Media Matters Misses on Keystone XL

Media Matters is not a particularly big fan of Cato’s climatologists and their views on climate change. Apparently Media Matters prefers anthropogenic climate change be portrayed as producing a much more desperate situation than either Pat Michaels or myself is fond of presenting.

In a piece last week, Media Matters’s Jill Fitzsimmons included a quote from my recent Wall Street Journal op-ed as supporting one of the “myths” about the Keystone XL pipeline that she was set on busting. While my WSJ article was largely focused on the climate aspects of the Keystone XL, she chose a sentence from it that had to do with rerouting the pipeline to avoid the (supposedly) environmental sensitive Sands Hills region of Nebraska. Apparently she didn’t agree with my statement that “the arguments against the pipeline have all but evaporated. The route now largely bypasses the most ecologically sensitive regions,” despite a slew of environmental studies that so concluded.

But, I am less concerned about what she did quote from me than what she didn’t.

The first “myth” she took on was “Would Keystone XL contribute to climate change?” Fitzsimmons excerpts several prominent articles where the “myth” that it wouldn’t was promulgated. She quotes pieces from the Washington Post, the Washington Times, Fox News, and the Washington Examiner. But my WSJ article was not among them.

The reason why became quickly obvious—despite her claims, she really wasn’t interested in assessing the actual climate change impact of the pipeline oil, but rather in leaving the impression that it must be large.

She did this by employing the tactic commonly used by those who think that their climate mitigation plan is actually going to “do something” about climate change—that is, focus on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions rather than climate change.

Emission mitigation from such plans, free from any larger perspective, often sounds impressively large. For instance, Fitzsimmons quotes a recent Congressional Research Service report that “the estimated effect of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline on the U.S. GHG footprint would be an increase of 3 million to 21 million metric tons of GHG emissions annually.” 

Wow. That sounds like a lot.

But, she left out that this is only between 0.06% and 0.3% of the annual U.S. carbon dioxide emissions.

She also left out the actual climate change impact of what such emissions would cause—which was, after all, the topic of her “myth.”

Since she was familiar with my WSJ article, I know she was familiar with the answer about the climate.

Here is what I wrote:

A study last year by the Congressional Research Service found that the greenhouse-gas emissions from energy produced from Canadian tar-sands oil delivered by the pipeline would increase U.S. annual greenhouse gas emissions by a paltry 0.06%-0.3%. These additional emissions have virtually no impact on the rate of global warming, increasing it by an infinitesimal 0.00001 degrees Celsius per year. This amount is too small to detect, much less to worry about.

Fitzsimmons, of course, doesn’t have to believe me, but before she doesn’t, she ought to try to do the calculation for herself. I am sure that she won’t like what she finds—which is that the story that the Keystone XL pipeline will have virtually no impact on the future of climate change is not a myth at all.

Protests at the White House, rallies on the National Mall, Media Matters articles, and all other forms of foot stomping won’t do anything to change that fact.