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Keystone Decision Buys Much Needed Time
By postponing construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to Texas, President Obama has ignited a political firestorm that will rage right up to Election Day. Progressives will praise the decision for protecting the environment, making a symbolic step toward a cleaner energy economy, and standing up to conservative bullying in Congress.
Conservatives will cite the decision as evidence of the President’s refusal to create jobs and giving into his political base in an election year.
But politics aside, a central feature of the pipeline debate is the jobs the project would create. While predictions on exactly how many jobs would emerge range widely from several thousand to nearly 250,000, one fairly important group on the topic is split on the issue: labor unions.
Not surprisingly, labor unions whose members would work on the proposed pipeline, such as the Building Trades Council and Minnesota’s own International Union of Operating Engineers Local 49, support the Keystone XL project. But other unions, such as the Transport Workers Union, United Auto Workers and United Steel Workers, have supported the President’s decision to postpone the pipeline construction.
There is no doubt that the jobs needed to build the pipeline, regardless of the number, will help a construction industry that currently faces a 16% unemployment rate. It is also true that the communities along the pipeline route would see an economic boom from the influx of workers and business. Northern Minnesota communities experienced the same “shot in the arm” when the Alberta Clipper oil pipeline was built in 2009.
But these jobs and local economic windfalls are temporary; the pipeline workers generally don’t stick around and are usually not from the areas around the pipeline in the first place. What happens to these jobs when the pipeline is finished two or three years later? Does a temporary, short-term increase in employment justify the construction of yet another oil pipeline that carries the dirtiest transportation fuel on the planet?
This is an extremely difficult question to answer because it pits people’s livelihood and the ability to feed their families against the long-term, global environmental and health concerns of continuing to extract and burn fossil fuels. So the bigger question here should be “How do we continue to employ these construction workers while pushing forward with clean energy sources and a green economy?”
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, who comes from a family of coal miners, is apparently grappling with this same question. He recognizes that both sides of this argument, workers and environmentalists, need to acknowledge the other side’s perspective if true progress is to be made. Postponing the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline will provide the space needed for this dialogue to happen.
Posted in Economic Development | Related Topics: Environment Job Growth President Obama
4 Comments
January 30, 2012 at 6:25 pm
Lyme disease—carried by ticks—is increasing as our US climate warms. From 2000 to 2006, the Center for Disease Control reported between 17,000 and 24,000 cases a year. At the close of 2009, the CDC reported 29,959 cases.
The KXL Pipeline will produce 5,060 to 9,250 full-time equivalent, temporary, non-local jobs over the two year construction phase as calculated by Cornell University’s Global Labor Institute (GLI)—a realistic number lower than the inflated 20,000 claimed by KXL supporters. Thus KXL will produce $253,000,000 - $555,000,000 in wages (@ $50,000 to $60,000/job). Compare that with the $534,000,000+ cost of treating 6,000 added US cases of Lyme disease every three years (@ $89,000/case). Thus, within three years or less, global-warming-related, impaired-health-costs will begin to outweigh wage benefits of the earth-warming KXL project.
Burning fossil fuel also detrimentally impacts agriculture and fuel costs, while increasing dryness. USDA and other scientists note a 10% - 17% decline in wheat, corn, soybean, and rice yields for every 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature during growing periods. As temperatures rise our ability to raise food will diminish.
TransCanada, KXL’s developer, indicates that some oil now refined for domestic production will be diverted to KXL for export to more lucrative markets overseas. As a result, according to the GLI, 15 mid-western states will experience a 10 to 20 cent/gallon increase in gasoline prices (up to $5 billion/year). Taken together increases in healthcare and fuel costs and decreases in food production obliterate any financial benefit from KXL jobs and local tax revenues.
The National Intelligence Council’s classified assessment for Congress concludes climate change could threaten U.S. security by causing political instability, mass refugee migration, terrorism, or conflicts over water and other resources. So, our national interest lies in preventing use of tar sands oil, not in facilitating it.
January 30, 2012 at 6:16 pm
UNWANTED CONSEQUENCES OF KEYSTONE XL
Are projects that make climate change worse—like the Keystone XL Pipeline (KXL)—in the national interest? Not if short term expedience creates long term disaster.
The 1711 mile-long, yard-wide KXL, would transport oil from underneath Alberta’s boreal forests to refineries in Oklahoma and Texas. The oil would most likely be exported from there.
One long term cost of KXL is its contribution to raising the earth’s temperature. Burning fossil fuel carried in the pipeline produces CO2. Dr. James Hansen, who heads NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, calculates KXL will carry enough tar sands oil to raise the level of CO2 on earth by 200 parts per million (ppm).
Eighteen American scientific organizations support the consensus view that excess CO2, which is at its highest level in the last 800,000 years (392 ppm), is warming our planet. An increase in the earth’s temperature causes climate change, which has many negative effects.
For example, climate change has enlarged the range of disease-bearing insects that once thrived only in warmer climates. In Africa, malaria kills a child every 30 seconds. Climate change will expand the habitat of the tropical mosquitoes that carry malaria, adding 80 million cases annually to that toll. In 1933, malaria infected 30% of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s inhabitants. Spraying of DDT, which is no longer considered safe, eradicated malaria in the US by 1951. However, if climate change produces the warming and torrential rains that exacerbate stagnant water pools, malaria could return.
Another example of an increase in the spread of disease due to climate change is painful and occasionally fatal, “dengue.” Before being eradicated here, it infected half a million Texans in 1922. On the rise in other countries, dengue is expected to revisit the US Southwest and areas stretching to Chicago where one of its carriers, the Asian Tiger Mosquito, has migrated.
January 26, 2012 at 2:42 pm
In the early 1990s, labor unions were among a group of progressive organizations that developed a 10-year plan called the Apollo Project for the switch from fossil fuels to renewables.
It would have gotten America off the path to environmental disaster because of unaddressed global warming and would also have created millions of permanent, good-paying union jobs. It was a wonderful plan.
How sad for America and the world that the Right then came to power and, even if it can’t stop every helpful piece of legislation, remains able to stop much of the movement toward renewables by propagandizing a good portion of our citizens into believing that climate change actually doesn’t exist.
Labor should be lobbying for jobs in renewable energy instead of pushing Keystone (speaking of disasters!!).
Bernice Vetsch says:
January 31, 2012 at 2:36 pm
On either the radio or TV early this morning, I heard that Republicans in Congress are trying to develop a way Congress could get around the need for Presidential approval of the Keystone pipeline.
The root of this problem is corporate power (money = speech) over both public opinion and our government. “Think” tanks created by the Koch Brothers (ALEC) work through the media and the internet to spread the corporate gospel. And politicians who cannot raise the millions needed to run for reelection are dependent on them for financial support.
Even certain members of the Supreme Court now serve corporate power instead of us, and decisions favoring corporations over consumers are becoming more common. It’s anyone’s guess how the majority in the court would vote on an anti-Keystone lawsuit.
Two justices skate very closely to the edge of unethical practice. In addition to Thomas’s lapses in reporting income and his wife’s employment, he and Antonin Scalia were the featured speakers at the Federalist Society’s annual dinner in 2011. The list of sponsors included, among many law firms, Chevron, Coca Cola, Pfizer, Verizon, Facebook and Time Warner.