The Petro States of America
The Keystone XL pipeline should be an open-and-shut case from a climate perspective, the criterion President Obama has set for judging it. In a speech in June, he said he would approve the pipeline “only if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.” By that standard, this should be an easy, data-driven call to make. It hasn’t been. And the core reason the Keystone saga has dragged on inconclusively for years has little to do with the well-aired talking points both sides of the debate trot out on cable TV talk shows.
The oil industry says Obama should stop stalling. The U.S. Department of State’s latest environmental impact report concluded that the Keystone XL pipeline that would transport 700,000 barrels of carbon-heavy tar-sands oil per day from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Gulf Coast is unlikely to significantly worsen carbon emissions. Even if the $5.4 billion, 1,700-mile pipeline were not completed, the report determined, the oil would still be extracted and transported to world markets. That’s all the rationale Obama needs to say yes. Climate advocates and parts of the Democratic base, on the other hand, deride the department’s report as exactly what one would expect from a document written by the industry itself; they’re calling on Obama to show some guts for once and reject a pipeline that would connect a massive amount of carbon to the world oil market and most certainly expand greenhouse gas emissions.
But there’s a deeper explanation for Obama’s caution on Keystone that rarely gets acknowledged. He is the president of a petro state, a country that ranks as an OPEC nation in all but name. And in a petro state, saying no to Big Oil is never easy.
“The United States is as much of an OPEC nation as most OPEC nations are,” Everett Ehrlich, an undersecretary of commerce for economic affairs in the Clinton administration, once told me in an interview. Ehrlich, who chaired the administration’s interagency deliberations on climate change, was explaining why a government that boasted Al Gore as vice president was nevertheless much more timid about cutting greenhouse gas emissions than were the European and Japanese governments. “The U.S. is an energy producer,” he added, “while the Europeans and Japan are energy consumer nations. Our natural resource industries are very powerful, and their executives saw dealing with climate change as punitive to their interests.”
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http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-27/oil-industrys-power-in-u-dot-s-dot-petro-state-shapes-keystone-xl-debate
