On Friday the US State Department dropped a stink bomb on the US anti-Keystone environmental movement. When this Department released a 2,000-page draft environment impact statement on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline project.
Specifically, the State Department report concluded "the approval or denial of the proposed Project is unlikely to have a substantial impact on the rate of development in the oil sands, or in the amount of heavy crude oil refined in the Gulf Coast area." (as reported in a Washington Post article dated, March 1)
This State Department report based its conclusion on the fact that the oil-sands producers will eventually find new routes to markets, including the growing use of rail cars to transport crude oil around North America.
In short, impact on the global emissions of greenhouse gases. Not so much!
Basically, the Keystone XL pipeline will not contribute to the warming of the planet.
Talk about your "Inconvenient Truth". Ouch. That really hurts the anti-Keystone types, big time!
On the other hand, you can just see the executives of TransCanada, the developers of Keystone, doing happy dances around their boardroom table, in the oil-rich Canadian city of Calgary.
I can imagine Russ Girling, CEO of TransCanada, barely suppressing his glee when he stated, referring to the above State Department Report, that "This report again confirms that the US is going to continue to import oil for decades into the future. This isn't an issue of alternate energy versus fossil fuels. This is really just a question of where do you want to get your oil from, given that you're going to need it."
So the US will still have to import oil for its energy needs. For the foreseeable future. To date the US also imports oil from Venezuela.
Recall that the anti-western, anti-capitalist socialist leaders of Venezuela hate the US guts, ideologically speaking." Emperor for Life Chavez and Venezuela are unreliable suppliers of oil to the US. But let us put aside these very real national security concerns. Let us stick with the science.
The very same US State Department has concluded in a recent report that Canadian oil from the Alberta oil sands is at or below Venezuelan oil in terms of GHGs ( greenhouse gases). Guess what? The unintended consequences of blocking the Keystone pipeline, will be continued oil imports from Venezuela to the US. And greenhouse gas emissions increasing , together with all those nasty emissions arising from the trucks and trains needed to transport Venezuelan oil throughout the US.
Talk about pouring oil sands on the US environmentalists' wounds.