled and volume spilled per incident is far greater from pipelines.
FWIW this table is from a paper that is trying to argue that pipelines are safer. But they quantify safety with the metric "how many people get hurt." In making that argument they make statements like: "The majority of incidents occur on road and rail." << duh, people are usually not around when pipelines spill. Also driving is hazardous.
Also rail cars and vehicles are monitored, whereas long pipelines are not so easily monitored; some spills may not even be detected for a long time. Related physics explaining a little bit of why long pipelines are hard to build: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msxMRwQyXI8
There's a rail line running right through the central business district of my town, and it's the primary route between Alberta and the Pacific ocean. I sure wish all that oil was travelling through a pipeline instead of my town.
If you’re only going to use oil, it’s worse. But rail is much more flexible than a pipeline, and it can easily move food, people, garbage, and other various products that a society needs.
The long tail risk is just higher when it comes to a pipeline.
The actual evolution process was wood-powered steam trains, then coal-powered steam, then electric, then diesel-electric.
Yes, in the US, several railroads electrified then deelectrified, because it turns out that (for freight at least) diesel-electrics get you most of the useful benefits of electric locomotives without all of the problems of having to string up electric catenary and worry about provisioning traction power stations for your 1000s of miles of mainline track.
India for example has been investing in this convertion last 2-3 years and are expecting 4-5 billion dollars savings every year by going full electric in the next 2 - 3 years.
The networks are very different , single public owner/lots of private owners , frieght/passenger ratios are different, Density is different etc,however there can be cost savings
Some types of oil must be diluted with other types of oil can consume it, such as tar sands oil.
Can you give some reasons why you think that?
I think pipelines make sense as long as we are continuing to use oil. This particular pipeline project was pretty stupid though, and kenny's support of it was either gross incompetence or an indirect way to defraud tax payers.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-air-product...
I hypothesize that a hydrogen leak is less destructive than an oil leak, but that's still a problem.
Plus hydrogen burns much more easily and the flame is transparent.
That question isn't intended as rhetorical
While I get the idea and oppose oil infrastructure made possible by the greenhouse gas subsidy (i.e., that the gasses are dumped on the public), rail can't efficiently transport electricity. It's not infrastructure for low-carbon or zero-carbon energy (with some possible future exceptions).
Find a place with abundant electricity. Ship aluminium ore there by rail. Smelt the stuff there with the cheap electricity. Ship the resulting aluminium back.
The end result is more energy efficient than using a power line to move the electricity to the aluminium ore.
Forget about trains and build more planes.
If paywalled maybe you can still see https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-FR879_expert_G_...
That's why the US for the most part uses trucks not trains.
Interestingly, the max-flow min-cut theorem was apparently developed as a way to find the best way to sabotage railroads (i.e.: how to cause to cause the most harm with the fewest "cuts" = sabotage).
Nope. The interstate highway system followed the railroad system. It also followed world war 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System
Rail infra investment stopped after ww2 and never restarted. All of these railroad engine power train tech improvements may have happened, but the rails on ground infrastructure peaked in the 1950's .
Interstate highways also made most of the US accessable to heavy aircraft in case an emergency airport needed to be assembled on short notice. It's a network of runways. Interestingly, the German Autobahn has a lot more curves, but it's debatable if that is to make them harder to bomb or to keep drivers awake.
Also many US cities had full fledged local rail systems that were paved over to make way for roads and cars.
No, they were not.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/landing-of-hope-and-glory/
> That's why the US for the most part uses trucks not trains.
Do you mean, that's why the U.S. built infrastructure around interstate highways and not rail? Why did European countries and other places conclude differently?
Is there anything you can recommend reading about it? The more scholarly the better.
Likewise, to learn to live without fossil fuels, shutting down supply will lead us to face the actual problems we have to solve, not theoretical. Obviously, don't shut everything all at once, and protect the helpless, hospitals, and necessary things.
Among the rest of us, no one will be injured. Entrepreneurs will innovate. Inconveniences will lead to learning and life improvement.
Russia, China, India, and Iran must be so happy with the ways we shoot ourselves in the arm. Fracking moved us closer to getting away from the Middle East, but the pipeline cancellation, the fracking fights, and the anti-nuke efforts is forcing us to get closer to them.
I disagree with this framing that "we shoot ourselves in the arm." As a US citizen I think a better way to think of it is that we insist on proceeding with caution when it comes to diversifying our energy supply, and while in the short term we do have a dependence on foreign fossil fuels, there are certainly many efforts being made to reduce that. And many of these efforts don't involve looking for more non-renewable oil.
If you think of our energy supply as a long-running software service that can't go down, replacing foreign oil with fracking+local pipelines is like replacing old short term dependencies on new short-term dependencies that we pay maintenance cost on. Negative externalities must be factored into those cost decisions. Similarly nuclear is like building a very complex internal service that, if done right, will pay huge dividends, but if done wrong, can be quite catastrophic and expensive.
For example, there is the “methanol economy”, in which solar or nuclear energy is used to create syngas from water and CO2. The syngas is then transformed into methanol or other higher energy density fuels. When they are burned, you get the CO2 and water back - it’s a closed cycle, like a battery in an electric car. But, it is practical for air transport propulsion.
It seems to me that the main outcome is that the same amount of fuel is transported with a costlier (environmentally, and financial) vehicle.
https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-05/global_em...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/Electric...
https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/styles/medium/pub...
https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-05/global_em...
https://c.files.bbci.co.uk/16D76/production/_108485539_optim...
Transportation is 14% which is not insignificant. But EV transport still requires charging from the powerplant, materials, mining, disposal. I am hopeful we will overcome them but we will exchange pollution problems for new different pollution problems.
In contrast, we are scaling solar, wind, and storage production at a huge rate, and the increases in production capacity are huge each year.
It's been a few months since I've don the napkin math, but at the current rate of production increases, extrapolated to 2035, we will just barely be able to replace all fossil fuel energy with renewable electricity. Electrification of many primary fossil fuel uses, such as heat and transportation, will require 1/3 to 1/4 as much energy (see the amount of rejected energy in the top right here [1]). But at the same time, the developing world will be greatly increasing their use of energy services, and renewables will be the easiest way to do that. So even though developed countries' total energy use will go down as we electrify, developing countries' use will go up.
[1] https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/images/energy/us/...
Energy production with out long-term, long-duration energy storage doesn't solve our current problems.
Q. Has longer-duration energy storage been solved with out my awareness?
There are several ways to provide energy during the worst sun and wind lulls, and though we will likely use all of the below to some extent, we won't know the full mix until the next 10-15 years of tech development show which is the cheapest mix of techniques.
1) overprovisioning solar and wind generation to provide more during the lulls, at the cost of providing extra most of the time
2) flow batteries, such as vanadium redox, are having ever increasing pilots. There are also long-duration startups with extremely experienced teams that are taking bets on completely novel chemistries that will give us more shots on goal.
3) As we decarbonize industry, we will end up with massive amounts of energy stored in chemicals. Industrial policy is creating massive electrolyzer capacity for hydrogen, which doesn't store super well, but which will be the base for transformation into other chemicals that can be used for fuels such as ammonia (primary use is fertilizer but might end up being used for ocean shipping too). Current fossil fuel tech for creating and breaking hydrogen chains may make synthetic kerosene economical, which would allow us to keep the current airline fleet flying without modification.
4) Demand response. Currently the electrical grid has very little price information, which will not be economically efficient as we switch to nearly all primary generation having zero marginal cost, and times of great excess of electricity supply. As we build time-based prices into electricity, we will find that demand for many large energy users is quite flexible, and we will discover the true demand elasticity. This will make the entire economy more efficient than our current utility pricing schemes (at least US utility pricing, I'm not as familiar with the rest of the world.)
We don't need to know everything right now, because the energy world will be unbelievably different within 10 years. After nearly a century of almost no change, the energy world is undergoing a tech revolution which will catch nearly all the old giants off guard. Which is why so many fossil fuel majors are having to write down so many assets, and have not read the writing on the wall that even their financiers have now seen. Utilities (again, at least in the US), are significantly less sophisticated than even the fossil fuel majors, and have no idea of the huge changes they will see in the coming decades.
I agree with most of what you have written. I have to disagree on nuclear though.
I think nuclear is no different than the other avenues to clean energy and will also go through the same new tech development to reduce costs, risks, and management overhead. At least that's what I hope!
I am an Albertan who lives in Calgary, where TC Energy is headquartered. I am by no means a shill for Big Oil and am thankful that I do not work in that industry.
Having said that, I do not think that blocking the supply side of the equation helps as much as certain parties believe that it does. As long as the demand for oil exists, the suppliers will find a way.
This also has side effects that some parties do not consider: Railroads have finite capacity, and when more of that capacity is absorbed by oil shipments, there is less capacity for the transportation of other goods, like grain.
There is demand for energy. Cheap oil is a great source. If oil gets more expensive because it now has to be shipped with more risk in smaller quantities via rail/truck, then renewables can compete even better.
I don't think there's any realistic policy option to reduce energy demand as a whole, but if we can reduce demand for certain types of energy we might have a shot.
I'm all for reducing oil company profits, but I think it would be better to do that through carbon taxes than by forcing operational inefficiencies.
I don't see this as an environmental move based on the political signalling it buys and other moves made by the US administration. If we agree that we want to reduce demand for certain types of energy than the first thing we should do is promote FF from Canada that are relatively clean, highly regulated and produced by a trusted democracy over the ones that will be used to fill this void from 3rd-world dictators with no environmental controls.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57180674
I don't think demand reduction was an objective with Keystone.
A market-based acceleration in renewables energy use requires well funded energy companies to pivot. High priced oil doesn't get them to do that. Low priced oil doesn't either, but a sharp drop in oil prices can.
Some other incentive is still necessary.
Of course in the end, the real solution is a carbon tax that factors the bad externalities of oil into its price (which would likely make it unprofitable for a lot of purposes regardless of the free market price). However, that seems unlikely in the near future due to one party denying that the problem even exists. In light of that, I could see a (grim) argument that really rough solutions like denying pipeline permits are the best we’ve got on hand at the moment.
This has never been true for consumers. The only “demand” it impacts are companies, who then move their jobs to China where they can use coal powered plants.
There is no world where this artificial increase in prices is good.
Green energy is improving, nuclear is improving. It’s improving because it has to compete with alternatives, like oil. Green energy is not cheap or widespread enough today for consumers or industry. So it’s only the people of the country that lose.
If new new oil demand makes the capacity go from 9% to 12% that is one thing, and quite another going from 68% to 98%...
Whether or not people want to think about it, Canada exports a lot of natural resources, and if they want to stop, which is fine, they better have a real plan for transitioning those industries, and have an idea of what they will do in lieu of a that huge chunk of their exports going away. Its really easy to say something like "just transition away from oil" but history has shown that it is very difficult to do, especially for a province beholden to federal policy.
These costs are massive but are largely being ignored, or just offloaded as only Alberta's problem. They are running the risk of hollowing out a huge portion of the economy without any real plan which has pretty severe consequences as seen in places like the rust belt, which will end up sowing the seeds of populist resentment amongst communities that will feel used and abandoned, especially in places that already feel largely ignored by federal politics like western Canada.
Do you have a moment to talk about Calgary? Canada is the fourth largest producer of crude oil in the world. Not bad for a county half the population of California over the same area as the USA.
They might talk a good talk, but they aren’t going to stop oil production until they run out. Same as anyone else.
Interesting take on "competitive". I guess we could encourage renewables or capture externalities, but why do that when we can rig the entire system "for fairness"?
... which is more expensive than transporting by pipeline, thus increasing the cost of oil, cutting the development of marginally-viable oil exploration projects, and hastening the point at which it is uncompetitive with renewables and killed. This is working exactly as intended.
That said, running a refinery also has local costs that are usually externalized, in terms of local pollution and populace movement. Canada itself though has a fairly large amount of space, but perhaps a surfeit of people. Why doesn't TC energy (or other Canada producers) build a refinery somewhere in Canada and transport to there?
The only real lever the government has is increasing fuel taxes, but that would result in roots from people who are barely making it before massive increases in transportation costs.
3% of oil goes towards residential uses.
> transportation of all those goods you buy
16% of oil goes to diesel for transportation
>plastic products, fertilizer that has allowed us to feed millions,
1.5% of oil goes to all petrochemicals combined
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...
The vast plurality of oil goes to making gasoline which is used in motor vehicles.
You missed the point. The upthread poster made a gag about BNSF as a way of arguing that this was somehow a corrupt gift to the transportation industry (which... yeah, whatever).
I quipped about Tesla to indicate that, no, the market adapts along every available axis and renewable power is if anything more likely to benefit than some rail outfit that just happens to be owned by Warren Buffett.
I mean, putting aside the political & scientific issues around clean energy etc.
How does the government get to revoke a permit after significant work and money was already spent based on getting the permit in the first place? Does the government pay compensation? Does the company have to file a lawsuit?
I'm kind of fascinated that people see such a breezy permit as an important factor in the decision to build something or not. Of course they need the permit to construct the border facility, but they aren't going to make the investment decision just based on the existence of the permit.
This sort of scenario is precisely why private interests lobby so hard to add arbitration rules to international free-trade agreements, btw; they want to protect their investments against changes in political winds, by moving judgements on compensation to a dodgy world of ad-hoc pseudo-legal structures.
>In Thursday's ruling, Morris wrote that the State Department's analysis of potential environmental effects fell short of a "hard look" on the effects of current oil prices on the viability of Keystone, cumulative effects of greenhouse gas emissions, cultural resources and potential oil spills.
Yes it does.
> rather that the analysis wasn't as thorough as necessary.
It was revoked because it was illegally issued (in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act and thr Administrative Procedure Act) because the analysis was not sufficient to meet the legal requirements for issuing it.
All that has happened here is more oil getting shipped by rail with a higher carbon footprint.
[1] https://www.suncor.com/-/media/project/suncor/files/investor...
I think the better way would be to build the pipeline without subsidies at all and increase taxes on it. So we won't see a cheaper price and have a better mode of transport, but that's probably not politically feasible, so this is the next best option.
I think the comments declaring "oil will find a way" are completely wrong. This is not about eliminating oil and I think most supporters of the scrap will know this.
But trains and trucks will definitely be used. And will use more carbon.
It’s pretty similar arithmetic that this will result in more carbon released.
Comically, the way to stop production is to lower the price of oil so extraction no longer makes sense from these locations. If anything a higher price for oil means more extraction because it becomes more profitable. And more oil transported using dirtier means.
Oil spills from trucks and trains are much more detectable, meaning residents don’t need to worry about them secretly contaminating water supplies. Pipeline spills are harder to detect, so you don’t necessarily know until oil has already seeped into the ground.
There are a lot of good reasons to stop oil pipeline projects.
As to transportation options, boats and trains are extremely efficient to the point where pipelines don’t make that big of an environmental difference.
Will the permit holder be compensated for lost revenue from the oil pipeline they had been given permission to build but now cannot?
What would happen had the permit been revoked after the oil pipeline was already operational?
The fault of these companies was pretending that they can ignore the climate crisis.
The choice is actually quite simple: Either we find a way to stop projects already in the pipeline and sometimes already in operation or the planet gets burned. I know which one I'd choose.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipeline_transport#Other_sys...
If you’re already playing with other peoples’ money and trying to change behavior I would suggest less stick, more carrot.
Simple exercise:
- Fire-up Excel - Model a future with 100 million electric cars - Determine how much power (not energy) will be required to plug them in every day
Now answer a simple question: Were is this energy going to come from?
Then realize that the oil economy goes way beyond just fuel. This is a complex problem with an almost unlimited number of variables.
For example, the buttons and the cloth of the shirt you are wearing are likely made with oil byproducts. The same is the case for parts of the sewing machines, tools, computers and even the building where it was made. The machines required oil-based lubricants. The factory used other oil-based products, such as release agents and other chemicals. The people who work there, in turn, could not live or even get to work, without myriad products made from or that require oil derivatives. And then there’s the vehicles, transportation and communications systems, all of which depend on oil for materials (plastics) and fuel.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Ignoring reality does not lead to better outcomes.
Go back to power required to charge 100 million vehicles. Given our current energy infrastructure we would have to burn astronomical quantities of everything we can burn in order to support “clean” transportation. Either that or we have to start building nuclear power plants at a pace and a scale never before seen.
Not saying this pipeline saves the world. I am simply suggesting we are failing to exercise critical thinking and, because of this, tend to focus on the wrong problems.
It is far easier for politicians to sell “pipeline = evil) than to discuss the energy realities of all-electric transportation at scale.
One gets you votes. The other one gets you voted out. And that’s how we end-up on the wrong path.
Having said that, the US seems not to have the legal or ethical framework in place to make them work, because the leaks are too common, too slowly-discovered, and too enormous. So maybe doing pipelines correctly is actually uncompetitive with other forms of moving oil, because time and time it again it seems to be a rejected option by the people building leaky pipelines.
We are very much removed from this reality. We pump gasoline at the station and buy plastic spoons and forks without a sense of what it took to get there.
Pipelines are no different from any other engineering endeavor. They are difficult to design and build and, no, we can’t make them perfect any more than you can make a hammer or a screwdriver indestructible. I don’t think it is about the US being incompetent or careless. I also don’t think it is about nefarious intent on the part of corporations. I could not imagine a nastier industry to navigate, from a political and regulatory perspective.
This, I think, is the problem. The deep political divisions in the US create a situation where energy policy is, at best, disjointed, disorganized and likely misplaced.
I think shutting down modern pipelines is ridiculous. Not because I love oil. No. I think it is because I try hard to be realistic about not just energy, but also the massive and deep chain of products and services that depend on oil derivatives. Simple example: Tens to hundreds of millions of people world wide would have died from COVID if we did not have oil and it’s derivatives to support what we had to do to protect ourselves, fight it and find a cure.
Perspective is important.
Having said that, it seems that the enormous savings to be had by using pipelines should be channeled back into more sensors, robustness, and/or monitoring. The article I linked cites $50B of annual savings on oil transported by Keystone XL. Great! Maybe let's put 10-20% of that back into more sensors, hiring more people for monitoring/inspections, or better.
When I look at the Wikipedia page of oil spills, I want oil pipelines if the US can be like Canada, where spills often release <1000 barrels (still a lot, but representing very fast response), not a place where it's hundreds of thousands of barrels, and not detected by the companies themselves most of the time.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2018/10/11/which-is-...
For example, I remember travelling to Europe and South America and having better mobile phone services and features than the US. The reason at the time is that we were stuck with a massive investment that was made in the early days of cell phones. Other parts of the world, where deployment was what I might call phase 2, had the ability to take advantage of next generation ideas and technology.
I would imagine the same is true of oil pipeline technology. I don't know any more about oil transportation than you do. Yet, I think I might be correct in making the assumption that older (50+ years?) pipelines exist in the US and it it these that might lead to the conclusion that we don't build them well. The facts, however, could be precisely the opposite to this conclusion: We built them very well. They survived 50+ years without issues. And now they are starting to show their age and need extensive repairs or replacement.
This is where I think politics might get in the way. I think you actually want brand new, high tech pipelines. They are likely far better for the environment across a range of criteria.
By turning oil and energy into a political mess we can't make the right decisions, which might very well be to build new high-tech pipelines and replace the old ones.
The oil economy isn't going away for a long time, 100+ years. Transportation fuel is only one variable in the vast array of benefits we derive from fuel. Look around your house, everything you own depends of oil. It would be hard to identify items in modern life that would be possible without oil and oil derivatives.
Here's the fallacy committed by those equating oil with bad things for humanity or the planet. We would literally have to go back to pre-industrial revolution humanity in order to be able to truly get to a post-oil society. Now imagine the damage eight billion people would do to the environment if we could not rely on oil and derivatives. We would burn down every forest on the planet. We would deplete every single farmable patch of soil of nutrients. We would destroy ecosystems at an unimaginable rate. A post-oil society cannot support eight billion people on this planet without doing unimaginable damage all ecosystems we touch.
We need to do all we can to make cleaner use of oil and derivatives. It isn't going away. And having a war against the very infrastructure that makes it safer is truly not intelligent.
As a citizen of Earth, I'm of mixed feelings. On the one hand heavy crude from the tar sands, which is some of the most polluting oil on the planet, because it requires so much energy to extract, will keep shipping by rail to the United States. That involves more spills than a pipeline and burning yet more fuel. That's bad.
On the other hand that makes the prices higher and both constrains the volume of output and the price at which it's profitable to extract. Both things that mean more of that tar sands oil will stay in the ground. That's good.
On the other, other hand - more tar sands oil staying in the ground means more oil from elsewhere in the world, often from politically unstable or unfriendly regimes will replace the oil the US otherwise would have imported from Canada. That's potentially bad.
I'm not sure which outcome is better for Canada, the USA, or the world. I'm pretty sure neither Obama, Trump, not Biden had any accurate idea either.
Edit: and the downvotes are because you disagree with my economic analysis? Or because you think any of those politicians actually have a solid, fundamental analysis including unintentional consequences? Get real, they did it for political reasons, that's why they came out on different sides of the issue based on party lines. Actually judging by the downvotes, I think it was a smart political move. I really wish HN would require a comment with a downvote, even if it's only visible to the OP.
This statement has some inaccuracies in it, it is true that it will literally result in more oil from other places, but, given supply and demand, it will result in less additional oil from other sources.
Whenever a cheap source of a good is eliminated the average production price of that good is increased (assuming there is an exhaustible supply of that good at that price) so the removal, or even inconveniencing of access, to tar sands extract will cause an up-tick in prices overall and a likely unnoticeable dip in supply.
Additionally, as a Canadian myself, the Alberta oils sands have recently contributed strongly to an economic crisis in Calgary as extraction profitability has sharply declined. There is a lot of oil still left up there but Alberta needs to act now, while it has the funds to do so, to transition their economy. It is not a feasible long term revenue source.
Alberta seems to be expecting this oil thing to keep the province going forever; it is over. Diversify, try new things, for your sake and the sake of the rest of Canada. Please stop expecting this to get better. 2015 was a warning, it's now officially ending and the time to start moving on has passed, every day not diversifying the economy of Alberta is just a day of economic procrastination.
Edit: Sure energy security, keep some for us, but let's not make it the backbone of our economy.
Energy security, not propping up authoritarian regimes with terrible human rights records, not requiring military interventions to protect a stable supply of oil.
Maybe not good enough reasons to change the balance, but reasons nonetheless.
People keep saying that Alberta needs to diversify as though this is some sort of epiphany that the province refuses to have, but it honestly just reveals the ignorance of the person making that claim regarding the current economic state of Canadian provinces.
Given strongly inelastic demand, I would say very marginally less.
> Whenever a cheap source of a good is eliminated the average production price of that good is increased (assuming there is an exhaustible supply of that good at that price) so the removal, or even inconveniencing of access, to tar sands extract will cause an up-tick in prices overall and a likely unnoticeable dip in supply.
I think we're saying the same thing?
> Additionally, as a Canadian myself, the Alberta oils sands have recently contributed strongly to an economic crisis in Calgary as extraction profitability has sharply declined. There is a lot of oil still left up there but Alberta needs to act now, while it has the funds to do so, to transition their economy. It is not a feasible long term revenue source.
Yes, they had better get serious about transitioning the economy away from oil before Calgary becomes a ghost town. People sure aren't there for the weather.
People will find ways to reduce their car commute when prices spike and, especially, oil power plants will defer operation to cheaper (possibly less clean :sigh:) alternatives.
Secondly, the majority of Canada's economy is service oriented, but due to the way Canada is structured, the super-majority of the transfer payments that the federal government makes to the various provinces comes from resource extraction generated revenues.
The following statements are not meant to be value judgements, they are just simple statements of fact that should give color to the context that is missing from the parent comment. For non-Canadian HN users, in order to guarantee a relatively equal standard of living for Canadian citizens regardless of where they happen to live, the federal government distributes billions of dollars every year to various provinces, taking from the more wealthy provinces and helping shore up the budgets of the less wealthy provinces. These revenues have been generated in overwhelmingly large part by resource extraction, and the service oriented economies of other provinces show 0 possibility of taking up the slack for these revenues should resource extraction end, they simply don't generate enough surplus on a per-capita basis. Without these revenues large portions of Canada would face absolutely devastating cuts to government revenues and thus services, and frankly no government has really put forth any sort of solution to this, outside of larger deficits on a temporary basis. How Canada navigates this difference between its aspirations, a service oriented non-resource economy, and the reality on the ground, an absolute dependence on resource revenues for current quality of life, is probably the biggest question it will face in the 21st Century.
And yet, Alberta was the most economically successful province, literally subsidizing all others. Go figure how the service transition worked out...
Norway has been handling their fossil fuels remarkably intelligently.
How so? Oil production is ticking back up and is higher than any time since about 2010.
The only problem here is that Alberta was forced to give up all its money in equalization payment, and has none left.
Because all modern-day chip are so much environmentally friendly...
[1] https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/major-canadian-oilsands-producers...
[2] https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/oil-companies-net-...
It's fine to encourage companies to try and do things like that, but it's also important to keep that congratulatory tone in check when it comes to a world that still incentivizes profits singularly and doesn't necessarily put the price of ecologic externalities that they might deserve.
Net-zero sounds perhaps cool but there should be some important education done for everybody to understand that it's far from Gross-zero (or near zero), which would be much closer to what we actually need to avoid some pretty cataclysmic collapses sooner than most people realize.
Edit: I take that back, it's always been a Canadian company. I'm thinking about something else, there was another takeover or merge with a US company back before 2000. That's before the Suncor merger.
Very heartening to see though.
The downvotes are because they disagree with your politics.
The tough part is all your statements hold truth. We must face that if we want to find real answers.
Down voting is supposed to be used to indicate a comment has no relevance to the conversation. Conversely, each of your statements must be part of the conversation.
[ upvoted ]
( instantly downvoted )
[ upvoted ]
( instantly downvoted )
This site's guidelines: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
Maybe people don't like nuance and prefer to see the world in black and white where it agrees or disagrees with their views. I don't like to believe that's true, but it probably is in general.
Now, if you wanted to criticize the downvote mechanism in general, maybe it would be considered off topic by HN rules, but it certainly wouldn't be unreasonable.
Edit: Also, perhaps some of your downvotes are due to your commenting on your own downvotes. Personally, I always downvote those kinds of comments (including the self-fulfilling-prophecy version: "I'll be downvoted/flagged for this, but..."), even if I find the rest of the post interesting, or completely agree with them. But I have no idea if other people do that.
Actually, it's not. It should be, but it's not. In fact, on HN, downvoting purely to signal disagreement, without offering any rebuttal or substance, is working-as-intended. pg and dang have said so themselves. It's one of the reasons HN is not actually the place to go for those who are intellectually curious, despite that being the site's claimed purpose.
I do feel a bit sympathetic for the company driving this project. They invested billions of dollars and over a decade of time only to see the project killed at the last minute. This is a consequence of our erratic and unpredictable political system - every four years we seem to completely change energy policy. It's the price of our democracy, but I'm sure it's frustrating for CEOs.
Edit: It's frustrating to see the parent comment get downvoted. If you disagree, explain why in a comment - no need to bury a perfectly reasonable perspective.
Have you got a good source for this? I can only find information about ocean oil spills for transport. The rail ones are barely ever mentioned and much less than the pipeline ones.
... (not my area, but I was curious too)
> Or because you think any of those politicians actually have a solid, fundamental analysis including unintentional consequences? Get real, they did it for political reasons, that's why they came out on different sides of the issue based on party lines.
Or maybe Obama, Trump, and Biden had different ideas about what "better for the USA" meant that led to them making reasonably rational but different decisions? Maybe, maybe not. But I'm not sure your assumption that all three of those presidents have a worse understanding of this issue than you do is justified.
Yes, that's basically what politics is about in a nutshell, making different tradeoffs based on values. I'm not sure any of them actually had a sufficiently detailed analysis or model to justify having any certainty in their decision.
> But I'm not sure your assumption that all three of those presidents have a worse understanding of this issue than you do is justified.
Don't get me wrong, I don't understand the issue either. I'm just honest about that fact and merely espoused why it's a complicated dilemma. This is all unintentional consequences and it's not clear which was the best call for the environment, the countries involved, or the world at large.
I would have liked to see an in-depth study of the tradeoffs and a rational decision based on that rather than a political decision, which seems to be what we got all three times.
Killing the pipeline will help but not in a vacuum. Continued policy/pressure needs to be applied to move away from oil, which is probably best for the sake of the world.
Your other points were creative even if a little /edgy/ and could(will?) get conversation on their own.
Electric is approaching winning on its own merits. Giving billions to horrible people in the mean time is not an acceptable solution.
Oil independence is great for America and Canada. Independence “from” oil is a separate if related matter.
A half way point is to allow drilling and pipeline and add taxes to local oil and major tariffs on external oil.
We get oil independence, alternative tech will be encouraged to replace expensive oil. Only losers are people that use oil.
Shut down as many pipelines as we can, stop producing oil, build solar farms, build wind farms, build nuclear, everything should be on the table and done simultaneously if we want our grandchildren to have a live remotely similar to ours.
The framing of governments and media seems like only half steps are possible, but those steps will still kill us.
Obviously if all oil companies magically shutdown today human society would be cataclysmically affected. That would never going to happen short of a "Childhood's End" style alien invasion. Any change, even with extreme external pressure, would be gradual.
That's why one must always advocate for the position purely and without compromise. Shut down this pipeline, shut down the next one that comes up. Etc etc.
"Reasonable" perspectives have not helped the planet at all in the past 50 years.
==========
EDIT:
One more thought, let's consider how EFFECTIVE the oil industry has been. Continuous profits, continuous increase in production, great subsidies. How did they do this?
Well, for one thing, they knew about global warming was caused by burning fossil fuels decades before admitting it publicly. They argued from the strongest framing of their position: "fossil fuels don't cause global warning so nothing should change"
It's only in the past decade or so that they put on a face of caring about renewables. That's because public pressure grew enough that the strongest portrayal of their side was acting like they're already doing everything they can.
Moral of the story, if you want to be affective don't compromise. The benefit of caring about the environment is at least we don't have to lie about our side, just boldly state truths and what should happen.
It's also possible that eventually we'll make plastic using CO2 as the feed-stock rather than oil.
https://www.api.org/oil-and-natural-gas/wells-to-consumer/tr...
Just 190,000 more miles to go !
Besides the environmental issue of "we don't want to spend any extra money subsidizing oil production," there's also a strong amount of concern about the impact along the construction pipeline--particularly among the indigenous lands it would travel against the wishes of the indigenous people who live there.
Breaking Keystone benefits Russia, but y'all smart people ain't ready for that yet.
I am also deeply concerned that the withdrawal of permits signals an extreme degree of instability in America's business environment, which future investors and entrepreneurs have to now think about. Why would anyone invest here if they can't be sure what the government will allow or disallow next, especially with the fast-moving leftward political shift? A weaker business environment has numerous secondary implications. If the US economy is weaker, while other economies are getting stronger, our influence in the world will be impacted (economically, militarily, culturally).
It's a gas pipeline, not an oil pipeline, which is very different.
> The reality is we need oil.
The reality is that we need -- and for the most part have -- cleaner sources of energy. Whether or efforts to kneecap supply is a good move right now is certainly up for debate.
> Now this oil will be transported through some other means, at a higher cost to consumers, with potentially greater environmental risk.
That's true, and is not great. But if you make oil more expensive, cleaner alternatives become more attractive.
> I am also deeply concerned that the withdrawal of permits signals an extreme degree of instability in America's business environment
To be fair, this particular permit had a clause saying it could be revoked at any time by the sitting president. And another poster points out (haven't had a chance to verify) that this particular pipeline has been opposed for over a decade, even during the Trump administration, with the permit approval essentially happening for political reasons.
To many people, that's a feature, not a bug. (The CCP being one of them, of course. The implications of domestic powers aligning with the CCP are left as an exercise for the reader.)
No wall for Americans yet they pay for walls in other countries. Trump is a racist for saying don't immigrate here illegally? Harris is ignored for worse. Democrats demand infrastructure and oppose obstruction... yet did nothing when Trump wanted it and obstructed him at every step.
The list goes on and on... Biden isn't odd... he's a hypocrite. He's a democrat. But I repeat myself.
The only sensible thing would be to have a pipeline, with zero trucks doing that work in its place, plus a carbon tax on top of that oil to adjust the price.
The carbon tax could be applied uniquely to oil brought on the pipeline so as to equalize the cost of that oil with that which will instead be brought over on trucks.
Which means no misaligned incentives to increase oil consumption but also no inefficiency from trucks doing the work in its place. That tax revenue is effectively new wealth since it represents the saved inefficiency of the alternative of having no pipeline.
On further thought, it would be best if both the pipeline and the oil transport by trucks/trains are taxed out of existence.
I do believe that we should be doing alternative energy at this point - but it's also clear that this particular decision has a lot of negative side-effects (including greater exports over trains and trucks, and increased dependency on oil-fracking and bad middle eastern regimes).
There's actually no good case to be made for this thing at all from current data. You have to project an increase in demand that doesn't seem to be coming.
Bottom line: this pipeline was proposed in the middle of the post-peak-oil boom in oil prices. It made sense in an imagined world of ever rising oil prices and ever larger SUVs. The world kinda moved on.
Also:
> increased dependency on oil-fracking
This is tar sand oil. While not every drop necessarily qualifies, depending on your definition, this is process-extracted secondary petroleum. It's very much in the same category as "fracked" oil in terms of extraction efficiency.
I understand traditionally that's when you break bad news, but this is the middle of the week.
It seems like bad precedent for the assumption to be that the federal government will pull the carpet out from under your feet (losing you your entire investment) whenever the political winds shift.
Today it's an oil pipeline, but tomorrow it could be for a solar installation in a nature reserve, or new hydropower, or a nearly-complete nuclear power plant.
Nah, that would never happen.
"Construction of the plant at Zwentendorf, Austria was finished but the plant never entered service. The start-up of the Zwentendorf plant, as well as the construction of the other 2 plants, was prevented by a referendum on 5 November 1978, in which a narrow majority of 50.47% voted against the start-up."
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwentendorf_Nuclear_Power_Pl...
Like, yeah, solar and wind and hydro are great, but we also keep saying you can't build PV in the desert because it'll cool them down (Nevada), that solar thermal vaporizes birds (California), that wind mulches birds (California), and that hydro power consumes to much land and destroys river systems (name a state with big rivers).
Nuclear isn't nearly as harmful if you have recycling processes in place (recycling has been completely shuttered in the US) and don't build oversized reactors because of a regulatory failings that make many small reactors exponentially more expensive than a single massive one.
So the sequence of events here was:
Permit denied in normal administrative course.
Permit approved, illegally reversing factual determinations without sufficient support by subsequent administration, resulting in the approved permit being struck down by the courts, which was maintained through extensive litigation after the initial decision.
Permit reapproved by executive order bypassing the environmemtal and procedural law constraints that resulted in the previous approval being revoked.
Permit rerevoked by executive order undoing the previous order.
Its certainly not a history that inspires trust in institutions generally, but focussing on the last step for that criticism is...bizarre.
I think it's a bit unfair to talk about this permit being withdrawn without warning when literally every other route open for export has been shut down - it's like asking your dad for candy after your mom said no, they might go along with you for a bit but the outcome is likely to be swayed by the same basic facts.
1. Existing transportation is also highly problematic, one of the really big questions for Canadians here is whether the additional safety of pipelines is worth the cost to the environment, we've specifically paid that lack of safety cost several times including https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste... and more generally https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/lac-megantic-crude-... this is very much not a simple issue in Canada.
2. Oh hey - no it isn't - this is still actively ongoing as pointed out by the comment below
Didn't the Canadian federal government actually buy the pipeline company, and offer to indemnified any investor for any delays caused by other governments?
It seems like many people feel that it's the second to worst possible outcome.
If you're making a broader argument that, say, people won't trust plumbing permits in building construction because the federal government revoked a permit for a cross-border oil pipeline... I suppose there's no way to know, but personally I just don't really buy it.
What is climate activists' perspective on the price of everything increasing, leading to everyone's standard of living declining and poor nations remaining poor?
But who can blame people for lack of trust. Mom said we could have candy if we cleaned our room and dad showed up and changed that. Room isn't gonna get cleaned the second time around.
Why?
It was obvious from the start of the planning that this project was at risk from political intervention given the continuous protests and the general political landscape (being blocked by Obama and then unblocked by Trump, with Democrats calling for the reversal of the decision).
It was obvious that long-term political trends are leading towards ecological conservation, that international treaties limit CO2 emissions and that oil consumption will only go downwards given the rise of viable electric car models.
The companies behind Keystone XL accepted this risk, and if they now go bankrupt or face massive losses as a result of not accounting for obvious risks, I don't shed any tears for them. They were aware, never forget that.
Or at a much smaller scale, suppose you've just won permission to build a house and a new city council is elected and revokes your permit. How much are you going to trust your government after that?
It also widens the door for more forms of corruption. "Shame if that permit were to suddenly evaporate..."
If you don't want carbon emissions, tax them to death. Or don't permit projects that produce them. But don't revoke permits of projects you've approved!
A government needs to be able to change its mind and always act in the best interests of the people. Building a pipeline because some rich corporation has some sunk costs is insane.
Edit: Also, I only addressed the environmental issues, but the article also cites "U.S. landowners, Native American tribes". Don't you think its also good that they get a say in what gets built? And that it is likely that the early construction was done without full understanding by those groups impacted directly?
So in that sense your solar installation example isn't appropriate because generally solar installations aren't that controversial, aren't built on the broken backs of people who lived there, aren't against the public interest, and don't require millions in lobbying $$ to manipulate politicians to get it done to begin with.
I think the more pragmatic answer to these companies is "don't invest billions of dollars in controversial projects that can be undone if your permits are revoked"
Any project can be 'controversial' depending on who is in power. The real pragmatic answer is that the government should be liable for investments lost by revoking a permit.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/nov/06/obama-re...
It was political from end to end, and was never denied on fundamental grounds, but instead has been governed by protectionism. What made it particularly farcical is that at the same time Obama was pontificating about the horror's of Alberta's oil and turning an environmental new leaf, US shale oil exploration (just as bad in every dimension) was growing at a staggering pace, and is now multiples the output of Alberta's oils ands.
The quicker we transition to renewables the better, but the farce of Keystone was always just politics.
You can redefine, or re-interpret the law later to make something _now_ illegal, but that absolutely does not mean it was illegal at the time. That's 1984-style history rewriting.
Kid asked dad if he can get a candy after mom said no. Then started crying when mom came and said it's not allowed.
That leaves just government-funded infrastructure, with all the efficiency that usually brings...
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/04/03/2019-06...
(in that permit, it comes right after revocation of an earlier, similar permit)
I agree that it's not ideal, but we have to remember things are changing rapidly, and we need to take decisive action if we have any hope of minimizing the most severe impacts of climate change.
With the rapid price decline in solar and batteries, the shift to EVs and so many other things going on, we have to remember that anyone who invests in the "old way" is taking a huge risk. In this case their risk did not pay off.
They could have chosen not to take that risk, or invest in something less risky.