MSNBC’s Ed Schultz: ‘I Was Wrong,’ Don’t Build Keystone XL Pipeline

by Mark Heffinger, Bold Nebraska, EcoWatch, March 6, 2014

After coming to Nebraska to meet with farmers and ranchers facing eminent domain seizure of their land for TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline, and listening to the voices of Native Americans, environmental experts and pipeline fighters across the country, MSNBC host Ed Schultz of The Ed Show announced on his March 5 show that he’s had a change of heart and is now against the pipeline.

[Go to this link to see the video:  http://ecowatch.com/2014/03/06/msnbcs-ed-schultz-now-opposes-keystone-xl/ ]

Schultz has devoted many recent segments of his show to sharing the stories of people in the path of Keystone XL, but had held firm in his support for the pipeline until now.

On his show, Schultz stood in front of a map of the pipeline route over the Ogallala Aquifer and exclaimed:

The water there is feet deep—not thousands of feet. This pipeline, if it’s constructed, like every other pipeline that’s been constructed—it will leak. It’s an absolute. You can count on it. So the question is this, does the President want to risk the aquifer? You are going to make void the farm economy in this part of the country. It will be one of the most disastrous events ever, because it’s irreversible.

Schultz also encouraged President Obama to come to Nebraska and visit with pipeline fighters, and urged him to reject the pipeline. 

http://ecowatch.com/2014/03/06/msnbcs-ed-schultz-now-opposes-keystone-xl/

Chris Nelder: The Energy Transition Tipping Point Is Here

The economic foundations supporting fossil fuels investments are collapsing quickly, as the business case for renewables such as solar and wind finds a new center of balance.

by Chris Neldon, "The Take," smartplanet.com, March 3, 2014

I have waited a long time—decades, really—for a tipping point in the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables beyond which there can be no turning back. Fresh evidence pertaining to many themes I have explored in this column over the past three years suggests that tipping point is finally here.

Oil and gas

Underlying the abundance hype over tight oil, tar sands and other "unconventional" sources of liquid fuel has been a dirty little secret: They're expensive. 

The soaring cost of producing oil has far outpaced the rise in oil prices as the world has relied on these marginal sources to keep production growing since conventional oil production peaked in 2005. Those who ignored the hype and paid attention to the data have known this for years. I have detailed this evidence repeatedly (for example, in “The cost of new oil supply,” “Oil majors are whistling past the graveyard,” and “Trouble in fracking paradise”), but now the facts are earning mainstream recognition.

The Wall Street Journal recently pointed out that oil and gas production by Chevron, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell has declined during the past five years even as the companies spent more than a half-trillion dollars on new projects. Chevron’s costs alone have jumped 56% since 2010. 

A marvelous new presentation by Steven Kopits, Managing Director of the Douglas-Westwood consultancy, details oil supply, demand, cost and price trends with merciless precision. If you can take an hour to watch Kopits' presentation I highly recommend it, as it's the most comprehensive perspective you'll find on the global dynamics of oil. 

The graphic above shows how capital spending (capex, i.e., capital expenditures) by the world's publicly listed oil majors has increased by more than a factor of five since 2000, while their production of oil has fallen back to the 2000 level after a few years of very modest increases. In Kopits' earthy metaphor, the companies kept watering the plant but it just wouldn't grow anymore—precisely as the peak oil model predicted.

In late February, Bloomberg finally addressed the most problematic issue in shale gas and tight oil wells: their incredible decline rates and diminishing prospects for drilling in the most-profitable "sweet spots" of the shale plays. I have documented that issue at length (for example, "Oil and gas price forecast for 2014," "Energy independence, or impending oil shocks?," "The murky future of U.S. shale gas," and my Financial Times critique of Leonardo Maugeri's widely heralded 2012 report).

The sources for the Bloomberg article are shockingly candid about the difficulties facing the shale sector, considering that their firms have been at the forefront of shale hype. 

The vice president of integration at oil services giant Schlumberger notes that four out of every 10 frack clusters are duds. Geologist Pete Stark, a vice president of industry relations at IHS—yes, that IHS, where famous peak oil pooh-pooher Daniel Yergin is the spokesman for its CERA unit—actually said what we in the peak oil camp have been saying for years: "The decline rate is a potential show stopper after a while…You just can’t keep up with it."

The CEO of Superior Energy Services was particularly pithy: "We've drilled all the good stuff…These are very poor quality formations that I don't believe God intended for us to produce from the source rock." Source rocks, as I wrote last month, are an oil and gas "retirement party," not a revolution.

The toxic combination of rising production costs, the rapid decline rates of the wells, diminishing prospects for drilling new wells, and a drilling program so out of control that it caused a glut and destroyed profitability, have finally taken their toll. 

Numerous operators are taking major write-downs against reserves. WPX Energy, an operator in the Marcellus shale gas play, and Pioneer Natural Resources, an operator in the Barnett shale gas play, each have announced balance sheet “impairments” of more than $1 billion due to low gas prices. Chesapeake Energy, Encana, Apache, Anadarko Petroleum, BP, and BHP Billiton have disclosed similar substantial reserves reductions. Occidental Petroleum, which has made the most significant attempts to frack California’s Monterey Shale, announced that it will spin off that unit to focus on its core operations—something it would not do if the Monterey prospects were good. EOG Resources, one of the top tight oil operators in the United States, recently said that it no longer expects U.S. production to rise by 1 million barrels per day (mb/d) each year, in accordance with my 2014 oil and gas price forecast.

Coal and nuclear

When I wrote “Why baseload power is doomed” and "Regulation and the decline of coal power" in 2012, the suggestion that renewables might displace baseload power sources like coal and nuclear plants was generally received with ridicule. How could "intermittent" power sources with just a few percentage points of market share possibly hurt the deeply entrenched, reliable, fully amortized infrastructure of power generation?

But look where we are today. Coal plants are being retired much faster than most observers expected. The latest projection from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) is for 60 gigawatts (GW) of coal-fired power capacity to be taken offline by 2016, more than double the retirements the agency predicted in 2012. The vast majority of the coal plants that were planned for the United States in 2007 have since been cancelled, abandoned, or put on hold, according to SourceWatch.

Nuclear power plants were also given the kibosh at an unprecedented rate last year. More nuclear plant retirements appear to be on the way. Earlier this month, utility giant Exelon, the nation’s largest owner of nuclear plants, warned that it will shut down nuclear plants if the prospects for their profitable operation don’t improve this year.

Japan has just announced a draft plan that would restart its nuclear reactors, but the plan is "vague" and, to my expert nose, stinks of political machinations. What we do know is that the country has abandoned its plans to build a next-generation "fast breeder" reactor due to mounting technical challenges and skyrocketing costs.

Grid competition

Nuclear and coal plant retirements are being driven primarily by competition from lower-cost wind, solar, and natural gas generators, and by rising operational and maintenance costs. As more renewable power is added to the grid, the economics continue to worsen for utilities clinging to old fossil-fuel generating assets (a topic I have covered at length; for example, "Designing the grid for renewables," "The next big utility transformation," "Can the utility industry survive the energy transition?" "Adapt or die - private utilities and the distributed energy juggernaut" and "The unstoppable renewable grid").

Nowhere is this more evident than in Germany, which now obtains about 25 percent of its grid power from renewables and which has the most solar power per capita in the world. I have long viewed Germany’s transition to renewables (see "Myth-busting Germany's energy transition") as a harbinger of what is to come for the rest of the developed world as we progress down the path of energy transition.

And what's to come for the utilities isn't good. Earlier this month, Reuters reported that Germany’s three largest utilities, E.ON, RWE, and EnBW are struggling with what the CEO of RWE called “the worst structural crisis in the history of energy supply.” Falling consumption and growing renewable power have cut the wholesale price of electricity by 60 percent since 2008, making it unprofitable to continue operating coal, gas and oil-fired plants. E.ON and RWE have announced intentions to close or mothball 15 GW of gas and coal-fired plants. Additionally, the three major utilities still have a combined 12 GW of nuclear plants scheduled to retire by 2020 under Germany’s nuclear phase-out program.

RWE said it will write down nearly $4 billion on those assets, but the pain doesn’t end there. Returns on invested capital at the three utilities are expected to fall from an average of 7.7 percent in 2013 to 6.5 percent in 2015, which will only increase the likelihood that pension funds and other fixed-income investors will look to exchange traditional utility company holdings for “green bonds” invested in renewable energy. The green bond sector is growing rapidly, and there's no reason to think it will slow down. Bond issuance jumped from $2 billion in 2012 to $11 billion in 2013, and the now-$15 billion market is expected to nearly double again this year.

A new report from the Rocky Mountain Institute and CohnReznick about consumers "defecting" from the grid using solar and storage systems concludes that the combination is a "real, near and present" threat to utilities. By 2025, according to the authors, millions of residential users could find it economically advantageous to give up the grid. In his excellent article on the report, Stephen Lacey notes that lithium-ion battery costs have fallen by half since 2008. With technology wunderkind Elon Musk's new announcement that his car company Tesla will raise up to $5 billion to build the world's biggest "Gigafactory" for the batteries, their costs fall even farther. At the same time, the average price of an installed solar system has fallen by 61 percent since the first quarter of 2010.

At least some people in the utility sector agree that the threat is real. Speaking in late February at the ARPA-E Energy Summit, CEO David Crane of NRG Energy suggested that the grid will be obsolete and used only for backup within a generation, calling the current system "shockingly stupid."

Non-hydro renewables are outpacing nuclear and fossil fuel capacity additions in much of the world, wreaking havoc with the incumbent utilities' business models. The value of Europe's top 20 utilities has been halved since 2008, and their credit ratings have been downgraded. According to The Economist, utilities have been the worst-performing sector in the Morgan Stanley index of global share prices. Only utilities nimble enough to adopt new revenue models providing a range of services and service levels, including efficiency and self-generation, will survive. 

In addition to distributed solar systems, utility-scale renewable power plants are popping up around the world like spring daisies. Ivanpah, the world's largest solar "power tower" at 392 megawatts (MW),  just went online in Nevada. Aura Solar I, the largest solar farm in Latin America at 30 MW, is under construction in Mexico and will replace an old oil-fired power plant. India just opened its largest solar power plant to date, the 130 MW Welspun Solar MP project. Solar is increasingly seen as the best way to provide electricity to power-impoverished parts of the world, and growth is expected to be stunning in Latin America, India and Africa.

Renewable energy now supplies 23% of global electricity generation, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, with capacity having doubled from 2000 to 2012. If that growth rate continues, it could become the dominant source of electricity by the next decade.

Environmental disasters

Faltering productivity, falling profits, poor economics and increasing competition from power plants running on free fuel aren't the only problems facing the fossil-fuels complex. It has also been the locus of increasingly frequent environmental disasters.

On February 22, 2014, a barge hauling oil collided with a towboat and spilled an estimated 31,500 gallons of light crude into the Mississippi River, closing 65 miles of the waterway for two days.

More waterborne spills are to be expected along with more exploding trains as crude oil from sources like the Bakken shale seeks alternative routes to market while the Keystone XL pipeline continues to fight an uphill political battle. According to the Association of American Railroads, the number of tank cars shipping oil jumped from about 10,000 in 2009 to more than 230,000 in 2012, and more oil spilled from trains in 2013than in the previous four decades combined.

Federal regulators issued emergency rules on February 25 requiring Bakken crude to undergo testing to see if it is too flammable to be moved safely by rail, but I am not confident this measure will eliminate the risk. Light, tight oil from U.S. shales tends to contain more light molecules such as natural gas liquids than conventional U.S. crude grades, and is more volatile.

February 11 will go down in history as a marquee bad day for fossil fuels, on which 100,000 gallons of coal slurry spilled into a creek in West Virginia; a natural gas well in Dilliner, Pa., exploded (and burned for two weeks before it was put out); and a natural gas pipeline ruptured and exploded in Tioga, ND. Two days later, another natural gas line exploded in the town of Knifely, Ky., igniting multiple fires and destroying several homes, barns, and cars. The same day, another train carrying crude oil derailed near Pittsburgh, spilling between 3,000 and 7,500 gallons of crude oil.

And don't forget the spill of 10,000 gallons of toxic chemicals used in coal processing from a leaking tank in West Virginia in early January, which sickened residents of Charleston and rendered its water supply unusable.

No return

At this point you may think, "Well, this is all very interesting, Chris, but why should we believe we've reached some sort of tipping point in energy transition?"

To which I would say, ask yourself: Is any of this reversible?

Is there any reason to think the world will turn its back on plummeting costs for solar systems, batteries, and wind turbines, and revert back to nuclear and coal?

Is there any reason to think we won't see more ruptures and spills from oil and gas pipelines?

What about the more than 1,300 coal-ash waste sites scattered across the United States, of which about half are no longer used and some are lacking adequate liners? How confident are we that authorities will suddenly find the will, after decades of neglect, to ensure that they'll not cause further contamination after damaging drinking water supplies in at least 67 instances so far, such that we feel confident about continuing to rely on coal power?

Like the disastrous natural gas pipeline that exploded in 2010 and turned an entire neighborhood in San Bruno, Calif., into a raging inferno, coal-ash waste sites are but one part of a deep and growing problem shot through the entire fabric of America: aging infrastructure and deferred maintenance. President Obama just outlined his vision for a $302 billion, four-year program of investment in transportation, but that's just a drop in the bucket, and it's only for transportation.

Is there any reason to think citizens will brush off the death, destruction, environmental contamination of these disasters—many of them happening in the backyards of rural, red-state voters—and not take a second look at clean power?

Is there any reason to believe utilities will swallow several trillion dollars worth of stranded assets and embrace new business models en masse? Or is it more likely that those that can will simply adopt solar, storage systems, and other measures that ultimately give them cheaper and more reliable power, particularly in the face of increasingly frequent climate-related disasters that take out their grid power for days or weeks?

Is there any reason to think the billions of people in the world who still lack reliable electric power will continue to rely on filthy diesel generators and kerosene lanterns as the price of oil continues to rise? Or are they more likely to adopt alternatives like the SolarAid solar lanterns, of which half a million have been sold across Africa in the past six months alone? (Here's a hint: Nobody who has one wants to go back to their kerosene lantern.) Founder Jeremy Leggett of SunnyMoney, who created the SolarAid lanterns, intends to sell 50 million of them across Africa by 2020.

Is there any reason to believe solar and wind will not continue to be the preferred way to bring power to the developing world, when their fuel is free and conventional alternatives are getting scarcer and more expensive?

Is there any reason a homeowner might not think about putting a solar system on his or her roof, without taking a single dollar out of his or her pocket, and using it to charge up an electric vehicle instead of buying gasoline?

Is there any reason to think that drilling for shale gas and tight oil in the United States will suddenly resume its former rapid growth rates, when new well locations are getting harder to find, investment by the oil and gas companies is being slashed, share prices are falling, reserves are getting taken off balance sheets and investors are getting nervous?

I don't think so. All of these trends have been developing for decades, and new data surfacing daily only reinforces them.

The energy transition tipping point is here, and there's no going back.

http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/the-take/the-energy-transition-tipping-point-is-here/

Wen Stephenson: Nearly 400 Arrested at XL Dissent—the Largest White House Civil Disobedience Action in a Generation

The student-led protest was a dramatic demonstration of the youth climate movement’s growing resolve—and its sense of solidarity.

by Wen Stephenson, 

The Nation

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March 7, 2014 

 

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Students listen to a speaker at the XL Dissent march in Washington, DC. (Courtesy of Flickr user Light Brigading, CC 2.0)

A middle-aged white guy named Al Smith walked past me down the hallway of the crowded Thurgood Marshall Center in Washington last Saturday. He stood out with his long blond hair under a gray knit-wool hat, grizzled and graying beard and tattoos covering his forearms. The back of his dark hooded sweatshirt bore the face of a wildcat in black-and-white, the logo of the Michigan Coalition Against Tar Sands, also known as MICATS.

Smith was talking to one of his comrades on a cell phone as he passed. “What does he look like?” He was referring to me, another middle-aged white guy with graying stubble but short cropped hair, a Red Sox cap and a navy J Crew sweater.

In fact Smith and I both stood out in the crowd. The place was teeming with hundreds of energized and determined college students and recent grads from more than forty states and 100 schools, assembled for a training in nonviolent direct action. The next morning, Sunday, March 2, more than 1,200 young people would march from Georgetown University down Pennsylvania Avenue to Lafayette Park and the gates of the White House, where nearly 400 of them would be arrested for peaceful civil disobedience protesting the Keystone XL tar-sands pipeline and Barack Obama’s lack of seriousness on climate change. The student-led protest, dubbed XL Dissent, would be the largest one-day civil disobedience action at the White House in a generation. In a show of solidarity, the student organizers had invited Smith and his MICATS comrades Chris Wahmhoff and Jarret Schlaff, along with others from frontline communities fighting tar sands extraction and pipelines, to join the march and speak at the rally in Lafayette Park.

Smith’s presence that weekend had a special significance. His wife, Vicci Hamlin, was one of three women, known as the MICATS 3, facing two to three years in prison on felony charges after locking themselves to construction equipment last July in a peaceful protest against the expansion of the Enbridge Line 6B tar-sands pipeline—the same one that ruptured in 2010,spilling catastrophically into the Kalamazoo River. On March 5, Hamlin, a 60-year-old great-grandmother, and her MICATS sisters Lisa Leggio, 35, and Barb Carter, 22, woud be sentenced—having already spent over a month in jail since their conviction on January 31. A petition with 60,000 signatures was delivered to the judge pleading for leniency. Perhaps it had some effect: on Wednesday, to great relief, the three were sentenced to time served and thirteen months probation and were released.

But on Saturday in Washington, Al didn’t know what to expect, and was bracing for the worst. “There’s no human being I respect more,” Al told me, speaking of Vicci, a lifelong activist who most recently worked at a shelter for abused women. “The one human being I believe should never be in jail. She has done nothing but love and care for people.”

I asked him why he and Vicci were protesting tar sands pipelines, whether TransCanada’s Keystone XL or the Enbridge Line 6B. “We had a strong emotional response to the Alberta tar sands,” he said. “We both believe that our survival, and the survival of life on the planet, really is at risk. And when we found out the way the indigenous people [in Alberta] are being treated, we were mad. We were angry.”

Al, who is 50, grew up near Boston, in Revere, Massachusetts, and has the accent to prove it. “I was never an activist, never thought I’d be an activist,” he said. “I was an IV drug addict for many years, and in recovery I kind of woke up that everything isn’t about me, and I started praying in a Native American way.” He and Vicci got involved with Occupy Chicago, which he says was “a very healing experience.” Now the MICATS community is like another family to them. “They’ve taught me about unity,” he said. “About what it means to really love your friends.”

I asked him what he thought about the XL Dissent action the next day. “An action like this,” he said, “the fact that these students come here, fired up and passionate, and full of love and excitement and energy—it fills me with hope. It’s gonna take all of us. We have to put our differences aside and stand together. We really do. It means the world to me that they’re doing this. I love ‘em.” He said Vicci had called him from jail, and she was excited about it. “It means the world to her.”

*     *     *

The fact that Al Smith and his fellow MICATS members were there at XL Dissent, with a prominent role at the Lafayette Park rally, speaks volumes about how the student organizers viewed their action at the White House. Along with indigenous activists from Canada and the US whose communities are threatened by tar sands and other extreme fossil-fuel extraction, the MICATS were there to send the message that the Keystone fight has always been about more than one pipeline. It’s about everything Keystone XL represents—from the poisoning of land, water, and air in frontline communities from Alberta to Texas, where the southern leg of Keystone XL is already built and operating, to the unbridled expansion of fossil fuels driving this generation of young people toward an unstable, possibly unlivable, climate future.

Varshini Prakash, a junior at UMass-Amherst and one of the student organizers, gave an impassioned speech at the pre-march rally at Georgetown. The urgency of the climate crisis, she said, “means we’re not compromising. We don’t want half-baked solutions. We can’t gamble with false promises. We won’t settle for an ‘all-of-the-above’ energy policy when what this looming crisis demands is a ‘none-of-the-above’ approach to fossil fuels.” She challenged her generation of young people to “stand with each other, march in the streets, put your bodies on the line, resist!…Right here, right now, it starts with stopping the Keystone XL pipeline.”

The week before the action, I sat down with Tufts University junior Evan Bell in Davis Square near the Tufts campus. Evan is one of XL Dissent’s core organizers, along with Columbia student Michael Greenberg, Smith student Aly Johnson-Kurts and Tulane student Nick Stracco. For the past year, Evan has been immersed in climate organizing with the New England campus network Students for a Just and Stable Future, which sent busloads of students to DC for XL Dissent. For many of them, including Evan and the other organizers, it would be their first civil disobedience. And while the legal risk was small—they were arrested for blocking passage in front of the White House, fined and released that same evening—it was nevertheless a significant step for him and hundreds of other young people, an on-ramp to more and higher-stakes resistance to come.

“As a movement,” he said, “we’ve been high on rhetoric and low on action.” XL Dissent had already taken flack from some quarters, he said, “for being just another White House protest.”

One of the main goals of XL Dissent, Evan said, was “radicalizing the student movement to be able to take real and more meaningful action than a White House protest.” The goal was “to bring as many young people together as possible and force them to think about things, to see what it means to be a climate activist and what it means to address climate change—taking this on and making it real. And that involves every bit of the frontline activism that’s been going on.”

Of course XL Dissent was never just another White House protest. It was something new: a dramatic demonstration of the youth climate movement’s growing power and resolve. You had to be there. The sheer size, intensity, and noise of the march from Georgetown and the action at the White House fence represented a new and escalated tone and energy. Several older and experienced climate organizers agreed it was unlike anything they’d seen. These “kids” meant business. And Democrats, who need young voters this year and in 2016, would be fools to ignore them.

“We’re saying to Obama, ‘young people voted you in, but you failed us. If you approve Keystone, we’re taking back our vote,’” Evan said. “Climate change isn’t the change we voted for. He said in a speech that he’s proud of building enough pipeline to encircle the earth and then some. We didn’t vote for that. We didn’t vote for Keystone. I mean, Keystone South is already built. It’s ludicrous!”

“So it’s not just, ‘Obama, do the right thing,’” Evan went on. “It’s like, ‘Obama, you failed us up to this point. So you do this, or get out of the way and we’ll do it ourselves.’ The inaction on the part of Obama and the system in general is what’s making civil disobedience necessary.... It’s shameful that we would have to do civil disobedience to stop the climate crisis. It is absolutely horrifying.”

*     *     *

That anger and intensity, while steadfastly nonviolent—hundreds of students chanted “I love you!” to the police preparing to arrest them at the White House—represents a generational truth that may be finally starting to dawn on the political world. For these young people, the climate crisis is their future, their lives. This is where the intensity comes from, and it’s why so many of these young people see themselves in solidarity with frontline communities from Alberta to Texas to Michigan, and all around the world. Their predicament represents another kind of front line: the generational one.

“Many of us who are organizing XL Dissent, we have so much to learn about climate justice,” Aly Johnson-Kurts told me the week before the action. “Those of us who are core organizers are all, you know, white and privileged college students. We have a lot to learn.”

Climate justice usually means addressing the disproportionate impacts of climate change on the poorest and most vulnerable, most often communities of color, and the structural inequalities at their root. And yet, I wondered if perhaps her entire generation and those younger have the right to some kind of climate justice of their own—a kind of intergenerational justice—given that those who’ve done the most to create the crisis won’t live to see the major impacts expected later this century, while many people her age and younger will.

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“That’s a huge part of this action,” Aly said. “Young people are realizing that we have a huge stake in protecting the climate for our future.”

Does that mean she feels solidarity with those on the front lines? I asked. Is this a solidarity action?

“I want to say yes,” she said. “Yes, we’re in solidarity with folks fighting tar sands and doing environmental justice work. But then, what does that mean? In solidarity, yes, we want to elevate those struggles and help bring our privilege to those struggles—and engage with them and recognize that our future is tied to their future, as young people especially.”

At the training on Saturday night, I put the same question to Al Smith, who the next day marched up front with the students, holding aloft a painted portrait of Vicci, Lisa, and Barb with the words “Free the MICATS 3.”

“This is one example of what love looks like,” Al told me. “When people show up, people put their time and their resources and their heart into something, that’s solidarity. When there’s a level of respect and appreciation and honor for what both groups do, that’s solidarity. Yeah, it’s an easy word to say. I don’t know what it means to most people. To me, it means love.” 

http://www.thenation.com/article/178739/xl-dissent-generation-climate-front-lines

State Dept Keystone Review Assumes 'Global Failure to Address Climate Change'

by  "Carbon Copy," InsideClimate News, March 7, 2014

As the deadline for public comment on the Keystone XL pipeline arrived on March 7, environmental groups told the Obama administration that the State Department's analysis of the project was based on flawed assumptions that clash with the nation's commitment to mobilizing global action against climate change.

In its final environmental impact statement (EIS) issued on January 31, the State Department asserted that no single project would have much effect on the growth of Canada's tar sands industry. It based its conclusions partly on business-as-usual projections that demand for oil and prices would rise amid continued worldwide inaction on global warming.

The Natural Resources Defense Council said in wide-ranging comments that the EIS "makes a fundamental error by relying on energy consumption scenarios which assume a global failure to address climate change."

If the State Department stuck with its predictions that energy consumption and prices were destined to remain high, it would "undermine the nation's credibility" during United Nations talks aimed at heading off the worst effects of global warming, the advocacy group said.

Climate experts from around the world have agreed to aim for a binding treaty to be signed in Paris in 2015 that would keep emissions at a level consistent with global warming of no more than 2 degrees Celsius. According to the scientific consensus, this means not letting carbon dioxide emissions grow above 450 parts per million in the atmosphere. To stay within this limit, widely accepted computer models project that as much as 80 percent of available fossil fuels must be left in the ground.

But in analyzing the Keystone XL's effects, the State Department never considered the decline in oil use that would occur under an effective global climate treaty. Achieving a climate deal is a high priority for Secretary of State John Kerry and President Obama, who are the ultimate decision-makers on a permit for the Keystone XL .

The authoritative International Energy Agency has projected that under carbon cuts aimed at hitting the international safe-climate goal, United States demand for petroleum would drop from 17 million barrels a day in 2011 to just 10 million barrels a day in 2035.

Instead, the State Department's Keystone analysis adopted business-as-usual assumptions in which U.S. consumption either grows to 19 million barrels a day, or in the best case declines only slightly.

The agency's assumptions about the energy markets "must be interpreted as analysis centered on a world where curbing climate change is not a priority," said a separate report released Monday by the Carbon Tracker Interactive, a nonprofit that links capital markets to climate issues.

Oil Prices: High or Low?

The NRDC's comments to the State Department were written for a coalition of several environmental groups who have made common cause against the pipeline throughout the five-year review of the project. The public was given 30 days to comment on the January 14 environmental review. The pipeline will carry fuel from Canada's oil sands region to the Texas Gulf Coast.

In their comments, the groups pointed out that if the world acts now to rein in the use of oil and other fossil fuels as part of a global climate deal, demand for these fuels would fall, and so would prices.

With prices lower, it would be harder for tar sands oil producers to turn a profit. To remain profitable, producers would need to keep down the costs of transporting their oil all the way to the Gulf Coast, a crucial artery for the flow of tar sands abroad. Since pipelines are cheaper than rail, projects like Keystone XL would hold the key to tar sands profits.

Therefore, the groups reasoned, the Keystone XL and other pipelines would be essential if the Canadian oil industry is to double or triple tar sands output in the decades ahead. Rail would be unaffordable if oil prices fall, they said. Only the Keystone XL and others like it could enable the higher tar sands output—and the higher emissions—that would exacerbate global warming.

The State Department, on the other hand, believing that oil prices would stay high, argued that even without pipelines, the Canadians could afford to expand the tar sands and deliver the oil by rail. Its review said it was unlikely that oil prices would decline in the years ahead. And so the Keystone XL line would not affect the rate of tar sands growth and its approval makes no difference to global warming, the agency concluded.

NRDC and the Carbon Tracker Initiative both said that the State Department had relied on projections for oil demand and prices that were much higher than those suggested by the International Energy Agency, under a scenario that assumed nations would devise a way to restrain emissions to relatively safe levels.

The scenarios built into the market analysis that is at the heart of the State Department's environmental review did not include any "supply/demand outlook or other elements that would be consistent with a global energy sector that is evolving to contain the risks of climate change," the Carbon Tracker report said.

The State Department and its contractor assumed "growing global oil demand and a trajectory for future oil prices strongly at odds with the trends likely to persist in a world that is aggressively reducing carbon emissions," it said.

Both the United States and Canada have already pledged to reduce carbon dioxide pollution by the year 2020 to a level 17% below the 2005 mark, with steeper reductions to follow. The United States is on course to meet this goal if new controls on emissions from coal fired power plants are imposed, as the Obama administration is proposing. But Canada has conceded that it is unlikely to meet the target, largely because of emissions associated with growing production of tar sands oil.

By drawing the connection between the State Department's analysis of the Keystone project and its task in the ongoing international negotiations—which resume this month in Bonn—the environmental groups were reminding Secretary of State John Kerry that the current examination of whether the pipeline is in the national interest must take global interests into account as well.

European nations, in particular, are adamant that the new treaty should respect the 2 degree safe [nope, not safe at all] climate goal and that nations should explicitly declare what steps they are taking to stay within the desired limit.

http://insideclimatenews.org/content/state-dept-keystone-review-assumes-global-failure-address-climate-change

SENATORS SPEAKING ALL NIGHT TO URGE ACTION ON CLIMATE CHANGE

***MEDIA ADVISORY***

SENATORS SPEAKING ALL NIGHT
TO URGE ACTION ON CLIMATE CHANGE

MONDAY, MARCH 10 – TUESDAY, MARCH 11

Washington, DC – Immediately following votes on the evening of Monday, March 10, until approximately 9 a.m. EST, Tuesday, March 11, Senators from the Senate Climate Action Task Force will be holding the Senate floor to urge action on climate change.  A significant number of Senators are expected to participate throughout the night. 

“Climate change is real, it is caused by humans, and it is solvable,” said Senator Schatz.  “Congress must act.  On Monday night we’re going to show the growing number of Senators who are committed to working together to confront climate change.”

Senator Boxer said: “So many Senators coming together for an all-night session shows our commitment to wake up Congress to the dangers of climate change. All you have to do is look at China to see what happens to your country when you throw the environment under the bus.”

"The cost of Congress' inaction on climate change is too high for our communities, our kids and grandkids, and our economy,” Senator Whitehouse said. “On Mondaywe’ll be sending a clear message: it’s time for Congress to wake up and get serious about addressing this issue.”

Senators expected to participate include:

Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

Senator Dick Durbin, D-Ill. 

Senator Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. 

Senator Patty Murray, D-Wash.

Senator Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I.

Senator Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. 

Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.       

Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore.    

Senator Bill Nelson, D-Fla.    

Senator Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.         

Senator Benjamin L. Cardin, D-Md.   

Senator Bernard Sanders, I-Vt.             

Senator Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.                    

Senator Mark Udall, D-Colo.  

Senator Tom Udall, D-N.M.   

Senator Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H.         

Senator Jeff Merkley, D-Ore.  

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.      

Senator Al Franken, D-Minn.  

Senator Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.           

Senator Chris Murphy, D-Conn.      

Senator Martin Heinrich, D-N.M.       

Senator Angus King, I-Maine 

Senator Tim Kaine, D-Va.      

Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.

Senator Edward J. Markey, D-Mass.  

Senator Cory Booker, D-N.J.

Senators will be actively participating on social media as well throughout the night – using the hashtag #Up4Climate.

For Immediate Release

March 7, 2014

Contact:  Meaghan Smith (Schatz) (202) 224-4305

               Seth Larson (Whitehouse) (202) 228-6291

    Mary Kerr (Boxer) (202) 224-8832

BloombergBusinessweek editor slams Keystone XL pipeline: "Give Me One Good Reason Obama Should Approve Keystone XL"

Give Me One Good Reason Obama Should Approve Keystone XL

by Brad Wieners, Bloomberg Businessweek, March 6, 2014

Photograph by Shane Bevel/Bloomberg

Tanks of unrefined oil in Cushing, Oklahoma, where there’s a glut of crude in storage

Really, there could be two:

1. President Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, and economic growth-focused Washington want China as America’s new BFF and plan to let Beijing know by offering up an energy supply from our friends to the North.

2. Obama, Kerry, and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper have worked out a quid pro quo. The Yanks will accept a pipe carrying toxic sludge through America’s bread basket so long as Canada takes over counterterrorism in Afghanistan, sends peacekeepers to Ukraine, and Harper himself places Justin Bieber under house arrest so he can’t tour in the lower 48.

Some American teens might not find that last measure in the national interest, but some version of these realpolitik rationales—overture to China, huge favor to Harper—are about the only ones left to explain why Obama hasn’t killed the proposed 875-mile final leg of pipeline from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico.

A number of strong arguments appeared to be in favor of Keystone XL when it first became a national story, beginning with jobs. Several U.S. representatives and senators testified that the pipeline would yield 20,000, 40,000, or even 100,000 new jobs. The recession made those prospects extra compelling. Turns out they were extra optimistic, too. Now we know the pipeline might generate about 3,900 temporary (two-year) construction jobs and about 50 permanent ones. (Should we really be surprised? The whole point of a pipeline is that it’s automated.)

The other big case for Keystone—also given full voice by pols who received campaign help from oil and gas lobbies—was the chance to rely on a friendly neighbor for oil rather than on an unstable Middle Eastern regime. But now, due in part to fracking and the Bakken reserve in North Dakota, U.S. oil inventories are at a 21-year high; a glut of unrefined oil is sitting in Cushing, Okla., and the U.S. is expected to become the world’s leading oil producer next year. Moreover, the sweet crude pouring out of the Bakken is of far finer quality than bitumen, the sour, thick oil sands extraction that is effectively steamed out of the soil beneath Alberta’s former boreal forest. What’s more, Keystone XL isn’t really designed to serve the U.S.; it’s meant to get Alberta’s tar sands to Texas refineries and ready for export. The Keystone XL would better serve China’s energy “independence” than America’s.

Oh, but surely a $5.4 billion infrastructure project would provide the U.S. economy a welcome boost and added tax revenues? Yes, more than $3 billion over its lifetime, according to the market analysis in the Jan. 31 Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement on the Keystone XL prepared by the U.S. Department of State [pdf]. Yet before the U.S. collects taxes from refiners, resellers, and exporters, it will first spend hundreds of millions on subsidies so these companies can invest in the technologies needed to make usable fuels out of bitumen. One example: Houston-based Motiva, which operates major storage facilities and scores of Shell gas stations and is slated to receive between $680 million and $1.1 billion from U.S. taxpayers so it can deal with tar sands oil. So in the near term, economic stimulus related to Keystone XL will come from Washington, not be paid to the IRS.

None of these arguments should particularly matter, though, as Obama has indicated that impact on the earth’s climate is his pass/fail for approving the project. This has led to a ridiculous effort to prove that the pipeline itself will not lead to a great deal more carbon entering the atmosphere. That’s a feint. The real question isn’t how carbon-intensive the 3-foot diameter pipe is but how much carbon-polluting oil it brings to market.

Presuming the tar sands will be developed with or without the Keystone XL, State’s estimates of carbon emissions were modest in its January 31, 2014, report. Even so, the report acknowledges that the project will accelerate climate change. Hence, says Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, international program director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, “President Obama now has all the information he needs to reject the pipeline.”

A new report this week, using some of the same forecast formulas, is more damning yet. It suggests that State massively understated the consequences of the Keystone XL. According to Carbon Tracker’s analysis, by facilitating tar sands oil production the proposed pipeline will result in carbon emissions equivalent to 46 new coal burning power plants.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-03-07/keystone-xl-energy-independence-isnt-a-good-reason