Keystone XL on hold

From the Times:

The Obama administration is preparing to delay a decision on the contested Keystone XL pipeline while it studies an alternate route, effectively pushing any action past the 2012 election, officials and lobbyists who have been briefed on the matter said on Thursday. An announcement is expected as early as Thursday afternoon.

This is a victory for those that stood against this spectacularly awful plan to help Canada distribute massive amounts of dirty oil. James Hansen, a world-renowned scientist and septuagenarian who went to jail over this, deserves special mention.

It's also really clever politics. Environmentalists are appeased. The plan isn't dead, which should blunt the inevitable "job-killing government socialist machine!" meme. And because the plan isn't dead, and the final decision will fall into the next president's lap, angry progressives have another reason to fight for Obama's re-election.

The secondary costs of carbon energy, part two: the terrorism fallacy

Probably the most frequently pundit-cited reason for reducing our use of hydrocarbons is the fact that much of our oil comes from a certain "volatile region of the world," and sales of oil by "them" to us benefit terrorists and tyrants. Pundits without an original thought in their heads typically gravitate towards this story, perhaps because it combines hobby-horses of the left (clean energy!) with hobby-horses of the right (Stick it to them Arabs!) Tom Friedman, who can always be relied upon for the shallowest deep thoughts around, gives us an example of the meme:

Sure, our opponents will scream ‘carbon tax!' Well what do you think you're paying now to OPEC? The only difference between me and my opponents is that I want to keep any revenue we generate here to build American schools, American highways, American high-speed rail, American research labs and American economic strength. It's just a little tick I have: I like to see our spending build our country. They don't care. They are perfectly happy to see all the money you spend to fill your tank or heat your home go overseas, so we end up funding both sides in the war on terrorism — our military and their extremists.

A carbon tax is an excellent idea. If you ever want to feel deeply shitty about supporting a cause you know is right, see if you can find an endorsement of it by Friedman. See also: the two-state solution.

A reviewer of Bill Maher's book, whose cover art is above, makes the same point in greater detail:

In World War II, there was a very famous poster of a man driving a car with a shadow of Adolph Hitler in the passenger seat. The caption was "When you ride ALONE you ride with Hitler! Join a Car-Sharing Club TODAY!" This was an appeal to save gasoline for the war effort and that every gallon of gasoline used was one less that could be used to fight the war. Maher makes the very valid point that it is just as true today as it was during World War II. The reason that American forces are fighting in the Middle East is because there is oil there and the Western nations need it to run their economies. If there was no oil or no need for it, hundreds of billions of dollars could be saved and we could care less what happens there.

The argument here is that by buying oil, we send money to the Middle East, and that money finds its way to terrorists, fueling extremism. But is that really true?

There are several problems with this argument. One is that for the most part, the governments benefiting from substantial oil revenues tend to be passionate enemies of terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda. Syria, for example, responded to an uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood by leveling a medium-sized city (Hama) and killed 20,000 Syrians. Saudi Arabia is engaged in a violent counterterrorism campaign inside its own borders. Iran is no friend of Al Queda -- in fact they captured and turned over to us several Al Queda operatives in the early days of the war. And so on.

One may argue that, yes, these countries do not directly support terrorism against America, but their wealth is shared with private citizens who do -- people like the Bin Ladens. And that's true. If their economies were weakened by the decline of oil exports, their extremists might have a harder time finding rich supporters. Then again, no one would call Somalia or Yemen well-off, and both have huge problems with fundamentalist Islam -- Somalia is primarily governed by what were once Muslim insurgents.

Those examples point to a couple of problems with the "No Hummers = no terror" meme. One is that while a poorer country may make for poorer terrorists, it also breeds terrorism. It seems unlikely that a country with more poverty and unemployment following the loss of most of its export income would become less hostile to the West as a result. Friedman ought to realize this -- he's written columns gushing over the new Arab future presaged by development in places like Dubai -- development that would collapse on itself faster than a supermassive black hole if the bottom fell out of the oil market.

Another point is that while poverty may weaken terror organizations, it weakens governments fighting terrorists even more. Oil-rich countries may supply some terror funding, but dirt-poor countries like Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia have been the lauching pad for all the major attacks on the West. Poverty breeds chaos, chaos breeds safe havens. And it is safe havens, more than money, and more than people, that terrorists require to plan and execute major attacks.

The sad reality is that terrorism is not all that expensive (except for the state-sponsered kind). 9/11 was carried out for the cost of box cutters and flying lessons. The trickle of money that may find its way from oil sales to anti-American organizations neither makes nor breaks them. There are a hundred good reasons to move towards a low-carbon future, but the threat of terrorism is not among them.

The secondary costs of carbon energy

The destructive and seemingly ever-worsening BP oil spill off the Louisiana coast, a crisis that began with the deaths of 11 rig hands and continues with the release of thousands of barrels of oil per day, is a timely reminder that global warming and ocean acidification are only part of the cost of running an economy on hydrocarbons.

As we weigh the costs of a transition to low-carbon fuels, an up-front cost estimated to be about 1% of the GDP for rapid and deep emissions cuts, it is wrong to assume that the volume of the protests from industry interests is proportional to actual reductions in our apparent wealth.

I say "apparent," because obviously climate change is overwhelmingly likely to make us poorer in the medium- to long-term. The low price of the carbon today is not reflective of the real cost of that carbon to society -- the levels of consumption this artificially low price facilitates are comparable to a shopping spree paid for by maxing out your credit cards. It is an illusory wealth, not true prosperity.

But I had started to say that even the short-term costs are misrepresented by opponents. Capitalism is, by principle, a planless exercise in creative destruction in which old ways of doing things -- and those who invested in the those old ways -- suffer as new better ways of doing things displace them. By fairly pricing carbon, we can accelerate that process for fossil fuels, but regardless of the benefit to society, the people who extract, refine, and sell these fuels will suffer.

There is no getting around that, any more than the tobacco industry could help but suffer a loss of profits as this country, to the great advantage of its health and productivity, undertook measures to reduce smoking. The analogy is a considered one, as the same tactics and many of the same people used to attack the science on the health risks of smoking are now being deployed by the oil industry to obfuscate the scientific consensus of dangerous anthropogenic global warming:

In an effort to deceive the public about the reality of global warming, ExxonMobil has underwritten the most sophisticated and most successful disinformation campaign since the tobacco industry misled the public about the scientific evidence linking smoking to lung cancer and heart disease. As this report documents, the two disinformation campaigns are strikingly similar. ExxonMobil has drawn upon the tactics and even some of the organizations and actors involved in the callous disinformation campaign the tobacco industry waged for 40 years.

From this paper. H/t to DeSmogBlog. (That reminds me, they need to go in the blogroll.)

Reducing emissions will cost certain people a lot of money, but what are the costs and benefits to society at large? The long-term necessity of these changes is relatively undisputed (by credible people (including credible conservatives, anyway.) But there are short-term benefits as well:

1. A reduction in industrial accidents, like the one that started this oil spill, or the recent coal mine disaster that killed 29 miners, or this accident in India in 1965, which killed 300(!) people. Coal mining accidents continue to kill thousands of people each year.

2. A reduction in air pollution, and with it a reduction in reactive airway disease and cancer. The potential benefits are huge. This study found the benefits in air quality alone from reducing carbon emissions to be around $54 a ton. There are unquestionable many megatons of carbon emissions that could be eliminated for less.

3. In addition to the cost in human life, the environmental cost of energy industry disasters in staggering. The Exxon Valdez cleanup alone cost billions. And the costs are not all monetary. As I have often discussed on this blog, environmental stresses have cumulative effects and potentiate one another. Global warming and ocean acidification to not operate in isolation: loss of biodiversity, nitrogen pollution, damage to water tables, damming and logging and, most definitely, damage from oil and coal extraction contribute to the stress on the environment. From the NYT article above:

The questions that haunt this region are how much more can the wetlands take and does their degradation spell doom for an increasingly defenseless southern Louisiana?

Many variables will dictate just how devastating this slick will ultimately be to the ecosystem, including whether it takes days or months to seal the leaking oil well and whether winds keep blowing the oil ashore. But what is terrifying everyone from bird watchers to the state officials charged with rebuilding the natural protections of this coast is that it now seems possible that a massive influx of oil could overwhelm and kill off the grasses that knit the ecosystem together.

Healthy wetlands would have some natural ability to cope with an oil slick, said Denise Reed, interim director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Sciences at the University of New Orleans. “The trouble with our marshes is they’re already stressed, they’re already hanging by a fingernail,” she said.

It is possible, she said, that the wetlands’ “tolerance for oil has been compromised.” If so, she said, that could be “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

To an untrained eye, the vast expanses of grass leading into Terrebonne Bay, about 70 miles southwest of New Orleans, look vigorous. Locals use boats as cars here, trawling though the marsh for shrimp or casting for plentiful redfish. Out on the water, the air smells like salt — not oil — and seabirds abound and a dolphin makes a swift appearance.

But it is what is not visible that is scary, said Alexander Kolker, a professor of coastal and wetland science at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. Piloting a craft through the inland waterways, he pointed out that islands that recently dotted the bay and are still found on local navigation maps are gone. Also gone are the freshwater alligators that gave the nearby town Cocodrie its name — French settlers thought they were crocodiles.

All evidence, he says, is that this land is quickly settling into the salt ocean.

The survival of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands is not only an environmental issue here. Since successive hurricanes have barreled up from the gulf unimpeded, causing mass devastation and loss of life, just about every resident of southern Louisiana has begun to view wetlands protection as a cause of existential importance. If the wetlands had been more robust when Hurricane Katrina’s waters pushed up from the ocean, the damage might not have been as severe.

But they were not. Levees holding back the Mississippi River have prevented natural land replenishment from floods. Navigation channels and pipeline canals have brought saltwater into fragile freshwater marshes, slowly killing them, and the sloshing of waves in boats’ wakes has eroded natural banks.

Since 1932, the state has lost an area the size of Delaware.

A rare outline of how some of the different stresses feed off each other and end in potentially catastrophic consequences for humans. Oil spills worsening hurricanes. Levees and navigation channels weakening the ecosystem of the marshes, opening the door to untold damage from a spill that seems destined to rival the Exxon Valdez disaster. So it goes.

Human activity is always going to have a footprint. And I am not one to dismiss what that footprint makes possible -- the art and the science, the comforts of everyday life, medicine, travel, music and books (and movies and television and really cool cars.) Precisely because we are not going to turn our backs on civilization, we need to minimize our impact wherever we can.

I seem to have wandered a bit from my topic, but the post has gone on a bit already. In part two, I'll talk about the most-cited benefit of the low-carbon economy -- and why it's a fallacy.