Last Friday evening, I attended a potluck fundraiser for Occupy Tucson, and Vince Pawlowski from Tucson Climate Action Network was the guest speaker. His topic was the Keystone XL Pipeline. Vince started out by talking about why the “oil” that is being violently wrenched from the Alberta Tar Sands is so problematic. (For some visual proof of just how violent that process is, see “Photographer Captures Tar Sands 'Destruction' from Above.") Vince said that in the first half of the 20th century, when oil literally gushed from the ground here in the U.S., it cost about one barrel of oil to take 100 barrels of oil out of the ground. But in the Tar Sands, one barrel of oil gets you roughly 3-5 barrels. That’s poor rate of return, by anyone’s standards, but the Tar Sands project is viable because of cheap frack gas from Alberta, which is used to heat the bitumen, the crude product that comes out of the earth.
This bitumen is corrosive, toxic, and contains compounds that are known carcinogens and mutagens. Two scientists from Environment Canada – Jane Kirk and Derek Muir – have confirmed that there's a “bull’s-eye” of mercury around the Tar Sands project that covers 19,000 square kilometers. And as if that's not already a toxic nightmare, there are a variety of toxic compounds like benzene, toluene, and xylenes in the diluted bitumen. These toxic substances pollute the air, water, and soil of nearby Canadians – most of whom are from the Alberta First Nation (the people who just hosted Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu at a weekend conference on treaty rights and the environment, at which he called the production of bitumen “filth.”)
This huge expenditure of fossil fuels – not to mention the number of toxics involved – is supposedly justified because of the jobs that will be created and the American industry the project will support. Yet, as Cornell University predicted, little American steel has gone into production of the pipeline infrastructure, and only a few thousand part-time, temporary, and short-term jobs have been created. So who will really benefit from the pipeline? Vince said that Koch Industries holds a lease on 1.1 million acres in the tar sands area, the single largest foreign holding. According to the Washington Post their lease holdings could be closer to 2 million acres, and they have a huge stake in this largest civil engineering project in the world. It’s not hard to see that the Kochs benefit, but the rest of us – the whole biosphere – will suffer the consequences of human addiction to fossil fuels as this project helps heat our climate.
Vince has an engineering background, so I asked him what he thought of some of the geoengineering projects that have been proposed as a solution to global warming; what’s notable about them is that they will not require the Koch Brothers – or us – to change our ways. He said he was skeptical about geoengineering because of the fact that tampering with complex natural systems can have unpredictable results, as the people who propose the space mirrors and atmospheric aerosols should well know. But he said there’s one geoengineering solution that he does favor – planting more trees. In addition to what I plan to do to reduce the size of my carbon footprint, I support planting more trees is a sustainable form of carbon-offsetting. Over the weekend I looked at some of the mesquite trees in my neighborhood, which are still flowering and also starting to make bean pods.
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| Edible bean pods of the mesquite tree |
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