A recent New York Times article (“Looking for a Way Around Keystone XL, Canadian Oil Hits the Rails”) describes how, even if the Keystone XL pipeline is not built, much of the Canadian tar sands oil will make it to market. And the oil will come by rail, a more carbon intensive and perhaps more dangerous method of transport.
What is a concerned environmentalist to make of this news? Well, even the most ardent pipeline opponents should realize that stopping the pipeline will do little – directly – to stop global climate change. The real reason to oppose Keystone XL is to call attention the United States’ lack of a coherent climate policy, but it’s not enough to protest Keystone and demand the government “do something.” If we want progress, we need to start talking about policies that make the most sense.
As James Hansen has pointed out, the tar sands contain about 240 gigatons (that’s billions of metric tons) of carbon (GtC) and releasing all of it into the atmosphere would be, as he famously phrased it in an op-ed in the New York Times last year, “game over for the climate.” Perhaps Hansen exaggerated the specific threat the tar sands pose. According to Scientific American, of the estimated 240 GtC in the tar sands, only about 22 GtC is recoverable with today’s technology. Then again, energy companies have a way with these kinds of things.
Regardless, here’s the larger problem: even if you were to shut down the tar sands, there’s always another place to find fossil fuels. The organization Carbon Tracker estimates current “high certainty” fossil fuel reserves contain about 779 GtC. That number will grow (and grow and grow) as new technologies develop.
To put things in perspective, humans have caused approximately 545 GtC in emissions from 1750 through 2011 according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (See page 7 of the Summary for Policymakers.) And our current run rate is about 10 GtC per year, around 80% of which comes from fossil fuel use (based on IPCC and International Energy Agency data). How much more carbon we can “afford” to release from fossil fuel use depends upon myriad assumptions not to mention our tolerance for risk and environmental destruction, but if we want decent odds of avoiding an average temperature increase of over 2 degrees Celsius, Carbon Tracker suggests we need to keep cumulative fossil fuel emissions from now through 2049 below 245 GtC, with a comparative trickle coming from and after 2050. Uh-oh.
Certainly, some fossil fuel energy projects are worse than others and developing the tar sands appears among the least desirable projects from an environmental standpoint. But there is so much fossil fuel supply out there that trying to stop greenhouse gas emissions on a project-by-project basis quickly becomes a game of environmental Whac-a-Mole.
Does this mean that the situation is hopeless, the Keystone XL pipeline should be approved, and tar sands oil should be brought to market? Not at all. The president should block Keystone in order to send a message that it is time to reform our overall system, but no one should pretend that blocking the Keystone XL pipeline fixes the real problem.
Phasing out greenhouse gas emissions over the coming decades is a tall order. It requires a massive rethink of our energy and transportation infrastructure. After all, today over 80% of the United States’ energy comes from fossil fuels.
We can change but it would be foolish to continue to approach the task, as we have so far, with a hodge-podge of inefficient regulations that fail to give us the greatest carbon reductions for each dollar spent. For countries with strong legal regimes and financial systems, including the United States and Canada, the most efficient path forward is to establish firm aggregate caps on emissions as part of a broad-based cap-and-trade program that requires polluters to pay for all carbon emissions. Europe has used such a system with some success since 2008. Canada has a sort of cap-and-trade program in place but it gives away too many emissions permits for free. The United States doesn’t even pretend to play, though some states have weak cap-and-trade programs in place. That’s a shame because the United States pioneered the use of cap-and-trade in the 1990s; using the market-based program, acid rain pollutants were cut drastically, at costs far lower than predicted.
By adopting a robust greenhouse gas cap-and-dividend program, we can put the muscle of the free market behind the switch to cleaner energy production and to more efficient energy use. The moment that energy producers need to pay for their greenhouse gas emissions is the moment you will see the ceaseless creativity and innovation of the free market turn away from greenhouse gas intensive fossil fuels like tar sands oil and toward real solutions, like energy efficiency and renewable energy.
Now that’s a way around Keystone XL.