Category Archives: pollution

The Tar Sands Pipeline Loves Suburban Sprawl

29 Thursday Sep 2011

Posted by in cities, oil sands, pollution, tar sands, transportation, urban planning

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Open Pit Bitumen Mine. Photo courtesy of Louis Helbig (click for link)

A lot of people are upset about TransCanada’s Keystone XL — the 1,600 mile pipeline that would ship tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada to Gulf Coast refineries in Texas. They’re protesting outside the White House. They’re protesting in Canada. Hell, they’re even protesting in Nebraska.

There are plenty of good reasons to hate this project. It’s a complete disaster for the areas surrounding the mines, obviously. But lately, the arguments against the pipeline are piling up in two main areas: the possible mess this stuff will cause in a spill, and the guaranteed mess it will cause when it’s refined and burned. There’s no shortage of opportunities for this pipeline to cause major problems if there’s a spill. The proposed path would cross 70 streams and rivers along with the Ogallala Aquifer, a major supplier of ground-water for US agriculture. There are plenty of bad scenarios that can play out here, but the main issue is going to be the refining of this garbage. It takes two-and-a-half times as much energy to refine as conventional oil. That means your Prius is effectively going to get the same mileage as a Camry. And your Camry is going to get the same effective mileage as a Tacoma pickup truck. And your pickup truck? That will get you mileage closer to a U-Haul.

71% of the oil we use is for transportation. That is, cars and trucks. Driving to work. Driving to the store. If we don’t want this pipeline going across the center of our country, and we don’t want to burn the dirtiest fuel imaginable in our 254,000,000+ cars and trucks, we need to drive less. And while it’s true that higher CAFE standards for new cars will help, and electric cars will help, the energy used to refine tar sands or drill in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, or in the Arctic is going to make quick work of any efficiencies Toyota, GM and Honda squeeze out of their engineers. And alternative energy? Daniel Yergin, the Pulitzer Prize winning oil historian says in his latest book that our current renewable technologies aren’t likely to provide enough inexpensive, reliable energy to replace fossil fuels.

So what do we do? If tar sands are profitable, we’re going to get tar sands gasoline. And if we perpetuate this situation in which we have to drive everywhere, we’re going to buy tar sands gasoline, whether we protest or not. The alternative isn’t going to be what we drive, but where we live. We need to build real cities. Real towns. Walkable neighborhoods. Places where transit can work. Places where we can choose not to drive.

Bitumen Slick. Photo courtesy of Louis Helbig (click for link)

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Our Pollution Footprint and Job Creation

06 Tuesday Sep 2011

Posted by in big picture, geography, globalization, Jobs, pollution

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It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Apple, an American Company, made my iPhone in China (mostly). I find it disappointing, though, that Apple’s suppliers were just accused for a second time of polluting several communities there. Then, a couple days ago, I was disappointed again when President Obama abandoned a more restrictive air pollution rule that was recommended by the EPA. The reason for doing this was, of course, jobs.

The argument usually goes that environmental protections are job killers. Where I live, in the Piedmont of North Carolina, air quality has gotten much better over the last 15 years. It’s not because of pollution controls, though. It has more to do with the tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs that disappeared from the region. Until recently, this area used to be the American center of textile and furniture manufacturing. People here wax poetic about how the local rivers would run whatever color the mills happened to be dyeing that day. It’s not that way anymore. The mills are largely closed, the rivers are mostly clear, and the air is more breathable. And a lot of people are out of work. So, if it wasn’t pollution controls that put these people out of work, what was it? NAFTA. I’m sure it’s cheaper to dump pollutants into the nearest river, but what’s driving manufacturing jobs oversees has more to do with wages, currency markets and trade agreements than pollution regulations.

Still, some people think we should open ourselves up to a bit more pollution to provide a kind of lesser-evil alternative to the uber-pollution status quo in China. It’s a decent argument, and I’m open to the possibility that some regulations may go too far, but I doubt a significant number of jobs would come back to the US if we start down this path. It begs the question though — what’s our responsibility for pollution in other countries? The world?

Pollution rules are built into many international treaties and regulations; maybe we need to concentrate our attention there instead. After all, if trade agreements are driving pollution, maybe trade agreements can tamp it down. Of course, the elephant in the room is carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Should we start there? A cap and trade system has the potential to stop manufacturing firms from chasing the lowest wage and start chasing the cleanest facility. That sounds like a situation that could create jobs here.