Keystone XL Pipeline Given High Marks in State Department’s Final Environmental Impact Statement

Recall this passage from President Obama’s Georgetown speech last summer announcing his Climate Action Plan:

Now, I know there’s been, for example, a lot of controversy surrounding the proposal to build a pipeline, the Keystone pipeline, that would carry oil from Canadian tar sands down to refineries in the Gulf. And the State Department is going through the final stages of evaluating the proposal. That’s how it’s always been done. But I do want to be clear: Allowing the Keystone pipeline to be built requires a finding that doing so would be in our nation’s interest. And our national interest will be served only if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution. The net effects of the pipeline’s impact on our climate will be absolutely critical to determining whether this project is allowed to go forward. It’s relevant.

This basically should have green‐​lighted the pipeline, because, as I pointed out in congressional testimony last year, regardless of how you figure the carbon dioxide emissions from the pipeline’s oil, the resulting climate impact will be so small as to assuredly put the president’s mind at ease.


The just‐​released Final Environmental Impact Statement from the State Department concluded about the same thing as the Draft Environmental Impacts Statement from the State Department, which is in complete agreement with my findings regarding carbon dioxide emissions from the pipeline’s oil and climate change. The net global warming impact from the pipeline oil amounts to somewhat less than 1/100^th of a degree Celsius over the next 100 years.


So if the president wants to kill the Keystone XL pipeline (clearly he does, because he has had ample opportunity to approve it), he’ll have to find a reason to do so other than a climate one. Unfortunately for him, trying to kill it for other reasons would be equally ill‐​founded.