http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-02/how-canada-s-flirtation-with-a-china-oil-market-soured.html
This is going to be a bit of an off-topic rant: I've always had a major problem with the Keystone XL opponents. In my view, there are many environmentalists on the left who get behind the issue of the day, be it Keystone or fracking, with little understanding, or interest in the underlying issues.
The average keystone opponent's basic world view as far as I can tell: carbon is bad. Wind turbines and solar panels are good. Nuclear energy is confusing and they don't know if they should like it or not so they don't worry about it. No wind turbine built in the past hundred years was carbon free. Carbon is used to mine the iron ore and copper, coking coal used to create the steel for the tower, the epoxy in the blades is a petroleum biproduct, and the building process, transport, and assembly all put carbon into the air. Now does the lifecycle of a wind turbine put less carbon into the air per KWH of electricity generated relative to a combined cycle natural gas power plant? I would guess that it probably does, though I've never seen the analysis.
Burning hydrocarbons is necessary for modern society to function. We must ween ourselves away from putting carbon in the atmosphere, and the best way to do that is to tax carbon. The emissions trading schemes in Europe are overly complex and practically designed to facilitate fraud and corruption. Taxing is fairly simple. Pretty much all oil goes to refineries, all natural gas goes through big pipelines, substantially all coal goes to power plants or steel mills (a small fraction). If you assess carbon taxes at the refinery, gas pipeline, and coal power plant, you will tax the vast majority of carbon entering the atmosphere due to human activity. The regressive nature of a carbon tax could be offset by a progressive compensating tax cut.
Unlike in Europe and China, I think the US has the capability to reduce emissions much more quickly than people generally believe. I think the medium term answer would be carbon sequestration, and longer term would be nuclear power, in one form or another. Wind and Solar is nice, but I'm skeptical that it can ever be more than a certain minority percentage of power generation. The reason that the USA has a big advantage over Europe is that we can more easily sequester carbon from coal and gas plants. It may not be widely known, but people are already injecting CO2 into on-shore oil reservoirs in the USA with no carbon tax to incentivize them, because it can aid in the recovery of oil. Most of this CO2 is simply pumped from other CO2 reservoirs underground, so there is no net benefit to the environment (and I'm sure there are losses, so there may well be a significant net negative to the environment). The technology exists to take CO2 out of the exhaust stream of a power plant. I've heard it would add 40-50% to the cost of power generation. Even if that is true, its not a huge price to pay relative to the scale of the problems associated with global warming. An appropriate carbon tax would make this happen pretty quickly I think. And after this happened, if we started to shift to electric vehicles for transportation, we would be able to eliminate the largest contributors of human generated CO2. Building more wind turbines is thinking small, as is banning fracking or blocking pipelines. To slow global warming we need to think big.
Is oil sands oil dirtier than Appalachian coal? Does it produce more CO2 than any type of US coal? Is it dirtier than the Nigerian crude oil we import? No, no, and no again. To the Canadians we're huge hypocrites. Just because the Republicans in congress would block the carbon tax today, doesn't mean that Democrats shouldn't promote sensible policies. The country will come around eventually.
This is going to be a bit of an off-topic rant: I've always had a major problem with the Keystone XL opponents. In my view, there are many environmentalists on the left who get behind the issue of the day, be it Keystone or fracking, with little understanding, or interest in the underlying issues.
The average keystone opponent's basic world view as far as I can tell: carbon is bad. Wind turbines and solar panels are good. Nuclear energy is confusing and they don't know if they should like it or not so they don't worry about it. No wind turbine built in the past hundred years was carbon free. Carbon is used to mine the iron ore and copper, coking coal used to create the steel for the tower, the epoxy in the blades is a petroleum biproduct, and the building process, transport, and assembly all put carbon into the air. Now does the lifecycle of a wind turbine put less carbon into the air per KWH of electricity generated relative to a combined cycle natural gas power plant? I would guess that it probably does, though I've never seen the analysis.
Burning hydrocarbons is necessary for modern society to function. We must ween ourselves away from putting carbon in the atmosphere, and the best way to do that is to tax carbon. The emissions trading schemes in Europe are overly complex and practically designed to facilitate fraud and corruption. Taxing is fairly simple. Pretty much all oil goes to refineries, all natural gas goes through big pipelines, substantially all coal goes to power plants or steel mills (a small fraction). If you assess carbon taxes at the refinery, gas pipeline, and coal power plant, you will tax the vast majority of carbon entering the atmosphere due to human activity. The regressive nature of a carbon tax could be offset by a progressive compensating tax cut.
Unlike in Europe and China, I think the US has the capability to reduce emissions much more quickly than people generally believe. I think the medium term answer would be carbon sequestration, and longer term would be nuclear power, in one form or another. Wind and Solar is nice, but I'm skeptical that it can ever be more than a certain minority percentage of power generation. The reason that the USA has a big advantage over Europe is that we can more easily sequester carbon from coal and gas plants. It may not be widely known, but people are already injecting CO2 into on-shore oil reservoirs in the USA with no carbon tax to incentivize them, because it can aid in the recovery of oil. Most of this CO2 is simply pumped from other CO2 reservoirs underground, so there is no net benefit to the environment (and I'm sure there are losses, so there may well be a significant net negative to the environment). The technology exists to take CO2 out of the exhaust stream of a power plant. I've heard it would add 40-50% to the cost of power generation. Even if that is true, its not a huge price to pay relative to the scale of the problems associated with global warming. An appropriate carbon tax would make this happen pretty quickly I think. And after this happened, if we started to shift to electric vehicles for transportation, we would be able to eliminate the largest contributors of human generated CO2. Building more wind turbines is thinking small, as is banning fracking or blocking pipelines. To slow global warming we need to think big.
Is oil sands oil dirtier than Appalachian coal? Does it produce more CO2 than any type of US coal? Is it dirtier than the Nigerian crude oil we import? No, no, and no again. To the Canadians we're huge hypocrites. Just because the Republicans in congress would block the carbon tax today, doesn't mean that Democrats shouldn't promote sensible policies. The country will come around eventually.
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