Tar-sands oil: Should the U.S. say yes?

last updated 8 January 2015

President Obama is stuck in a moral tar pit, said Mike Tidwell and Cindy Parker in The Baltimore Sun. The president must soon decide the future of a $7 billion oil pipeline, Keystone XL, from Canada to the U.S. The 1,700-mile pipeline, to be built by oil giant TransCanada, requires a federal permit because it would cross the U.S. border while carrying more than 700,000 barrels of tar-sands oil every day from Alberta to Texas refineries. But consider the environmental consequences of feeding our oil addiction this way. The tar sands must be steamed, crushed, and diluted in water before they yield oil—a process that uses far more energy than normal oil production, and would pump vast amounts of carbon dioxide into our already warming atmosphere. And TransCanada—which has a dismal safety record—would run its oil pipeline across 2,000 U.S. rivers and the nation’s largest aquifer. That’s why more than 1,200 protestors descended on the White House last week to implore the president to say no to this looming environmental threat.

Obama would be “crazy” if he turned TransCanada down, said Robert Samuelson in The Washington Post. Building the pipeline would reduce our dependence on a “global oil market threatened by wars [and] revolutions.” If the U.S. rejects Canadian tar-sands oil, Asia or China will gladly buy it, so there would be no net environmental gain. The pipeline would also put Americans to work, said The Washington Examiner in an editorial. TransCanada says building the project would create 20,000 jobs in the U.S., and designing and operating it would add as many as 118,000 “spin-off jobs.” Even labor unions loyal to the Democrats want the pipeline to be built. So why hasn’t Obama already said yes?

It’s because he’s torn, said Andrew C. Revkin in The New York Times. The president doesn’t want to anger environmentalists, but with the U.S. economy stuck “in its own tar pit,” he’s not going to turn down a chance to generate jobs. The smart, long-range policy is to let the pipeline go forward, while pursuing a broader energy policy of “conservation, efficiency, and innovation” that will reduce U.S. oil consumption. If American cars get far better mileage in future years, and if we can develop our own energy resources, then tar-sands oil will become too expensive, and the pipeline “has a good chance of dying on the vine.”