Keystone XL cancellation: ‘Wake-up call’ for Canada

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Keystone XL cancellation: ‘Wake-up call’ for Canada

Post by Doka » 01-19-2021 12:23 AM

China Joe , has spoken! This will hurt the Canadians, when, like us , with the killing of the economy, due to covid lockdowns not to mention Capitalism is to be banned(except for the rich), this could get very "dicy" we are (where) one of their biggest importors of their oil and everything was working just fine! Maybe China Joe's String Puller is into a bit of "Empire Building" with the Americas.?


Keystone XL cancellation: ‘Wake-up call’ for Canada to address oil and gas blind spot

Published on 18/01/2021, 6:02pm

Joe Biden is set to revoke permits for the controversial Canada-US oil pipeline expansion, putting Justin Trudeau in an awkward position

Joe Biden’s plans to cancel the controversial Keystone XL pipeline expansion should be a “wake-up call” for the Canadian government to take the transition to a post-oil future seriously, say campaigners.

Transition documents obtained by Canadian broadcaster CTV News show US president-elect Biden could use an executive order to revoke the Keystone XL pipeline expansion permit as soon as Wednesday, when he is due to be inaugurated US president.

The move is part of a to-do list for Biden’s first day in office that includes re-joining the Paris Agreement and announcing the date for a US-hosted leaders’ climate summit.

The pipeline, which has been in development for more than a decade, aims to transport 830,000 barrels of oil per day from Alberta tar sands in Canada to refineries along the US’ Gulf Coast.

Faced with lawsuits and strong opposition from environmental groups, the project was rejected by the Obama-Biden administration in 2015 over “environmental concerns” – a decision reversed by Donald Trump in 2017.

The move would be a blow to Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau who has unreservedly supported the pipeline expansion, describing it last month as “an integral part of Canada and America’s energy security”.

Trudeau, who was the first world leader to speak with Biden following his election win, said he discussed the issue during his phone call with the president-elect and would press the new US administration to continue with the project.

On Sunday, Canada’s ambassador to the US Kirsten Hillman defended the pipeline expansion, arguing “Keystone XL fits within Canada’s climate plan”.


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https://www.climatechangenews.com/2021/ ... lind-spot/
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Re: Keystone XL cancellation: ‘Wake-up call’ for Canada

Post by Raggedyann » 01-19-2021 02:50 PM

Hope Biden cancels the project! Spend the money on alternate eco friendly energy sources.
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The Ominous Meaning Of The Keystone Diktat

Post by Riddick » 01-24-2021 12:52 AM

From Steven Hayward at Power Line Blog:

President Biden’s diktat canceling the Keystone XL pipeline is thought to signify his total slavishness to the climate campaigners, for whom pipelines have become like garlic and holy water to a vampire. This is correct, but the larger significance of it is much more ominous. If anything, the critics of the decision are under-reacting.

We are continuously told by our betters that high voter turnout is to be celebrated because it is a measure of the civic engagement of our citizens. I hold the opposite view: high turnout is an indicator of serious civic breakdown. High turnout in other struggling democracies is usually a sign of things going very wrong (like the German elections of the late 1920s and early 1930s, or Argentina back in the Peron era).

The point is: you get high turnouts when people believe everything is at stake in the results of the election. Middling voter turnout in American elections is a sign of the relative health of our political order, because it means that much of the population doesn’t think everything important is up for grabs in the result.

Elections are supposed to determine who rules, and we take turns in ruling and being ruled. Our presidents are supposed to run the government, not every aspect of our lives.

I’ve long thought it overwrought to hear people on both sides of the spectrum say, as has become typical over the last couple decades, that the current presidential election is “the most important election of our lifetime.” If every election is now a life-or-death matter for the republic, then the republic is already lost.

For thousands of workers on the Keystone pipeline, the election result did entail the life or death of their jobs, at the capricious stroke of a pen. The cavalier answer of Biden’s people (like Transportation Secretary designate Pete Buttigieg who said that the Keystone pipeline workers can “find other jobs”) shows how little regard Democrats now have for actual workers. Can pipeline skills be simply transferred to other kinds of construction, just like that?

It is one thing if a government makes macroeconomic mistakes that bring on a recession that costs jobs, imposes a health care plan that wrecks your health insurance, or cancels a government funded project (like the border wall construction that Biden has suspended), but the Keystone pipeline was entirely a private sector project that had obtained its legal permits. I’ll skip over for now whether Keystone may have legal remedies to be brought against Biden’s decision.

The point is: I can’t think of another example of a president crushing thousands of private sector jobs at a stroke in the absence of a genuine legal reason. Biden offered no legal reason, such as defects of the permit or violations of the permit conditions. He just doesn’t like it. Maybe readers can help me out with examples, but I suggest we have just passed an awful milestone, in which we’ve moved one step closer to elections where everything is at stake.

Somehow Michael Oakeshott’s warning comes to mind just now: The conjunction of dreaming and ruling generates tyranny. Prediction: Fracking, even on private land, is next. And a reminder—even the Washington Post gets this:

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Re: Keystone XL cancellation: ‘Wake-up call’ for Canada

Post by Doka » 01-24-2021 12:00 PM

As far as Keystone goes..........just more oil for China. China Joe owes them, Big Time!
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Oil's Well That Ends Well

Post by Riddick » 01-24-2021 04:07 PM

Doka wrote: 01-24-2021 12:00 PM As far as Keystone goes..........just more oil for China. China Joe owes them, Big Time!
And he owes the American workers nothing - China gets more oil, they get the shaft - BUT they can get other jobs! Right, like those all high paying green ones yet to be created. I dunno about blue collar but I betcha the execs are killing it.
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Re: Keystone XL cancellation: ‘Wake-up call’ for Canada

Post by kbot » 01-25-2021 07:57 PM

Oh geez, stop listening to the lobbyists. Listen, Canada's original plan was to send the sand oil to China anyway, so they're back to Plan A. It'll be China's environmental disaster to fix - not OURS.

Besides, as the article here shows, the purported safety issues were a lie, the jobs numbers were a lie and the market was also a lie.

Keystone XL Pipeline Environmental Impact
Leaks and the pipeline
Tar sands oil is thicker, more acidic, and more corrosive than lighter conventional crude, and this ups the likelihood that a pipeline carrying it will leak. Indeed, one study found that between 2007 and 2010, pipelines moving tar sands oil in Midwestern states spilled three times more per mile than the U.S. national average for pipelines carrying conventional crude. Since it first went into operation in 2010, TC Energy’s original Keystone Pipeline System has leaked more than a dozen times; one incident in North Dakota sent a 60-foot, 21,000-gallon geyser of tar sands oil spewing into the air. Most recently, on October 31, 2019, the Keystone tar sands pipeline was temporarily shut down after a spill in North Dakota of reportedly more than 378,000 gallons. And the risk that Keystone XL will spill has only been heightened: A study published in early 2020, co-authored by TC Energy’s own scientists, found that the anti-corrosion coating on pipes for the project is defective from being stored outside and exposed to the elements for the last decade.

Complicating matters, leaks can be difficult to detect. And when tar sands oil does spill, it’s more difficult to clean up than conventional crude because it immediately sinks to the bottom of the waterway. People and wildlife coming into contact with tar sands oil are exposed to toxic chemicals, and rivers and wetland environments are at particular risk from a spill. (For evidence, recall the 2010 tar sands oil spill in Kalamazoo, Michigan, a disaster that cost Enbridge more than a billion dollars in cleanup fees and took six years to settle in court.) Keystone XL would cross agriculturally important and environmentally sensitive areas, including hundreds of rivers, streams, aquifers, and water bodies. One is Nebraska’s Ogallala Aquifer, which provides drinking water for millions as well as 30 percent of America’s irrigation water. A spill would be devastating to the farms, ranches, and communities that depend on these crucial ecosystems.

What is tar sands oil?
The tar sands industry is just as hard on the cradle of its business. Its mines are a blight on Canada’s boreal, where operations dig up and flatten forests to access the oil below, destroying wildlife habitat and one of the world’s largest carbon sinks. They deplete and pollute freshwater resources, create massive ponds of toxic waste, and threaten the health and livelihood of the First Nations people who live near them. Refining the sticky black gunk produces piles of petroleum coke, a hazardous, coal-like by-product. What’s more, the whole process of getting the oil out and making it usable creates three to four times the carbon pollution of conventional crude extraction and processing. “This isn’t your grandfather’s typical oil,” says Anthony Swift, director of NRDC’s Canada project. “It’s nasty stuff.”

Keystone XL and climate change
A fully realized Keystone XL would lead to more mining of that “nasty stuff” by accelerating the pace at which it’s produced and transported. (Indeed, Keystone XL was viewed as a necessary ingredient in the oil industry’s plans to triple tar sands production by 2030.)

It would also lead to greater greenhouse gas emissions. In 2014, the EPA stated that tar sands oil emits 17 percent more carbon than other types of crude, but ironically, the State Department revised this number upward three years later, stating that the emissions could be “5 percent to 20 percent higher than previously indicated.” That means burdening the planet with an extra 178.3 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually, the same impact as 38.5 million passenger vehicles or 45.8 coal-fired power plants. Finally, the pipeline would undermine efforts to minimize global warming and prioritize clean energy like wind and solar. Leading climate scientist and former NASA researcher James Hansen has warned that fully exploiting Canada’s tar sands reserves would mean “game over” for our climate. In short, tar sands oil represents no small threat to our environment, and our best stance against it, as the rallying cry goes, is to “keep it in the ground.”

Keystone XL Pipeline Controversy
Opposition to Keystone XL centers on the devastating environmental consequences of the project. The pipeline has faced years of sustained protests from environmental activists and organizations; Indigenous communities; religious leaders; and the farmers, ranchers, and business owners along its proposed route. One such protest, a historic act of civil disobedience outside the White House in August 2011, resulted in the arrest of more than 1,200 demonstrators. More than 90 leading scientists and economists have opposed the project, in addition to unions and world leaders such as the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and former president Jimmy Carter (together, these and other Nobel laureates have written letters against the project). In 2014, more than two million comments urging a rejection of the pipeline were submitted to the State Department during a 30-day public comment period.


In the two years leading up to the November 2014 midterm elections, the fossil fuel industry spent more than $720 million to court allies in Congress. When industry-friendly politicians took charge of both congressional houses in January 2015, their first order of business was to pass a bill to speed up approval of Keystone XL. (That effort failed.)

“So what if there’s no pipeline . . .Big Oil will find a way.”
One of the central arguments by pipeline pushers is that tar sands expansion will move forward with or without Keystone XL. This has proved to be untrue. Dealing in tar sands oil is an expensive endeavor. It’s costly both to produce and to ship, particularly by rail, which would be an alternative to Keystone XL. Indeed, moving crude by rail to the Gulf costs twice as much as by pipe. For companies considering whether to invest in a long-lived tar sands project (which could last for 50 years), access to cheap pipeline capacity will play a major role in the decision to move forward or not. Without Keystone XL, the tar sands industry has canceled projects rather than shift to rail, subsequently leaving more of the earth’s dirtiest fuel in the ground where it belongs.

Keystone Pipeline Economic Facts
Will the pipeline create jobs?
The oil industry has lobbied hard to get KXL built by using false claims, political arm-twisting, and big bucks. When TC Energy said the pipeline would create nearly 119,000 jobs, a State Department report instead concluded the project would require fewer than 2,000 two-year construction jobs and that the number of jobs would hover around 35 after construction.

Will the pipeline lower gas prices?
Dirty energy lobbyists claimed developing tar sands would protect our national energy security and bring U.S. fuel prices down. But NRDC and its partners found the majority of Keystone XL oil would be sent to markets overseas (aided by a 2015 reversal of a ban on crude oil exports)—and could even lead to higher prices at U.S. pumps.

https://www.nrdc.org/stories/what-keystone-pipeline
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Re: Keystone XL cancellation: ‘Wake-up call’ for Canada

Post by Doka » 01-26-2021 12:12 AM

Big Oil is on it's way out.......but one should consider the products, that we use from soup to nuts , to kitchen cabnets. The Chinese would have nothing to sell if it weren't for plastic. But basically it is everywhere, world wide.
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America On The Rocks

Post by Riddick » 01-26-2021 01:06 AM

Doka wrote: 01-26-2021 12:12 AM Big Oil is on it's way out.......but one should consider the products, that we use from soup to nuts , to kitchen cabnets. The Chinese would have nothing to sell if it weren't for plastic. But basically it is everywhere, world wide.
It's world wide but it ain't a Woke commodity. Certainly doesn't do the ecosystem any good. But hey, why should we be dependent on plastic OR oil? Our ancestors got along without either. A li'l fundamental transformation & we'll be all set! -

A simpler lifestyle is in order. Less like the Jetsons, more like the Flinstones. 'Course, that applies to common folk. The Elite have Pharisaical Privilege.
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Re: Keystone XL cancellation: ‘Wake-up call’ for Canada

Post by Raggedyann » 01-26-2021 01:42 AM

Thank you Kbot for the excellent article on the oil sands in Canada. So nice to see posts that are factual and true. :)
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Re: Keystone XL cancellation: ‘Wake-up call’ for Canada

Post by Raggedyann » 01-26-2021 01:52 AM

There's A Big Hole In The Argument That Ditching Fossil Fuels Will Kill Jobs

Every time a politician talks about climate policy or a newspaper runs a big story on the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, the question of jobs comes up. For those who are opposed to the transition, the common criticism is that moving away from coal, oil and gas would leave hundreds of thousands of Americans out of work. For those in favor, the question is how to train hundreds of thousands of oil and gas workers for different sorts of jobs.

Rarely do the talking points — or the debates that follow — get into the details of what’s actually happening in the oil and gas labor market: that it’s an industry already grappling with a dwindling talent pipeline and that a push toward automation was making tens of thousands of oil workers redundant even before the coronavirus pandemic wiped out more jobs.

The industry lost more than 100,000 jobs between March and August 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and consulting firm Deloitte (so certainly not the worst-hit sector, but hard-hit nonetheless). Even if oil demand and prices increase, not all of those jobs are likely to come back, said Ken Medlock, senior director of the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

That’s because it’s not just the pandemic that’s hurting the industry. Other factors are cutting down the oil and gas workforce as well.

First, as with most industries, there’s automation, which has reduced the number of jobs available in the energy sector over the last several years. When oil prices crashed in 2014, the Houston area shed some 86,000 oil and gas jobs and by 2019 had regained only 24,400 of those jobs. Why? In large part because in the wake of the crash, oil companies became more efficient and began to embrace automation in a big way.

“The automation trend has continued,” Medlock said. “So when production grew again from 2017 to 2019, that growth didn’t require a lot of additional labor input.”

Throw global trends toward electrification and clean energy into the mix and the job market wasn’t looking that rosy for oil and gas even before the pandemic.

If you’re a 30-year-old graduating with an MBA and you want to stay in Houston and you want to be in energy, you’re taking a very different look than you would have 10 years ago. And even if the job demand does rebound to any extent, between policy and economic shifts and dwindling social approval of the industry, oil companies may find themselves struggling to hire.

As fossil fuels flag, all signs point to a strong future for renewable energy.

“Looking at global investments in the energy space, it’s all going to wind, solar, batteries, EVs [electrical vehicles]. It’s not going into fossil fuels,” said Jeff Bishop, CEO of the large-scale battery company Key Capture Energy. “Fossil fuels aren’t going away, don’t get me wrong, especially not in Texas. But if you’re a 30-year-old graduating with an MBA and you want to stay in Houston and you want to be in energy, you’re taking a very different look than you would have 10 years ago.”

Last week — a century ago by 2021 standards — social media lit up with various opinions about a New York Times story that highlighted the waning fortunes of new college graduates looking to work in the oil and gas industry. Some sympathized with young people graduating into a pandemic, but most wondered why they had chosen to work in the industry in the first place, given what we know about both its impact on climate change and its financial prospects in years to come.

But actually, Bishop and Medlock believe the changing energy landscape is not such a big problem for the sorts of white-collar workers profiled by the Times, whose skills are largely transferable to any segment of the energy sector. In fact, according to Bishop, it’s a boon to clean energy startups like his to be able to hire oil and gas workers.

“I can teach people power, but I can’t teach people the process, procedures and mindset for these big energy projects,” he said. “Just in Texas alone, we’re putting over $100 million of capital to work and we need a level of rigor around project management, safety and process that oil and gas companies are really good at.”

His company specifically recruits current and former gas employees and recent grads who studied for oil and gas jobs.

“People call Houston the energy capital of the world, but Houston is really an engineering and logistics capital,” Medlock said. “Those skillsets — managing a supply chain, handling materials, chemical engineering — that’s all transferable.”

This is not to say that there’s a simple one-to-one transition from oil and gas jobs to clean energy jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics still doesn’t collect data on solar and wind jobs, so the stats that exist are cobbled together, but there are indisputably fewer jobs in clean energy than currently exist in the fossil fuel industry. And while white-collar workers can hop around the energy sector, it’s not as straightforward for the various blue-collar workers in oil and gas. Welders can work just as easily on a wind farm as an oil rig, but the skills of other oil rig workers are pretty specific to drilling.

Some job skills transfer easily between the fossil fuel and renewable energy sectors.
The idea of employing out-of-work oil hands to plug and remediate abandoned oil wells has been floated a few times in recent years as a transitional job for these blue-collar workers while the economy shifts away from fossil fuels. Although oil companies are legally required to decommission out-of-use wells and drill sites, and return the land or sea to its pre-drilling condition, it’s fairly common for companies to declare bankruptcy before these asset retirement obligations (AROs) are fulfilled. Consequently, there are now an estimated 1 to 3 million abandoned wells in the U.S. in need of remediation.

Some pro-transition activists ― like Theron Horton, a strategist with the ARO Working Group ― have suggested that oil workers could be hired by the federal or state governments to perform this work as they train for new jobs.

“There’s 10 years of steady jobs for these people, not boom and bust the way it has been in the oil fields,” Horton said. “And it’s work that their skillset and identity is aligned with. Plus, it leaves them in situ — they don’t have to move, their kids stay in the same schools. Ten years is a long time to transition, so it’s really common sense convergence here. It’s also worker solidarity, for these people in the fields not to feel like they’re abandoned by society.”

But despite the number of such wells, others, like Medlock, are not convinced that such an approach would put a large enough number of people back to work.

Meanwhile, in the white-collar world, if oil prices do rebound, it’s more likely that oil companies will be chasing graduates than the other way around. The fossil fuel industry has been worried for years about the lack of interest shown by younger generations in working for oil and gas companies. Even a few years ago, young people saw careers in the industry as “difficult, dangerous and harmful to society.” Between the 2014 crash and the pandemic, now it also seems financially unstable. So even as they lay off workers in the field, oil companies continue to recruit at universities to avoid creating a “generation gap” in their workforce, a problem the industry grappled with in the 1980s.

Unlike the ’80s, oil companies these days are competing for workers with more stable and more popular industries, including clean energy.

Bishop said he’s not worried that the people he’s hired away from oil and gas will defect back to fossil fuels if prices hit $100 a barrel again.

“People want stable, well-paying jobs that have purpose,” he said, adding that he’s regularly contacted by individuals who have an oil and gas education but are interested in his firm, “especially folks coming out of business school. They know they’re gonna be in energy, and they see the writing on the wall: You need to be in the energy transition now.”

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/big ... ri18n=true
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Re: Keystone XL cancellation: ‘Wake-up call’ for Canada

Post by Riddick » 02-19-2021 03:44 AM

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