Keystone XL and Big Green's Failure to Articulate Practical Energy Solutions

One of the most important laws of politics, in my estimation, is that you pick a battle in order to win or in order to send a very clear message for another battle to come in which you have a far better chance of winning. I have to assume the institutional environmental community (Big Green) is trying to do the latter with the approval of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, because frankly, they're fighting a battle that cannot be won on the terms they are setting out. Amazingly, with their practically nonexistent leverage, they're actually threatening President Obama that they will pull their election-time doorknockers if he doesn't kill the pipeline. That prospect would, of course, be much more scary if the environmental community had some real leverage (or, of course, if Obama hadn't gotten elected by the force of a massive volunteer army largely independent of traditional Democratic interest groups).

As someone who badly wants to see a real energy transition, I just had to say something.

To begin, though, I'll give the mainstream environmentalist view the credit it deserves. As the main conduit for bringing crude extracted from the oil sands of Alberta, it is beyond dispute that Keystone XL enables the transport of up to 40% more carbon intensive crude to be refined at the usual Gulf Coast refineries. It is also beyond dispute that the tar sands Keystone XL would transport is extracted at a far higher price than the typical crudes that, for many years, were so easy to extract. The rise of the tar sands, of course, heralds an era in which new fields of low-extraction cost oil are practically nonexistent, and unconventional oil is nearly all we have left. 

All of this, and more, is true about the tar sands. What is also true, however, is that the Alberta tar sands, at 175 billion barrels**, represents perhaps the largest remaining oil-bearing region remaining on the planet. To put that in perspective, Ghawar, the largest producing (but declining) reservoir on earth, has produced, to date, 55 billion barrels.

Which brings me to my point - can the environmental community say that killing one transnational pipeline is going to stave off climate change and keep the developed and developing world's grubby little hands off of that much oil? Please.

The honest reality is, oil production is going to continue apace until there is a viable alternative that makes sense. The likelihood is that electric vehicles will do so, and at a far lower price, efficiency and carbon intensity than other non-oil alternatives.

In all, it troubles me to see this kind of posturing from the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, 350.org and others. These organizations and I have the same end goal - a rational energy transition that mitigates climate change and does so at a reasonable cost to the global economy. However, it does not make sense to simply take shots at energy production itself without proposing a real alternative, like electric vehicles. Trying to kill a pipeline without explicitly linking it to a solution is exactly what makes environmentalists look extreme and out of touch to the average, far less eco-conscious American voter.

If most of these organizations took a poll, asked the right questions and looked objectively at the data, they would realize that most Americans are excited about clean energy and about a clean energy future in which we are free from imported oil. They don't want to be made to feel guilty about their lifestyles or their choices. They want an optimistic message about energy that heralds a future of economic promise and security.

No wonder it is so simple for the Republicans to keep bamboozling people and tagging Big Green as elitist - of the two, they're the only ones with a message that suggests they're actually listening to the people.

**Alberta's estimate, to be taken with a grain of salt...