Why the showdown over the Keystone XL pipeline is totally pointless

It’s political theatre at its most dramatic — a showdown pitting parties, ideologies, grassroots movements, branches of government, and even otherwise friendly nations against each other.

After more than six long years of argument, debate, protest, lobbying, and court rulings, a bill approving construction of the Keystone XL pipeline is wending its way through the Senate. Once the bill has passed, it will be sent to the president’s desk, where Barack Obama has pledged to veto it, marking only the third time he has chosen to use that constitutional power, and the first time he has done so since 2010.

It’s exciting.

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And also utterly pointless.

The fact is that the entire Keystone drama is a transparent case of senseless political posturing — a partisan conflagration the intensity of which stands in direct inverse proportion to its significance. Everyone involved in it should be ashamed of how it has unfolded, and none more so than the environmental activists who have expended enormous energy and resources fighting the pipeline for no good reason.

How do we know that the activists have been fighting the pipeline for no good reason? Because the evidence for their case tells us so.

The strongest argument against the pipeline is that it will contribute in a significant way to increasing greenhouse gas emissions. The only problem is that everyone knows that the contribution will be negligible — with estimates ranging from 27 million to 110 million additional tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year out of a global total of roughly 40 billion tons. That’s an annual increase of somewhere between .0675 and .275 percent.

That’s right: the high-end estimate predicts that the pipeline will increase global greenhouse emissions by slightly more than one quarter of 1 percent.

That hardly seems worth six years of organizing, protesting, and lobbying. But then again, I’m not an environmental activist. Maybe if I were, I’d be satisfied with definitively preventing even that small of an increase in pollutants.

But of course, stopping the pipeline would do no such thing. As everyone on both sides of the debate concedes, the Canadians will get their tar sands oil to market one way or the other, whether or not the pipeline is approved and built as proposed. (Rail transport is the most likely alternative.) And that means that rejecting the project will have essentially no impact on global carbon emissions.

Which is why some have focused on the potential for more acute environmental impacts within the United States, including nightmare scenarios of a pipeline rupture as a result of gross negligence or a terrorist attack. Thankfully neither is very likely — and certainly less probable than the derailment of a train carrying the oil across over a thousand miles of the American heartland.

Now, none of this means that the GOP’s rationale for approving the pipeline is especially strong. With oil prices in free fall, the case for tapping and exploiting new sources of fuel is far weaker now than it was when the Keystone debate began in 2008. It all comes down to jobs, jobs, jobs.

Yet the number of jobs at stake is as negligible as the projected increase in pollutants. Estimates place the number at around 2,000 annual temporary jobs over two years of pipeline construction, followed by 35 permanent positions once it’s up and running.

You heard that right: 35. Two digits; no zeros.

All of this is common knowledge. Pretty much no one on either side of the argument attempts to deny or refute any of it.

And yet here we are at the O.K. Corral, the Senate and president poised for a showdown.

Why on earth has it come to this?

Three interlocking reasons: Both Democrats and Republicans now go much too far in pandering to the interest groups that form each party’s electoral base; the environmental movement is a major player in the Democratic Party, and for some bizarre reason the movement decided years ago to take a life-or-death stand on this trivial issue.

Actually, the reason isn’t that bizarre at all. It’s just stunningly self-serving. As liberal columnist Jonathan Chait pointed out in the fall of 2013, environmental activists, led by Bill McKibben, made a calculation six years ago that stopping the Keystone pipeline was the perfect issue around which to galvanize the movement. The goal was simple and clear — “Stop This Pipeline!” — and that made it ideal for organizing protests, raising money, and organizing lobbyists and ad campaigns. By now even Elizabeth Warren, everyone’s favorite lefty populist, has jumped on the pipeline-bashing environmental-movement-building bandwagon.

Of course, for everyone in the country who isn’t an environmental activist, the hoopla defies comprehension. But hey, that’s the way our politics work now: enormous amounts of time, energy, and resources — and the president’s limited political capital — expended on a ploy to get a special-interest group trained and tested for...some as-yet-undetermined future fight.

Given that this is by far the most compelling argument on the anti-Keystone side, and I don’t think public policy should be made with an eye to movement-building, my view is that the pipeline should probably be approved. Thirty-five jobs isn’t a lot, and there’s not much demand for the oil at the moment, but both are slightly better than nothing. Which is all we’ll get if things go the other way.

Ever wonder why so many Americans are disgusted with Washington? Look no further than the demoralizing display of Kabuki democracy surrounding the Keystone XL pipeline.