Tension increases in the Keystone XL pipeline controversy as hard-core opponents behave with growing desperation.
"We're not stopping until the industry stops poisoning our futures with lies, unnecessary risks, and death for their profit," declared an activist on Apr. 22 after locking himself to machinery on a Keystone XL spread in Oklahoma. "As long as the tar sands industry promises it will kill, we will blockade."
Someone should take him at his word. The "tar sands industry" has never promised to kill anything. The ridiculous hyperbole is all his. Still, blockades won't cease.
'Direct action'
On the day of the Oklahoma stunt, Earth Day, several activist groups held a press conference to "preview this summer's ongoing and escalating resistance to TransCanada's tar sands pipeline." The groups, Credo, Rainforest Action Network, and Other 98%, threatened a "direct action response to a potential Obama administration approval of the northern segment of Keystone XL." For activists, "direct action" means acts of civil disobedience, some of them dangerous, designed to attract attention and delay work.
The groups say they're concerned about pipeline safety and point with practiced despair to the Mar. 29 rupture of ExxonMobil's Pegasus crude oil pipeline in Arkansas. Yet tickle an environmentalist with the Keystone XL feather and giggles turn quickly from pipeline safety to climate change.
"If President Obama is serious about tackling climate change he needs to reject KXL once and for all," declares the website of 350.org, a virulently anti-fossil energy group whose founder advocates the radical localization of economics and deemphasis of growth. "And we're not going away until that happens."
Climate alarm has been overplayed. A steady increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, much of it from combustion of fossil fuels, warrants concern. Yet the extent to which it contributes to observed warming remains subject to scientific debate. And whether people should make painful economic sacrifice, which the decarbonization of energy requires, represents a political question over which serious adults should be able to conduct civil discussion.
Activists will have none of that. They fancy themselves as wholly right and anyone who questions them as evil. In their rhetoric, anyone building a project they dislike is a killer.
They're beyond tiresome. Until recently, however, they have succeeded, pushing governments into costly mistakes. Lunges into biofuels have proven to be costly and of dubious environmental benefit. The European Union, having swooned in the heady vapors of climate righteousness and overburdened citizens with unnecessary energy cost, last month rejected a plan to raise the price of carbon to rescue its languid emissions-trading scheme.
Meanwhile, credibility of the theory underlying fear about global warming has diminished. Scientists warning of doom have been found to be interested more in political outcomes than in scientific truth. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, center of the supposed scientific consensus on global warming whose leader wants everyone to be vegetarian, has had to retract gloomy predictions. And satellite and other measurements indicate that, contrary to computer-model forecasts of steady warming, globally averaged temperature hasn't increased since 2000 or before.
Does this mean that steady increases in greenhouse-gas emissions deserve no attention? Of course not. It means that the self-righteous certitude of activists demanding that everyone else adopt disruptive remedies to ludicrously exaggerated ills deserves no attention. Juvenile threats of direct action deserve even less.
Caving to pressure
The US Environmental Protection Agency caved to pressure last week when it suggested yet more study of the Keystone XL project in response to a State Department finding that the pipeline poses little environmental risk. From an historically activist EPA, this is no surprise. But it aligns the Obama administration with a noisy fringe eager to force whole populations into life changes for which few people would volunteer—and to do so for increasingly doubtful reasons.
Contrary to activist blather, no amount of carbon dioxide in the air warrants such usurpation of freedom.
