On Tuesday, I posted an analysis of the climate impacts from the burning the oil that would be transported through the Keystone XL pipeline (if the pipeline were to be approved).

I concluded that on an annual basis, the burning of the ~800,000 barrels of oil that would flow through the pipeline each day would produce about 0.0001°C of global warming per year (one ten-thousandths of a degree Celsius)—a value of little climatological significance.

But on further reflection, I think this number is too high.

Data on U.S. oil consumption from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) shows that our consumption peaked in 2005 at a rate of nearly 21 million barrels per day (bpd) and has declined since. In 2011 (the last year of available data) the value was just under 19 million bpd. The EIA projects a continued slight decline of U.S. petroleum consumption for decades into the future.

This means that oil flowing through the Keystone XL pipeline will not amount to additional oil use, but rather will displace more expensive (economically and/or socially) foreign oil imports. Thus, all else being equal, the Keystone XL pipeline would lead to no additional global warming beyond that which would have taken place anyway from our domestic oil consumption.

But all else is not quite equal because the extraction and refining process of the Alberta tar sands oil (that the Keystone XL pipeline will deliver) is more energy intensive than oil from the Middle East, or Mexico, or Venezuela. By most accounts, this extra effort increases the lifecycle (well-to-wheel) CO2 emissions of Alberta tar sands oil by about 15 to 20 percent.

What this means is that instead of assuming CO2 emissions from an additional 800,000 new barrels of oil each day, I really should consider only the extra 15-20% of emissions that the 800,000 bpd of tar sands oil produces over the oil that we currently import. When I do this, instead of 0.0001°C of added warming each year, I get that the Keystone XL oil will produce only about 0.00001°C of warming each year (give or take a couple hundred thousandths of a °C).

I think we can all agree that 0.00001°C of warming is effectively the same as zero warming.

No matter how you look at it, there is no climate impact of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Whether or not other transportation routes out of the Alberta tar sands open in the future to meet the growing global (outside of the U.S.) demand for oil should not be a matter of consideration when assessing the climate impact of the Keystone XL pipeline.

After a couple of months during which larger issues were grabbing headlines, the Keystone XL pipeline is back in the news again.

Recall that in the fall of 2011, Congress attempted to force the Obama Administration to come to some sort of a decision on the pipeline—a project that would deliver oil from Canada’s Alberta tar sands to a pipeline junction in Steel City, Nebraska and then ultimately on to refineries in Illinois and along the Gulf Coast. President Obama rejected the pipeline application in January 2012, citing the Congressional deadline as being too tight to allow for a thorough assessment. TransCanada Corporation, the pipeline’s operator, last September proposed a new route through Nebraska which avoided the environmentally sensitive Sand Hills region which was one the largest local environmental concerns of the originally proposed pipeline route.

The rumors were that this new proposed route, and the promise of new jobs and economic activity, were now tipping the administration in favor of the giving the go ahead to the pipeline.

Last Wednesday, the New York Post reported that EPA head Lisa Jackson (a vocal opponent of the pipeline) was stepping down in a huff because she was convinced that Obama was soon going to green-light the project.

Last Friday, Nebraska’s Department of Environmental Quality released its study of the new route and proclaimed that it could have “minimal environmental impacts in Nebraska” if properly managed and that construction of the pipeline would result in “$418.1 million in economic benefits and would support up to 4,560 new or existing jobs in the state,” (though some jobs would be temporary) and annual local property tax revenues of between “11 million and 13 million” for the first year of evaluation. The U.S. State Department is conducting its own report because the pipeline will cross the U.S./Canada border. That report is expected any day now.

Yesterday, a group of protestors stormed the TransCanada offices in Houston, Tx, chaining their ankles, and for added measure, apparently supergluing their hands together. A statement from the group said that they were “representatives of a desperate generation who have been forced into this position by the reckless and immoral behavior of fossil fuel corporations such as Transcanada.” Bill McKibben’s 350.org is organizing a much larger-scale protest for Washington, D.C., and the White House next month.

The outcry is not really about local environmental concerns, but as NASA’s James Hansen (who himself was arrested outside the White House back in 2011 protesting the pipeline) put it, if the pipeline is built it will be “game over” for the climate.

With all this outcry, just how bad for the climate do you think the pipeline (or rather it contents) will be?

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After lengthy investigations by multiple federal agencies, the United States is going to impose a tax ranging from 45 percent to 70 percent on all imported wind towers from China and Vietnam. Manufacturers in those countries are doing too good a job and it’s harming the U.S. wind tower industry.

These duties come on the heels of similar levies (18–250 percent) imposed on Chinese solar panels.

For anyone who wants to see more “green” energy production, these duties are a direct step backwards. Both the wind and solar industries are heavily subsidized by U.S. taxpayers. If the goal of subsidizing green energy is to reduce carbon emissions and protect the environment, then taxing green energy would necessarily serve the opposite goal.

Aside from the general follies of protectionism, this contradiction also exposes the problems inherent in pursuing a policy to promote “green jobs” as a corollary of a broader environmental policy.

Green jobs policy is formed as follows.  First you use subsidies to distort incentives and increase investment in wind and solar power.  This creates green jobs that the market can’t support without those subsidies.  Other countries then do the same, but their manufacturers are better than yours.  So to protect the new green jobs you created, you impose tariffs to prevent green competition from harming the green investments you artificially incentivized.

The result is domestic industries ultimately dependent on government intervention rather than consumer choice.  It’s not a good way to promote jobs or green energy, but it does benefit the specific firms who now get unearned money both from taxpayers through the subsidies and from consumers through higher prices.

A troubling consequence of this paradigm is that the targeted industries develop a culture of rent-seeking.  Matthew Mitchell of the Mercatus Center aptly describes this phenomenon in his paper, “The Pathology of Privilege: The Economic Consequences of Government Favoritism.”  Firms respond to the availability of government favors by devoting time, money, and effort to acquire privilege.  The more they do it, the better they get at it.

Success in the wind and solar industries doesn’t depend on a company’s ability to deliver high-quality products at a competitive price; it depends on the quality of the company’s lawyers and lobbyists. In this way, government intervention has done far more to harm the development and success of domestically produced green energy than has transient Chinese competition.