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Greenies Pressure Buckwheat On XL

Mike

Well-known member
Obama’s Decision on the Keystone Pipeline IS a Legacy Making or Breaking Thing
ScienceBlogs | February 24, 2013 | Greg Laden

Is there a problem with John Abraham’s argument about Obama’s Legacy?

John Abraham wrote a piece in the Guardian titled Keystone XL decision will define Barack Obama’s legacy on climate change: Does the president have courage to say ‘no’ to a project that will lock us into decades of dependency on this dirty energy? in which he states:

Alberta has 1.8 [trillion] barrels of oil contained within the tar sands. Extracting and burning all of that tar will cause a global temperature increase of about 0.4 degrees C (0.7 degrees F). That is about half of the warming that humans have already caused. For perspective … the amount of oil-in-place in the Alberta tar sands is approximately seven times that of Saudi Arabia’s proven reserves.

Should [the Obama administration] approve a pipeline to export Canada’s dirty oil and be responsible for the continued environmental costs, or should they finally send a signal to the world that the US is willing to work with other nations to deal with the climate problem.

If his administration cannot say “no” to Keystone … can it say no to anything? This decision will cement Obama’s climate legacy.

I think this is one of the more important pieces anyone has put out lately because it is very specific about two things: 1) The role of major exploitation of Alberta tar sands in future climate change; and 2) The role of the Keystone XL pipeline as a virtual guarantee that the tar sands will be exploited in a major way.

The primary objection to building the pipeline is that this would open up the tar sands to major exploitation. There are other objections to the pipeline as well, having to do with the environmental effects of removing the tar sands locally in Alberta, and the environmental risks of the pipeline itself. Also, as sources of hydrocarbon fuels go, there is a spectrum of nastiness having to do with how “dirty” the fuel is to begin with and the energy required to extract, refine, and distribute it; the Alberta tar sands are on the far (dirtiest) end of that spectrum. All of these objections are valid and important, but looking just at these factors, the exploitation of Alberta tar sands overlaps to some extent with other hydrocarbon extraction ventures such as drilling in northern Alaska, off shore platforms around the world, and so on.
 
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