Month: January 2021

A Keystone Moment

Stephen Melkisethian via Flickr CC
DC Says No Keystone XL 12

Actually, much more than a moment, President Biden’s cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline permit is a milestone event in the on-again off-again, anti-climate history of this project.

Writing in the New Yorker on 21 January, Bill McKibben says the action “settled—almost certainly, once and for all—one of the greatest environmental battles this country has seen.”

Keystone XL is/was a project of the TransCanada Corporation (now TC Energy) and was designed to carry oil from Alberta’s tar sands across the country to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. President George W. Bush approved the original Keystone pipeline, and it went into service early in the Obama years. But the new XL version, announced in 2008, was larger and took a different course across the heartland. It caused major opposition from virtually everyone concerned with protecting the climate. It came first from indigenous people in Canada, who had watched tar-sand mines lay waste to a vast landscape, to Native-Americans in America. Eventually President Obama announced a delay in the permit process in order to consider the question more closely, but President Trump revived the pipeline during his first days in office by Executive Order.

Now President Biden, also by Executive Orders, has cancelled the Keystone permit and has the US rejoining the Paris Climate agreement during his first days in office.

A great start for the new administration. There’s still much work to do and battles to be fought but can we at long last focus on creating jobs through renewable infrastructure projects, and not on pumping filthy tar sand oil into the US?

It is past time to transition away from fossil fuel jobs and transform those jobs to renewable industries.

Postscript:

Greta Thunberg Tweeted this on 24 January: “This week Norway awarded 61 new oil and gas exploration rights to 30 oil companies. Sweden’s Lundin Oil was awarded stakes in 19 licenses. It’s 2021 and when it comes to facing the climate emergency the world is still in a state of complete denial.”

Further Reading:

12 new books explore fresh approaches to act on climate change

Yale Climate Connections

…

4 ways the US can reassert leadership on climate change | Bill Gates

Gates Notes

Playing Catch-up

In a few days the work begins to undo four years of neglect, incompetence and horrific awfulness on addressing climate change.

For one thing, the U.S. will rejoin the Paris Agreement, which is a good thing but that pact is probably already virtually useless and in need of a major update. Even with a new, updated agreement, which seems unlikely, it may be too late because global warming and climate catastrophe adheres to no timeline but its own.

But much work is needed right now, especially in the U.S., and the new president appears to understand this and the necessity of tying progress on climate, infrastructure, jobs and the economy in a coherent and workable plan.

Referring to the 2015 Paris Agreement, Greta Thunberg, said this week that it’s “a huge problem that nations are failing to meet their climate- and ecological targets. The main problem however, is the fact that their targets are completely insufficient in the first place. We can’t solve a crisis without treating it like a crisis.”

For those in need of a refresher on the Paris Agreement here’s a link. A status report on the agreement from Vox, published last month (Dec. 2020) offers some good information on where we are now.

While we play catch-up, here a couple recent articles to consider, courtesy of Google alerts:


The Economic Costs of Climate Change

European Corporate Governance Institute


The fight against climate change should focus on reaching positive climate tipping points

Fast Company

Let’s do this.