

Opponents of the Keystone XL pipeline, in contrast, seem to deliberately ignore the evidence that the pipeline wouldn't lead to environmental disaster. Missing from their argument -- on prominent display in Washington protests this past weekend -- are a few salient points. The pipeline would do little to increase greenhouse-gas emissions in North America. It would merely enable Canada to send its crude to Gulf Coast refineries via a north-south pipeline rather than rail or ship, and allow the U.S. to get more of the 8 million barrels of oil it imports each day from a good neighbor.

Now that Nebraska has accepted a revised route for the pipeline around the state's sensitive Sand Hills region, President Barack Obama is expected to decide this spring whether to allow its construction. He has already encouraged TransCanada Corp. to build the southern part of the line -- from Cushing, Oklahoma, to the Gulf Coast, and has only to consider the northern section, which crosses the Saskatchewan-Montana border.




Similar steam-injection processes that are used to extract oil from deposits in California's San Joaquin Valley, however, haven't received the kind of attention that anti-Keystone forces have aimed at the Alberta oil sands, as an editorial in the journal Nature recently pointed out. If these processes are so intolerable, why would the U.S. oppose Canada's using them but still allow them to proceed at home?

In any case, extraction methods are getting cleaner. By 2015, carbon-capture technology is expected to reduce emissions from Canadian oil sands by as much as 35 percent. Even now, when you look at the entire well-to-wheels life cycle of the oil sands crude, its emissions are at most 20 percent greater than normal, because most of oil's emissions come from burning the fuel.


So blocking the Keystone pipeline wouldn't save the world from environmental catastrophe.

