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New Study Shows Total North American Methane Leaks Far Worse than EPA Estimates | DeSmogBlog
New Study Shows Total North American Methane Leaks Far Worse than EPA Estimates | DeSmogBlog.

Just how bad is natural gas for the climate?
A lot worse than previously thought, new research on methane leaks concludes.
Far more natural gas is leaking into the atmosphere nationwide than the Environmental Protection Agency currently estimates, researchers concluded after reviewing more than 200 different studies of natural gas leaks across North America.
The ground-breaking study, published today in the prestigious journal Science, reports that the Environmental Protection Agency has understated how much methane leaks into the atmosphere nationwide by between 25 and 75 percent — meaning that the fuel is far more dangerous for the climate than the Obama administration asserts.
The study, titled “Methane Leakage from North American Natural Gas Systems,” was conducted by a team of 16 researchers from institutions including Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and is making headlines because it finally and definitively shows that natural gas production and development can make natural gas worse than other fossil fuels for the climate.
The research, which was reported in The Washington Post, Bloomberg and The New York Times, was funded by a foundation created by the late George P. Mitchell, the wildcatter who first successfully drilled shale gas, so it would be hard to dismiss it as the work of environmentalists hell-bent on discrediting the oil and gas industry.
The debate over the natural gas industry’s climate change effects has raged for several years, ever since researchers from Cornell University stunned policy-makers and environmentalists by warning that if enough methane seeps out between the gas well and the burner, relying on natural gas could be even more dangerous for the climate than burning coal.
Natural gas is mostly comprised of methane, an extraordinarily powerful greenhouse gas, which traps heat 86 times more effectively than carbon dioxide during the two decades after it enters the atmosphere, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, so even small leaks can have major climate impacts.
The team of researchers echoed many of the findings of the Cornell researchers and described how the federal government’s official estimate proved far too low.
“Atmospheric tests covering the entire country indicate emissions around 50 percent more than EPA estimates,” said Adam Brandt, the lead author of the new report and an assistant professor of energy resources engineering at Stanford University. “And that’s a moderate estimate.”
The new paper drew some praise from Dr. Robert Howarth, one of the Cornell scientists.
“This study is one of many that confirms that EPA has been underestimating the extent of methane leakage from the natural gas industry, and substantially so,” Dr. Howarth wrote, adding that the estimates for methane leaks in his 2011 paper and the new report are “in excellent agreement.”
In November, research led by Harvard University found that the leaks from the natural gas industry have been especially under-estimated. That study, published inthe Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, reported that methane emissions from fossil fuel extraction and oil refineries in some regions are nearly five times higher than previous estimates, and was one of the 200 included in Thursday’s Science study.
EPA Estimes Far Off-Target
So how did the EPA miss the mark by such a high margin?
The EPA’s estimate depends in large part on calculations — take the amount of methane released by an average cow, and multiply it by the number of cattle nationwide. Make a similar guess for how much methane leaks from an average gas well. But this leaves out a broad variety of sources — leaking abandoned natural gas wells, broken valves and the like.
Their numbers never jibed with findings from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Department of Energy, which approached the problem by taking measurements of methane and other gas levels from research flights and the tops of telecommunications towers.
But while these types of measurements show how much methane is in the atmosphere, they don’t explain where that methane came from. So it was still difficult to figure out how much of that methane originated from the oil and gas industry.
At times, EPA researchers went to oil and gas drilling sites to take measurements. But they relied on driller’s voluntary participation. For instance, one EPA study requested cooperation from 30 gas companies so they could measure emissions, but only six companies allowed the EPA on site.
“It’s impossible to take direct measurements of emissions from sources without site access,” said Garvin Heath, a senior scientist with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and a co-author of the new analysis in a press release. “Self-selection bias may be contributing to why inventories suggest emission levels that are systematically lower than what we sense in the atmosphere.” (DeSmog haspreviously reported on the problem of industry-selected well sites in similar research funded by the Environmental Defense Fund.)
Worse than Coal?
There was, however, one important point that the news coverage so far missed and that deserves attention — a crucial point that could undermine entirely the notion that natural gas can serve as a “bridge fuel” to help the nation transition away from other, dirtier fossil fuels.
In their press release, the team of researchers compared the climate effects of different fuels, like diesel and coal, against those of natural gas.
They found that powering trucks or busses with natural gas made things worse.
“Switching from diesel to natural gas, that’s not a good policy from a climate perspective” explained the study’s lead author, Adam R. Brandt, an assistant professor in the Department of Energy Resources at Stanford, calling into question a policy backed by President Obama in his recent State of the Union address.
The researchers also described the effects of switching from coal to natural gas for electricity — concluding that coal is worse for the climate in some cases. “Even though the gas system is almost certainly leakier than previously thought, generating electricity by burning gas rather than coal still reduces the total greenhouse effect over 100 years, the new analysis shows,” the team wrote in a press release.
But they failed to address the climate impacts of natural gas over a shorter period — the decades when the effects of methane are at their most potent.
“What is strange about this paper is how they interpret methane emissions: they only look at electricity, and they only consider the global warming potential of methane at the 100-year time frame,” said Dr. Howarth. Howarth’s 2011 Cornell study reviewed all uses of gas, noting that electricity is only roughly 30% of use in the US, and describing both a 20- and a 100-year time frame.
The choice of time-frame is vital because methane does not last as long in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, so impact shifts over time. “The new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report from last fall — their first update on the global situation since 2007 — clearly states that looking only at the 100 year time frame is arbitrary, and one should also consider shorter time frames, including a 10-year time frame,” Dr. Howarth pointed out.
Another paper, published in Science in 2012, explains why it’s so important to look at the shorter time frames.
Unless methane is controlled, the planet will warm by 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius over the next 17 to 35 years, and that’s even if carbon dioxide emissions are controlled. That kind of a temperature rise could potentially shift the climate of our planet into runaway feedback of further global warming.
“[B]y only looking at the 100 year time frame and only looking at electricity production, this new paper is biasing the analysis of greenhouse gas emissions between natural gas and coal in favor of natural gas being low,” said Dr. Howarth, “and by a huge amount, three to four to perhaps five fold.”
Dr. Howarth’s colleague, Prof. Anthony Ingraffea, raised a similar complaint.
“Once again, there is a stubborn use of the 100-year impact of methane on global warming, a factor about 30 times that of CO2,” Dr. Ingraffea told Climate Central, adding that there is no scientific justification to use the 100-year time window.
“That is a policy decision, perhaps based on faulty understanding of the climate change situation in which we find ourselves, perhaps based on wishful thinking,” he said.
For its part, the oil and gas industry seems very aware of the policy implications of this major new research and is already pushing back against any increased oversight of its operations.
“Given that producers are voluntarily reducing methane emissions,” Carlton Carroll, a spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute, told The New York Times in an interview about the new study, “additional regulations are not necessary.”
Photo Credit: “White Smoke from Coal-Fired Power Plant,” via Shutterstock.
New Study Shows Total North American Methane Leaks Far Worse than EPA Estimates | DeSmogBlog
New Study Shows Total North American Methane Leaks Far Worse than EPA Estimates | DeSmogBlog.

Just how bad is natural gas for the climate?
A lot worse than previously thought, new research on methane leaks concludes.
Far more natural gas is leaking into the atmosphere nationwide than the Environmental Protection Agency currently estimates, researchers concluded after reviewing more than 200 different studies of natural gas leaks across North America.
The ground-breaking study, published today in the prestigious journal Science, reports that the Environmental Protection Agency has understated how much methane leaks into the atmosphere nationwide by between 25 and 75 percent — meaning that the fuel is far more dangerous for the climate than the Obama administration asserts.
The study, titled “Methane Leakage from North American Natural Gas Systems,” was conducted by a team of 16 researchers from institutions including Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and is making headlines because it finally and definitively shows that natural gas production and development can make natural gas worse than other fossil fuels for the climate.
The research, which was reported in The Washington Post, Bloomberg and The New York Times, was funded by a foundation created by the late George P. Mitchell, the wildcatter who first successfully drilled shale gas, so it would be hard to dismiss it as the work of environmentalists hell-bent on discrediting the oil and gas industry.
The debate over the natural gas industry’s climate change effects has raged for several years, ever since researchers from Cornell University stunned policy-makers and environmentalists by warning that if enough methane seeps out between the gas well and the burner, relying on natural gas could be even more dangerous for the climate than burning coal.
Natural gas is mostly comprised of methane, an extraordinarily powerful greenhouse gas, which traps heat 86 times more effectively than carbon dioxide during the two decades after it enters the atmosphere, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, so even small leaks can have major climate impacts.
The team of researchers echoed many of the findings of the Cornell researchers and described how the federal government’s official estimate proved far too low.
“Atmospheric tests covering the entire country indicate emissions around 50 percent more than EPA estimates,” said Adam Brandt, the lead author of the new report and an assistant professor of energy resources engineering at Stanford University. “And that’s a moderate estimate.”
The new paper drew some praise from Dr. Robert Howarth, one of the Cornell scientists.
“This study is one of many that confirms that EPA has been underestimating the extent of methane leakage from the natural gas industry, and substantially so,” Dr. Howarth wrote, adding that the estimates for methane leaks in his 2011 paper and the new report are “in excellent agreement.”
In November, research led by Harvard University found that the leaks from the natural gas industry have been especially under-estimated. That study, published inthe Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, reported that methane emissions from fossil fuel extraction and oil refineries in some regions are nearly five times higher than previous estimates, and was one of the 200 included in Thursday’s Science study.
EPA Estimes Far Off-Target
So how did the EPA miss the mark by such a high margin?
The EPA’s estimate depends in large part on calculations — take the amount of methane released by an average cow, and multiply it by the number of cattle nationwide. Make a similar guess for how much methane leaks from an average gas well. But this leaves out a broad variety of sources — leaking abandoned natural gas wells, broken valves and the like.
Their numbers never jibed with findings from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Department of Energy, which approached the problem by taking measurements of methane and other gas levels from research flights and the tops of telecommunications towers.
But while these types of measurements show how much methane is in the atmosphere, they don’t explain where that methane came from. So it was still difficult to figure out how much of that methane originated from the oil and gas industry.
At times, EPA researchers went to oil and gas drilling sites to take measurements. But they relied on driller’s voluntary participation. For instance, one EPA study requested cooperation from 30 gas companies so they could measure emissions, but only six companies allowed the EPA on site.
“It’s impossible to take direct measurements of emissions from sources without site access,” said Garvin Heath, a senior scientist with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and a co-author of the new analysis in a press release. “Self-selection bias may be contributing to why inventories suggest emission levels that are systematically lower than what we sense in the atmosphere.” (DeSmog haspreviously reported on the problem of industry-selected well sites in similar research funded by the Environmental Defense Fund.)
Worse than Coal?
There was, however, one important point that the news coverage so far missed and that deserves attention — a crucial point that could undermine entirely the notion that natural gas can serve as a “bridge fuel” to help the nation transition away from other, dirtier fossil fuels.
In their press release, the team of researchers compared the climate effects of different fuels, like diesel and coal, against those of natural gas.
They found that powering trucks or busses with natural gas made things worse.
“Switching from diesel to natural gas, that’s not a good policy from a climate perspective” explained the study’s lead author, Adam R. Brandt, an assistant professor in the Department of Energy Resources at Stanford, calling into question a policy backed by President Obama in his recent State of the Union address.
The researchers also described the effects of switching from coal to natural gas for electricity — concluding that coal is worse for the climate in some cases. “Even though the gas system is almost certainly leakier than previously thought, generating electricity by burning gas rather than coal still reduces the total greenhouse effect over 100 years, the new analysis shows,” the team wrote in a press release.
But they failed to address the climate impacts of natural gas over a shorter period — the decades when the effects of methane are at their most potent.
“What is strange about this paper is how they interpret methane emissions: they only look at electricity, and they only consider the global warming potential of methane at the 100-year time frame,” said Dr. Howarth. Howarth’s 2011 Cornell study reviewed all uses of gas, noting that electricity is only roughly 30% of use in the US, and describing both a 20- and a 100-year time frame.
The choice of time-frame is vital because methane does not last as long in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, so impact shifts over time. “The new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report from last fall — their first update on the global situation since 2007 — clearly states that looking only at the 100 year time frame is arbitrary, and one should also consider shorter time frames, including a 10-year time frame,” Dr. Howarth pointed out.
Another paper, published in Science in 2012, explains why it’s so important to look at the shorter time frames.
Unless methane is controlled, the planet will warm by 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius over the next 17 to 35 years, and that’s even if carbon dioxide emissions are controlled. That kind of a temperature rise could potentially shift the climate of our planet into runaway feedback of further global warming.
“[B]y only looking at the 100 year time frame and only looking at electricity production, this new paper is biasing the analysis of greenhouse gas emissions between natural gas and coal in favor of natural gas being low,” said Dr. Howarth, “and by a huge amount, three to four to perhaps five fold.”
Dr. Howarth’s colleague, Prof. Anthony Ingraffea, raised a similar complaint.
“Once again, there is a stubborn use of the 100-year impact of methane on global warming, a factor about 30 times that of CO2,” Dr. Ingraffea told Climate Central, adding that there is no scientific justification to use the 100-year time window.
“That is a policy decision, perhaps based on faulty understanding of the climate change situation in which we find ourselves, perhaps based on wishful thinking,” he said.
For its part, the oil and gas industry seems very aware of the policy implications of this major new research and is already pushing back against any increased oversight of its operations.
“Given that producers are voluntarily reducing methane emissions,” Carlton Carroll, a spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute, told The New York Times in an interview about the new study, “additional regulations are not necessary.”
Photo Credit: “White Smoke from Coal-Fired Power Plant,” via Shutterstock.
Salient| The Play’s the Thing

We did get something – a gift – after the election. … It was a little cocker spaniel dog in a crate. … And our little girl – Tricia, the 6-year old – named it Checkers. And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re gonna keep it.
– Richard Nixon, “Checkers” speech after accepting illegal campaign contributions
Cory is here tonight. And like the Army he loves, like the America he serves, Sergeant First Class Cory Remsburg never gives up, and he does not quit. My fellow Americans, men and women like Cory remind us that America has never come easy.
– Barack Obama, 2014 State of the Union address
You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.
– William Jennings Bryan, the Boy Orator of the Platte, 1896 Democratic nomination speech
Every man a king, but no one wears a crown.
– Huey Long, the Kingfish, slogan from 1928 Louisiana gubernatorial campaign
You didn’t build that.
– Elizabeth Warren, slogan from 2012 Massachusetts campaign for US Senate
The play’s the thing. Wherein I’ll capture the conscience of the king.
– Shakespeare, “Hamlet”
As usual, I was struck by the pageantry and sheer theatricality of this Tuesday’s State of the Union address. As usual, you had the props – human and otherwise – on full display. As usual, you had the rhetorical flourishes, the ritualized audience behavior, the talking head performances before and after. Unusual for me, though, was the professionally scripted and rehearsed television broadcast production, such that the cameras were trained on the human props before the President referred to them in his speech. A bravura technical performance, to be sure.
Last week’s note focused on the primal human behavior of dance. This week it’s the primal human behavior of theatre, of the representation of stories, particularly the play-within-a-play…a fundamental trope of human story-telling from Hamlet to The Simpsons.


There’s the ostensible meaning of the spoken words and the performance, and there’s the ostensible audience to whom the words and performance are addressed. But then there’s the real meaning of the words, and the real audience to whom the words are addressed. And then maybe there’s a meaning and an audience beyond that. This is the recursive, strategic nature of public communications. These multi-level games are the beating hearts of both politics and economics, and looking at these behaviors through the lens of game theory can help us both see the social world more clearly and call more things by their proper names.
We expect this sort of linguistic game-playing in politics. It’s what politicians DO, whether it’s Elizabeth Warren’s “You didn’t build that” speeches putting a modern slant on the same language and imagery of populism and class warfare used by William Jennings Bryan in the 1890’s and Huey “Kingfish” Long in the 1920’s, or whether it’s the entire Republican Party’s “Southern Strategy” of coded language to maintain racist voting blocs post the Civil Rights Act of 1964. If you’ve never read political operative extraordinaire Lee Atwater’s infamous interview on the subject, you really should. And yes, I know that Atwater’s point was that overt racist appeals were diminishing in the South as the language changed, but does anyone doubt that Atwater would use language straight from the KKK handbook if he thought it were still an effective campaign tool? It’s not that he thinks racism is wrong or even distasteful in the context of a political campaign, any more than Elizabeth Warren would be opposed to burning Jamie Dimon in effigy (or maybe in person) at her next campaign rally … it’s just an unpopular tactic today, at least in its unvarnished form. But if it works tomorrow? Sure, why not? In the immortal words of Al Davis, “Just win, baby.”
This sort of linguistic game-playing is not a modern phenomenon. It is a quintessential human phenomenon, played just as effectively by Pericles 2,500 years ago as it is by politicians today. My favorite example of a linguistic play-within-a-play was staged 150 years ago by an undisputed American political genius: Abraham Lincoln. We’re all familiar with the Lincoln-Douglas debates as some sort of shining example of civic participation and civil discourse, but few know the politics behind those debates. Lincoln lost that 1858 election to Stephen Douglas for the US Senate (well, he won the aggregate popular vote by a slim margin, but US Senators were still chosen by state legislatures back then, and the allocation of votes within the Illinois legislature gave Douglas a clear victory). But the way he lost that Senate race … the way Lincoln played the game … won him the Presidency in 1860.

Here was the central question of those debates, the way in which Lincoln framed the language of the debate to give himself the best chance of winning the larger political game: should the citizens of a Territory have the right to decide whether or not to allow slavery in that Territory? Every time Douglas tried to move the debate to some other topic (and seeing as how Illinois was, of course, a state rather than a Territory, you can understand why other topics might be of interest), Lincoln moved it right back. Every time the crowd’s attention seemed to wane in the subject, Lincoln would say something certain to inflame his opponents in the crowd, drawing Douglas back into the fight. Lincoln’s position on this question may surprise you. He was adamantly opposed to popular sovereignty in the Territories, even when the majority opposed slavery (like Kansas). Lincoln’s position was not only anti-slavery, but also (and perhaps more importantly to Lincoln from a political game perspective) anti-states’ rights and local sovereignty.
Why? Lincoln’s question was not really directed at Douglas, the immediate audience. Nor was it really directed at the crowds of voters in the various Illinois towns where they debated. Nor was it really directed at the Illinois newspaper reporters who carried the debates across the entire state of Illinois. It was really directed at a national audience of Republican voters, because Lincoln knew that the Illinois Senate race in 1858 was just a warm-up for the Presidential election of 1860. If Douglas agreed with Lincoln on the Territorial sovereignty question, then he would lose the only issue where he was more popular than Lincoln within Illinois … Douglas would lose the Senate race and fatally damage his chances in the national Democratic primary. If Douglas disagreed with Lincoln, then he would probably win the Illinois Senate race and put himself in a reasonable position to win the national Democratic primary, but not without splitting his own party (Southern Democrats wanted slavery legalized in Territories even if the majority voted it down). Lincoln was playing a game four layers deep! He didn’t care about “winning” the debate. He didn’t care about winning the crowd. He didn’t really care about winning the Illinois Senate election. All of those things would be nice, but it was the fourth level – winning the national Republican primary and the national Presidential election of 1860 – where Lincoln was focused.
Lincoln’s multi-level game strategy worked perfectly. The Democratic party split into Northern and Southern factions (really into three factions if you count the Constitutional Union, which drew principally from former Southern Whigs), giving the Republicans a clean sweep of the Northern states and Electoral College domination even though Lincoln received less than 40% of the popular vote nation-wide. Douglas – the candidate of the (Northern) Democratic Party – finished second in the popular vote with 30% of the vote, but carried only one state (Missouri) and ended up with a mere 12 Electoral College votes, compared to Lincoln’s 180. Not bad for a former Congressman from a frontier state who couldn’t even win a Senate seat.
I’m always surprised when people who are quite aware of the linguistic game-playing that creates the fabric of politics are somehow blind to the same linguistic shaping of the fabric of economics and market behavior. I shouldn’t be surprised – as Upton Sinclair said, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it” – but still. We don’t expect our politics to be “scientific” or our politicians to be anything less than fallible humans, but somehow we expect Truth with a capital T when it comes to economics. There’s a tendency to treat economic communications and signals – whether it’s from a Famous CEO, a Famous Investor, a Famous Economist, a Famous TV Personality, or a Central Banker – as somehow less theatrical or less staged for a larger purpose than political speech. But this is a mistake. When Ben Bernanke said that the Fed would increasingly use its communications as a policy tool, he was declaring his intention to start playing a linguistic game. Or rather, his intention to play the game even harder than it had been played in the past. When Jean-Claude Juncker, former Luxembourg Prime Minister and head of the Eurogroup Council, said of European monetary policy “when it becomes serious you have to lie,” he was simply saying what every successful game-player knows: sometimes you have to bluff. Some Central Bankers are pretty good poker players (Draghi, for example); others … not so much. But they are all playing the Common Knowledge Game as hard as they can, they’re getting better at it, and they’re not going to stop. If you don’t understand the rules of this game, if you don’t listen to what is being said in the context of game-playing, then you are placed at a disadvantage versus those who do. You will not understand the WHY that exists behind the public statements.
There’s a slightly different linguistic game going on in the financial media, but no less important for understanding market outcomes. I’ll take CNBC as an example, but it’s just an example…you could make the same observations about any other media outlet. Within CNBC, Jim Cramer is everyone’s favorite whipping boy when it comes to complaints about media theatrics, but this is missing the forest for the trees. At least Cramer lets us in on the play-within-a-play conceit without constantly pretending that a daily price chart or a market “heat map” is anything other than a theatrical prop. If anything, Cramer’s performance is a paragon of honesty compared to the performances of the “news” hosts or the interchangeable “traders” on shows like “Fast Money.” XKCD published this cartoon in reference to ESPN and the like, but it’s even more applicable to CNBC and its ilk. Just to be clear, I’m not slamming these hosts and traders. I’m sure that they are overwhelmingly smart, honest people who believe that what they say are useful truths from their own perspectives. They are not hypocrites. But they are performers. And like any performer, there is a larger game being played with their words.

The larger meaning of the statements made on CNBC has absolutely nothing to do with specific investment advice or news. CNBC really could not care less about the actual content of what is being said. The purpose of CNBC’s game is not to tell you WHAT to think, but HOW to think, that thinking about investing in terms of some sell-side analyst’s anodyne story about fundamentals or some trader’s breathless story about open option interest is smart or wise or what all the cool kids are doing. Why? Because CNBC can create inexpensive content essentially at will to fill this demand, allowing them to sell advertisements and take cable carriage fees. Nothing evil or wrong about this. It’s what for-profit media companies DO. But the content they are producing is no less of a theatrical production than the State of the Union address, no less of a multi-level game, and it needs to be understood as such.

So what’s to be done if all of our leaders and all of our institutions are speaking past us, playing a larger game for power or money or whatever? Do we rage against the machine? Do we wander around like Diogenes, the founder of Cynic philosophy, holding to some absolutist standards of Honesty with a capital H and Truth with a capital T, living in rags and sleeping in a large clay jar? If that’s the price of being a Cynic and constantly fighting the innate fallibility of Man and his works…no thanks. There has to be a middle ground between being a Cynic and a Fool, some way of playing the game without losing one’s soul. Recognizing that all of us human animals, including me and including you, are playing multiple multi-level games … well, that seems like a good start to me. The Truths in life are still death and taxes (and maybe compounding returns). Everything else is theatre, where honesty (with a small h) and truth (with a small t) are probably the best we can achieve. And that’s not so bad.
Mixed Messages: Clearing the Air on the Keystone XL environmental report | – Environmental Defence
Mixed Messages: Clearing the Air on the Keystone XL environmental report | – Environmental Defence.

Reaction was fast and furious to the State Department’s final report on the environmental impacts of TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline on Friday, and you couldn’t be blamed if you wondered if environmental groups, the oil and industry and government were responding to completely different reports.
While many headlines trumpeted the report as good news for Keystone XL backers, we believe it swung the pendulum towards a rejection of the pipeline by President Obama.
Why? Because President Obama says that he is committed to climate action, and the report is clear that in a world where climate change is taken seriously, the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline would undoubtedly have a significant impact on climate change.
It is the President who will make the final decision to approve or reject the pipeline, and if he is serious about his commitment to climate action, this report gives him everything he needs to reject the pipeline.
The report looks at a series of scenarios and the climate impact of the pipeline in each one. In one of these scenarios, we are tackling climate change; demand for oil continues to drop in North America and the tar sands continue to face transportation constraints – not unlike the constraints they are facing today.
While the report still downplays the climate pollution, it is in this scenario that the pipeline would contribute most significantly to global carbon pollution, up to 5.7 million news cars or 7 coal-fired power plants worth of emissions per year. The other scenarios are ones in which the global demand for oil is aligned with carbon emissions that would lead to dangerous global warming. The other scenarios are ones where we are not meaningfully tackling climate change.
If the President is committed to a safe climate future – it is one that does not include the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.
The tar sands exist because of a perfect storm of conditions: a high oil price, no meaningful regulatory costs, and a world with little action on climate change. This is a set of conditions that is crumbling despite increasingly desperate efforts to keep this expensive and carbon intensive operation profitable. Industry and government know very well that pipelines, and especially Keystone XL, are the key to being able to lock in more expansion and more production.
While some who support the pipeline argue that tar sands oil will still be brought to market regardless of whether the pipeline is approved – namely by rail – the cost, lack of policy, public concern and logistics are enough for experts and industry alike to know that rail cannot replace pipelines. In fact, industry projections depend on approval of every pipeline on the table plus some rail to be able to triple tar sands product as planned by 2030.
Notably, the State Department itself threw cold water on the chances of Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline being built, stating that“…this project has been so derailed via political opposition, state determines ‘it remains uncertain at this time if the project would receive permits and be constructed and therefore… was eliminated from detailed analysis.”
Industry’s hopes for tar sands expansion are far from inevitable. Regardless of the Keystone outcome, it will never be easy to build another giant tar sands pipeline on this continent again.
Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time and the President has committed to doing everything he can to avoid the worst of it. The Keystone XL tar sands pipeline is the test of his sincerity. It is the single biggest thing he could do as President to make it clear to Canada and the world that the era of reckless fossil fuel development is over. That a country – like Canada – can’t get away with leaving its fastest growing source of greenhouse gas pollution completely unregulated. That now is the time to be investing in smarter, cleaner energy, not locking ourselves into decade’s worth of some of the world’ most carbon intensive fuels with a new giant pipeline.
Last week in his State of the Union speech the President said, “Climate change is a fact. And when our children’s children look us in the eye and ask if we did all we could to leave them a safer, more stable world, with new sources of energy, I want us to be able to say yes, we did.”
The reason we can be so optimistic about this report is that it gives the President the evidence he needs – if he is serious about the climate crises – to reject this pipeline, and leave a legacy of a clean energy future.
The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity : Ron Paul Goes Off The Grid…With Jesse Ventura!
The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity : Ron Paul Goes Off The Grid…With Jesse Ventura!.

“What will Congress do about it,” asks Dr. Paul of the president’s threat. “Do you think the Republican leadership, the John Boehners of the world will stand up to him?”
Ron Paul explains that his mission is not as a politician, but as an educator. And thanks to Gov. Ventura fo mentioning Dr. Paul’s educational arm, the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity!
Watch the whole interview:
Our take on the State of the Union address: It’s time for climate action | – Environmental Defence
Our take on the State of the Union address: It’s time for climate action | – Environmental Defence.

President Obama delivered the annualState of the Union address last night. And while we usually keep our attention north of the border, there are a few key reasons that we tuned in. As climate impacts hit harder and closer to home with floods, forest fires, heat waves and cold snaps, the time for ambitious climate action has never been clearer.
Last night the President reaffirmed his commitment to climate action through emissions reductions, clean energy, cuts to fossil fuel subsidies, and efficiency. But a ramping up of the ‘all of the above’ energy strategy, with increased natural gas and oil, threatens to hold the U.S. back as a climate leader. Nonetheless, the President’s determination to protect future generations from climate change stands in sharp contrast to what’s happening here in Canada, where the reckless expansion of the tar sands is making it impossible to do our share to prevent the worst of climate change.
Here are the key reasons we watched the speech:
- A tale of two countries and climate changeThe Canadian government claims, when it comes to action on climate change, we are harmonizing with the U.S., our largest trading partner. So when President Obama stepped up earlier this year (in the President’s June climate speech) by committing to tackle the U.S.’s biggest source of pollution (coal), it put pressure on Canada to finally take action to regulate the tar sands, our fastest growing source of climate change pollution.Rather than being harmonized, it seems our leaders are singing different tunes. Recently, Prime Minister Harper suggested that any rules to deal with tar sands emissions are still a couple of years away. In contrast, as we heard last night, the President remains dedicated to working to tackle carbon pollution and invest in clean energy and efficiency – commitments that are lacking in Canada.
We’d welcome real cross-border collaboration on climate action, clean energy and efficiency. The U.S. is committed to taking advantage of the growing clean energy economy (solar got a shout out last night). If we don’t get on board soon with clean energy, Canada will miss out on the jobs and benefits of this growing sector.
- The Keystone XL tar sands pipelinePresident Obama holds the key to significant tar sands expansion (and climate pollution) through the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. While he wasn’t expected to – and didn’t – mention the pipeline in last night’s speech, the heat was still on the President with over 100 people gathered in the cold outside of the White House,demanding a rejection of this massive pipeline that would enable major industry expansion and significant climate pollution.The pipeline is in the midst of a final environmental impact assessment, which the State Department is expected to release in the coming weeks or months. The impact assessment follows the President’s June climate speech, where he was clear that the pipeline would not be approved if it significantly exacerbatesclimate pollution. Industry and governments have been lobbying heavily for the Keystone pipeline, precisely because it would open up export routes and allow for tar sands expansion.
After the assessment is presented, the pipeline will go through a National Interest Determination process where the public can weigh in. But the final decision rests with the President. The Keystone XL tar sands pipeline is an example of the infrastructure we should not build if we’re serious about stabilizing our climate, which requires us to move away from polluting fossil fuels. Rejecting the pipeline would be yet another signal for investors who are coming to terms with the risks of investing in dirty fuels. And it would be very good news for the climate, which would be saved tens of millions of tonnes of carbon pollution.
- Our shared atmosphereBecause we share an atmosphere with the U.S, we care about what our southern neighbour does on climate change, pipelines, fracking, clean energy and energy efficiency. While we work hard every day to push for climate and clean energy policy in Canada, it isn’t just our pollution that matters. The U.S. is one of the world’s largest polluters and what it does or doesn’t do to tackle global warming pollution will impact us in Canada.Every country must try to do its fair share to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Here at home we will work even harder, because we have further to go. Some important change is happening in Canada, led by cities and provinces. Look at Ontario’s move to shut its last coal plant down for good or Nova Scotia’s impressive success at cutting energy waste. But as a country we need to grapple with the fact that expanding fossil fuel production is incompatible with action on climate change. If the tar sands are allowed to expand, pollution from them will cancel out every other effort in the country to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The good news is that on both sides of the border there a diverse, powerful and growing movement of committed individuals, organizations and communities standing up for a safer future for our shared environment and climate. This movement has made the tar sands the defining energy conversation on the continent, with many voices calling for an end to expanding the tar sands. As the impacts of climate change continue to hit close to home, this movement is only going to get stronger.
oftwominds-Charles Hugh Smith: The Real State of the Union: The Erosion of Community
oftwominds-Charles Hugh Smith: The Real State of the Union: The Erosion of Community.
The Central State and its core directives, central planning and ever-widening control of every aspect of life, is eroding the human essential: community.
Rather than the rah-rah phoniness of the President’s State of the Union speech,which was predictably filled with Soaring Rhetoric ™ and promises of more central planning and state expansion, let’s consider the real state of the union.
Two related truths are self-evident: that community is essential to human progress, communication, development and well-being, and that the current global systems of the central state (socialism) and cartel-state capitalism (capitalism) actively dismantle community.
These basics inform the view that the only way forward is a community-based economy that recognizes and restores community as the foundation of human life.
On the most fundamental survival level, if humans were isolated, solitary hunter-gatherers, humans would likely have gone extinct long ago, as we simply aren’t as capable as our competitors. If the species did endure, it would be equivalent to other solitary Great Apes–small in number and isolated to small pockets where it could survive.
Our dominance (“success” if you prefer) as a species flows directly from our social nature and the development of ways to spread better techniques, i.e. knowledge and cooperation, via spoken and eventually written language.
Yes, opposable thumbs boosted our toolmaking abilities and year-round fertility boosted our reproduction rates, but these advantages would be marginal were we a species of isolated individuals. Indeed, the fundamentals of sociobiology support the notion that human longevity results partly from the genetic advantages
bestowed by grandparents, i.e. a generation of elders who can aid in child-rearing and serve as a repository for experiential knowledge/wisdom that would be lost to short-lived species.
In our current system, the impersonal state replaces the core value created by participating in community with welfare checks; there is no need to bother cooperating and working with others once the state provides the basics of life.
A similiar dynamic is implicit in corporate capitalism, which assumes that large corporations dedicated to pursuing profit wherever such profits might be greatest can successfully replace communities with corporate “communities” of workers and supervisors.
In The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America (submitted by correspondent Cheryl A.), The author proposes that social cooperation waxes and wanes with wealth inequality: as inequality rises, so too does polarization. People become less cooperative and socially engaged as polarization increases.
The correlation between loss of community and wealth inequality is only the first step. This sociological perspective misses the political point, which is the structure of our centralized state-dominated economy leads to both wealth inequality and the loss of community from the same dynamic: the substitution of the state/corporation as the organizing/controlling structure for society, displacing community.
Want to Reduce Income/Wealth Inequality? Abolish the Engine of Inequality, the Federal Reserve (January 28, 2014)
Our state-cartel system creates aimless armies of unemployed people who receive just enough from the state that the incentive to rebel is eroded, but this does not fill the gap left by the destruction of community with anything positive or fulfilling: it simply maintains the void via bribery.
The entire notion that corporations pursuing maximization of profit for their shareholders can organize society to benefit everyone is nonsensical; how could organizations dedicated to reaping profits replace multi-layered communities that meet needs that cannot necessarily be commoditized for a profit?
Longtime correspondent Bart D. cogently summed up these issues:
“When boiled down to real world conditions, for a society and economy to operate sustainably and successfully, people have to do things for and with each other, and BE SEEN to be doing it.
From an evolutionary perspective a community would form the basis of the economy in which individuals lived their lives. Each participant would have known, in social terms, every other participant to some degree.
In such a ‘traditional’ system, individual participants were heavily incentivised to be valued by others. Being valued for your good works and deeds increased your chances of having other individuals help you out when you were individually unable to support yourself for some reason (sickness, old age, personal disaster).
In economies of small and local scale you really strived to have others feel they owed you something based purely on their sense of fairness and conscience, because people interacted economically and socially with the same people. This creates a pool of good will that functions as ‘social security’ (This has since been transmuted into the Frankenstein of ‘debt’ and ‘taxes’ both of which are grudging rather than volunteered.)
That type of interaction has been and is continuing to be eroded away in the modern economic system that seeks desperately to separate social relationships from economic relationships.
Thus we have the disconnect between small business taxpayers and welfare recipients that sets up the perfect conditions for corporatocracy and the bizarre ever-expanding debt economic models of the west.
What the architects of these current systems have lost sight of is that the illusion they created by pumping free credit into the system only works on some parts of the economic system and at the cost of GREATLY undermining the social component of the system.”
Richard Dawkins makes much the same point in this interview published in The New Republic:
“Now, there is another kind of altruism that seems to go beyond that, a kind of super-altruism, which humans appear to have. And I think that does need a Darwinian explanation. I would offer something like this: We, in our ancestral past, lived in small bands or clans, which fostered kin altruism and reciprocal altruism, because in these small bands, each individual was most likely to be surrounded by relatives and individuals who he was going to meet again and again in his life. And so the rule of thumb based into the brain by natural selection would not have been, Be nice to your kin and be nice to potential reciprocators. It would have been, Be nice to everybody, because everybody would have been included.”
This is not to suggest there isn’t a role for the state and profit-seeking organizations in society or the economy; it is simply to state the obvious that the wholesale replacement of community by the state has eroded an essential of human life that cannot be filled by impersonal states and corporations. States and corporations cannot “fix” what’s broken with the model of state-cartel capitalism/socialism because the model itself is the problem.
This essay was drawn from Musings Report 46 (2013), one of the weekly reports sent exclusively to subscribers and major contributors (i.e. those who contribute $50 or more annually).