Fareed Zakariah and the Keystone Pipeline

Sitting in the dentist's chair this morning, waiting to have a temporary crown re-attached (It keeps falling out.), I read Fareed Zakariah's column in this week's issue of Time magazine.  Mr. Zakariah writes that President Obama should approve the Keystone pipeline through the middle of America, carrying tar-sands oil from northern Canada to  refineries in Texas.

The case for the pipeline, as Zakariah makes it, is this. Canada is going to extract the tar-sands oil whether or not the pipeline is built. The oil sludge will be transported south by railroad if there is no pipeline. The columnist says fifteen trains a day, each of one hundred tanker cars, equal what the pipeline would carry. Diesel engines produce carbon emissions, adding to our pollution problems. Although Mr. Zakariah doesn't mention it, there is a small chance of a derailment with spills from all those tanker cars.

Alternatively, without routing their oil across the United States, the Canadians could build a pipeline to the Pacific coast and ship the oil to China. This of course would add to the amount of exhaust gases produced there, and so the level of global pollutants would remain the same. Americans would get our oil from Venezuela or Saudi Arabia.

What we need to do,  the columnist argues, is attack the demand side of the energy problem, rather than supply. Weaning us, and everyone else, away from fossil fuels is the answer.

I like Fareed Zakariah and respect his opinions. I differ with him on this one, however. Not being an engineer, I won't try to critique the proposal about routing the Canadian pipeline to the Pacific, except to note there are some very high mountains they would have to cross. I suspect the rationale for the Keystone project is that it's cheaper to go south than to go west.

I think there is a moral component to this as well as a business one. To say it simply, "If we're not part of the solution, we're part of the problem." It's right to say we should be converting as quickly as possible to use of renewable energy. It's correct to say that other countries will use the dirty oil from Canada even if we don't. China's air pollution inevitably affects us, as ours does them.

Still, it's insufficient to argue that because someone else will make a foolish mistake we should make one too.