It looks like the Keystone XL pipeline is coming down to a nasty war on Canada. In a stunning lead editorial Monday, The New York Times — which is inexplicably slated in June to receive a special tribute at the Canadian Journalism Foundation annual gala — told President Barack Obama he should “say no” to the pipeline that would bring more Canadian oil to the United States.
But the newspaper did more than that. The Times editorial, “When to Say No,” essentially urged Mr. Obama to declare a war on Canada’s oil sands. The Keystone decision, said the Times, is not merely about the environmental impact of the pipeline on flora and fauna as it runs through the United States. Nor is it about the alleged climate impact of the annual carbon emissions from producing and refining the oil that would flow through the pipeline and eventually to U.S. consumers.
These Keystone impacts are short-term issues. President Obama, when he comes to make a final decision sometime in the next few months, should be looking at the big, long-term picture. He should see Canada’s oil sands in their totality, a great ugly deposit of “tar sands” that is estimated to hold 170-billion barrels of oil, and maybe 10 times that amount. “It is these long-term consequences that Mr. Obama should focus on,” said the Times. “Given its carbon content, tar sands oil should be among the first fossil fuels we decide to leave alone.”
Following the Times’ advice, here’s a possible Keystone speech for Mr. Obama: “Today I am announcing that the Keystone XL pipeline will not be allowed to proceed. My reasons are simple. I believe that climate change is one of humanity’s most pressing dangers. We need to decarbonize the world economy, and I think Canada is a good place to start that vital process. We need to leave more oil resources in the ground, and given the scale of Canada’s tar sands and its carbon content, the tar sands should be among the first fossil fuels we decide to leave alone. And so today, in addition to halting Keystone, I have decided to propose that the United States begin to reduce its dependence on tar sands oil from Canada. To that end, we will begin negotiations with Canada to being a gradual reduction in our imports of tar sands oil with an objective of total elimination by 2020.”
That, essentially, is the advice the Times gave Mr. Obama and in doing so it played right into the hands of a U.S. environmental movement that has turned Keystone into religious crusade. The president, it said, should say no to Keystone because he has repeatedly identified climate change as a pressing danger and he “cannot in good conscience” approve a pipeline that would contribute to the climate crisis.
If Canadians want to develop the oil sands, said the Times, they can develop their own effing pipelines to China or wherever. But the U.S. should not accommodate Canadians. The Keystone decision will “say a lot about whether Mr. Obama and his secretary of state, John Kerry, are willing to exert global leadership on the climate change issue.”
The Times dodges the climate science issue with a throw-away declaration that “mainstream scientists are virtually unanimous” on the need to “decarbonize” the world economy. From what’s been appearing on the science front of late, the mainstream scientists are mostly on the defensive trying to explain numerous problems with climate models that cannot explain why the alleged average global temperature has been flat over the past 15 years.
Now come new alarms, with a report that scientists from Oregon State University have found that temperature data imbedded in the chemical composition of fossilized sea shells can plot temperatures back 11,000 years. And guess what? The temperature increase of the past 100 years will make the planet hotter than it’s been in 11,000 years. Said Shaun Marcott, the lead scientist on the sea shell project: “There’s been a lot of work that’s gone into the calibrations, so we can be dead certain [the shells] are recording the temperatures we think they’re recording.” Any scientist — Mr. Marcott is no doubt now one of the Times’ mainstream scientists — who is dead certain about the temperature of the planet 9,000 years ago is likely to be dead wrong.
But what now does look like a dead certainty is that Mr. Obama has set himself and Canada on a dangerous policy course. The president has declared his intentions to declare war on fossil fuels as a threat to humanity, a war backed by mainstream scientists. Canada produces fossil fuels from the oil sands, deemed by green activists to be the worst of all. This is a war somebody is going to lose, and The New York Times has decided on Canada.