It's easy to criticize Hollywood; though it's often unfair as when a particular celebrity takes up a noble cause like environmentalism, fighting poverty, or trying to eradicate diseases in the Third World which the First left behind decades ago. But there are also those times when the criticism is warranted like when a baseless opinions experience exponential growth in popularity: the anti-vaccine movement being chief among them. The criticism is warranted in this case because the public movement which has arisen out of it actually causes harm.
It should be noted that environmentalism does not fall into this category. The science is in - and has been for a long time - that humanity's use of fossil fuels is causing long term damage to our planet. If nothing is done, the effects of climate change may very well lead to only the seventh mass extinction event in our planet's 4.5 billion year history. And it would be the first time that the species most impacted bears sole responsibility for its own demise. This is not hyperbole.
There are plenty of business interests who stand to lose from the kind of limitations we need to put on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. These interests have ruthlessly combated every attempt to regulate their GHG emissions often by employing the most absurd appeals to ignorance. As of this writing only one out of the eleven front-runners for the Republican nomination for President even acknowledges that climate change is a reality that must be dealt with. That's up from zero in 2012. And talk about progress, Exxon Mobil is now shouting from the rooftops about climate change because of an investigation by the New York Attorney General into whether Exxon has been sufficiently honest with its shareholders about the effects of climate change. You can read about this brilliant play here.
But for all its faults, there are times when that which is good for business is actually good for everybody. Granted, it's rare...but it does happen. It is precisely because of this rarity that such opportunities must be acted upon with haste. The Keystone XL pipeline is just such a case. Unfortunately, this mutual advantage quickly becomes overshadowed by perception. That perception being that because it benefits big business it must be detrimental to the environment. Given the history of big business in this country one can hardly be blamed for being unable to overcome this perception.
The term NIMBY was once an obscure term used only by academics and social scientists. Thanks to George Carlin this term became accessible to popular culture as "Not In My Back Yard." It was meant to describe the reflexive and thoughtless response that comes from citizens who reject changes in their neighborhoods that threaten the character of their community regardless of necessity or potential benefits. Prisons? Not in my back yard. Homeless shelters? Not in my back yard. And so on. Insiders within the energy sector have a different term: BANANA. This stands for: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything. Accepting for a moment that many players within this sector have sown the seeds of this discontent, we still must question these impulses to consider whether they actually serve our ends.
Oil is an ugly thing. From the Exxon Valdez to Saddam Hussein's oil well fires to Prudhoe Bay to the Horizon platform explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, we are a generation that has been bombarded with images of the environmental devastation wrought by such accidents and this must not be understated. But the fact remains that oil and gas is still the cheapest and most efficient fuel available for use. Alternative fuels are great and the reintroduction of electric and natural gas vehicles is one of the reasons we're seeing some of the lowest energy costs in our lives. Yet oil remains vital to us.
As long as it can be sold for profit, oil will make its way to the market. This is as inevitable as any other force of nature. The question before us today is: How should the oil in Canada's Tar Sands get to market? The US uses upwards of 18 million barrels of oil a day. 70% of our oil comes via pipeline and 23% comes via water tankers which carry, on average, 2 million barrels per trip. The rest comes via rail and trucking. If one were to look up the most recent catastrophes from oil spills, the risks of transporting oil via water tanker become very clear. The fact is that while pipelines are the most efficient means of transporting oil, they are also the safest. That's not to say land based oil spills are not disastrous - they are - but they're rare.
Relegating the oil from Canada's Tar Sands to be transported by tanker opens a number of environmental risks that would be mitigated by an overland pipeline. If it's the environment we're concerned about, we better be sure that the choices we make will not yield the very results we're trying to avoid.
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