Keystone pipeline: What will Obama decide?

last updated 8 January 2015

“Every now and then what a president decides actually determines how the world turns,” said Michael Klare in Salon.com. So it is with President Obama’s upcoming choice on whether to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry 700,000 barrels of crude oil a day from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Texas coast. The project will be a critical turning point in the battle over global climate change, which is why 35,000 people came to Washington last weekend for the largest environmental demonstration ever. If Keystone XL is approved, oil companies will squeeze every drop of available oil out of the tar sands, which requires extraordinarily costly processes that consume massive quantities of water and energy. If Obama nixes this pipeline, oil companies will curtail their investments, and more of Alberta’s 1 trillion barrels in known reserves—as much as all the oil burned by humans since commercial drilling began, in 1859—“will stay in the ground.”

No it won’t, said Meredith Bragg and Nick Gillespie in Reason.com. The world’s thirst for oil is greater than ever. If America doesn’t build a pipeline heading south to our refineries, Canada will build one going west to a Pacific port in British Columbia, where “it’ll just get bought by China and other countries looking for cheap and plentiful energy.” That’s one reason Obama is unlikely to side with the environmentalists this time, said Byron York in WashingtonExaminer.com. Another is that the AFL-CIO badly covets the tens of thousands of good jobs the Keystone project would create for “skilled craft professionals” left jobless in this moribund economy. With polls showing most Americans supporting the pipeline, “it’s hard to see Obama saying no.”

That would be a painful defeat for climate activists, said Andrew Revkin in The New York Times. But in their idealistic concern about climate change, they’re ignoring an unavoidable reality: The world’s insatiable demand for oil will be met one way or another. If the supply doesn’t come from Canada or the U.S., it will come from backward places like Nigeria, where frequent oil spills and unregulated pollution foul the water, kill wildlife, and poison the population. So until a real alternative to oil exists, we’re better off filling the demand from “responsibly managed and regulated sources” than from countries “where oil wealth benefits few and the costs of extraction are borne by many.”