Want more expensive gas? Support the Keystone Pipeline!

Keystone Pipeline Means Dearer Gas, Few Jobs: Jonathan Alter

By Jonathan Alter Mar 1, 2012 4:00 PM PT
Bloomberg

“I’ll get us that oil from Canada,” Mitt Romney said in his victory speech after the Michigan primary. He was referring to Keystone XL, the crude-oil pipeline that has become a top-tier campaign issue for Republicans.

Problem is, the tar-sands oil in that pipeline wouldn’t be coming to “us.” It would go directly from Canada to refineries in the Gulf region en route to export markets in Latin America and Europe. The U.S. would be used as little more than a transit corridor.

We’ve heard a lot about groundwater contamination near the completed portions of the pipeline -- more than a dozen spills of the highly corrosive oil, including one near Kalamazoo, Michigan, that they can’t seem to clean up. Conservative Nebraskans became greens overnight when they learned the details of the project that will go through their state.

But the immediate effect of completing the Keystone pipeline (perhaps by 2015) is more surprising and counterintuitive.

The project would increase domestic oil prices by more than $6 a barrel and prices at the pump in parts of the country by about 20 cents a gallon. You read that right. At a time when rising gas prices threaten President Barack Obama’s re-election, the Republicans’ most ballyhooed remedy -- a new pipeline -- would make the problem worse.

(More here.)

Keystone pipeline expansion won't help Minnesota

by Leigh Pomeroy

Some Minnesotans have argued that the controversial Keystone pipeline expansion will be a boon to the state's economy. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The purpose of the proposed pipeline is to send a slurry of toxic oil-bearing material from the Canadian tar sands to refineries in Texas, much for export. Minnesotans need to realize that creating a new market for tar sands oil only creates more competition for it, which inevitably means higher prices.

Minnesotans also need to realize that tar sands oil is one of the most environmentally destructive energy resources on the planet, eclipsed only perhaps by coal. Thousands of acres of pristine forest must be destroyed and millions of gallons of water used and polluted to extract this oil. Were a price to be put on this destruction, mining the tar sands would not be economically feasible.

Tar sands mining is also a huge source of carbon dioxide release into the atmosphere. It does this by destroying forests, which are natural carbon sinks (absorbers); by unearthing and heating millions of cubic feet of soil, dirt and sand, which releases more CO2; and by perpetuating our civilization's dependence on burning fossil fuels, the largest single source of human-made CO2.

Scientists who specialize in the study of man-made climate change have called further expansion of tar sands mining essentially "game over" for preserving our climate as anything like what we have today.

Instead of supporting costly and environmentally destructive tar sands development, Minnesotans need to get behind homegrown energy solutions such as wind, solar, geothermal and biomass, all of which grow our economy, create local jobs, and make us less dependent on other countries and multinational corporations for our energy.

(A version of this article was published in the Mankato Free Press here. For more information on how the proposed pipeline will NOT be an overall job creator, see this study from the Cornell University Global Labor Institute.)