Re: i am ashamed of US policy, see whistle blower Vokes report over Keystone XL

Posted by Peace is real! on Feb 03, 2014; 5:12am
URL: http://i-come-to-talk-story-welcomes-all-as-we-appreciate-the-many-sk.22.s1.nabble.com/i-am-ashamed-of-US-policy-when-it-does-this-take-a-review-of-some-history-see-whistle-blower-Vokes-rL-tp7559805p7559806.html

ENERGY, INSIGHTS, KEYSTONE XL, PIPELINES
Tom Steyer’s Response to the Keystone XL Final Environmental Impact Statement

Tom Steyer | February 1, 2014 9:08 am |

First of all, this is President Obama’s decision, and the State Department’s Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) is just an input. So we don’t have an answer yet, and the fight is far from over. I remain hopeful that the President will, in fact, apply the test for Keystone he established in his speech at Georgetown University: that the project cannot be approved if it increases the amount of carbon pollution being put into our air, which it does. I trust the President is aware of the opportunity for America to show leadership on this critical issue, and that he will be mindful of the importance of doing right by our children by tackling climate change head on.

The FEIS is based on the flawed premise that Canadian tar sands oil will be developed no matter what—a tired talking point pushed by TransCanada and the oil industry. This is no surprise given that the contractor hired to evaluate the environmental risks of the project has direct ties to TransCanada and oil lobbying groups. But the truth is that Keystone XL is key to unlocking the Canadian tar sands—and all of the carbon pollution that comes with it. By expanding capacity and reducing costs, Keystone XL would spur investment in the tar sands and enable the oil industry to ramp up production at an irreversible rate, with potentially devastating impacts on the global climate. In June, the President drew a line in the sand when he said the pipeline would only be approved if “the project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.” Keystone XL fails the President’s climate test.

The pipeline also poses enormous economic and environmental risks to America’s heartland, threatening our farms, towns and drinking water. And what do the American people get in return? Higher gas prices in the Midwest, only 35 permanent jobs and none of the profits. If Keystone XL is approved, the real winners will be the oil industry and foreign investors like China who stand to profit from more production of this dirty oil.

As I said, our efforts to defeat the Keystone XL pipeline will continue. I hope President Obama will take a hard look at the facts before he makes a decision on this enormously risky project. In his State of the Union address this week, the President pledged to “act with more urgency” to combat the threat of climate change. His first step should be to reject the Keystone XL pipeline.

Visit EcoWatch’s KEYSTONE XLand CLIMATE CHANGE pages for more related news on this topic.

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Michael Berndtson • 13 hours ago
Keystone XL southern half is complete. Tar sands are flowing to the midwest from Alberta to Flanagan, Illinois to feed several of the Chicagoland Refineries including BP Whiting, Exxon Joliet, Citgo Lemont, Philips Wood River and smaller refineries in Michigan and Ohio. There is already plenty of tar sands flowing to these refineries and during 2014 there will be about 550,00 barrels per day of Alberta diluted bitumen refining capacity (and more petcoke). Illinois has arguably the best farmland in the world. Hell, there's even a tar sands bitumen pipeline carrying oil underneath Lake Michigan. The one that spilled around one million gallons of the dense non-aqueous phase liquid in the Kalamazoo River in Michigan.

The Keystone XL northern half is the pipeline in question at this point. And frankly, the only portion at issue is the two inches north and two inches south of the Canadian/US border. Enbridge is building the Flanagan Pipeline South from Flanagan, Illinois to Cushing, Oklahoma to divert 600,000 barrels per day in addition to the 550,000 barrels per day flowing to Midwest refineries. This oil will go down to Texas around Port Arthur. Another pipeline from Illinois will take oil sands bitumen directly south to Louisiana and the Gulf. This pipeline has a capacity of around 800,000 barrels per day.

If TransCanada was clairvoyant and maybe more savvy (or sinister), they could have built the northern half of keystone XL up to transport domestic oil from the shale shale fields of North Dakota and Montana. Waiting for American to become fully a petro-state.

All the above words were written to demonstrate what is already going on as Keystone XL is being argued about in the press, blogs and other places. It's almost like Keystone XL is being used by industry as a MacGuffin. To throw off environmentalists.

A MacGuffin is defined as such, "an object, event, or character in a film or story that serves to set and keep the plot in motion despite usually lacking intrinsic importance." Alfred Hitchcock would use a MacGuffin to throw off or trick the movie viewer.

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CB4BBS • a day ago
Why are the people of your ilk convinced of climate change? For years, while working for advanced degrees in geology, geophysics and numerical modeling (hydrogeology), advanced climate models were unable to be calibrated so that they would yield any results capable of describing the future climate. These models were based on prodigious amounts of geological data covering that last few thousand years of data and even then the future looking numerical models produced garbage! How can you say "with potentially devastating impacts on the global climate." when the science surrounding global climate change has not even been legitimized? Even though your biography looks like a very educated and business-wise person, it is apparent that you have either been unduly influenced by the environmentalist groups around San Fran or you've found a market in dealing with this unfounded craze. If someone, anyone, could provide the data to convince me, I'd be appreciative. However, to date, in everything I've been able to research, your position is just not true.
 
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GreenHearted  CB4BBS • 3 hours ago
Oh my gosh, CB4BBS, you just TOTALLY proved a point I've been trying to get across for years! Thank you so much. You have advanced degrees in geology, geophysics and numerical modeling (hydrogeology); just like most skeptic/denier scientists, your degrees have NOTHING TO DO WITH LIFE. You don't understand ecological systems (I'm not trying to be rude -- it's not your fault; it's the reductionism and hierarchy inherent in science education), so of course you can't understand why pumping 90 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every day might change the viability of the BIOsphere.

The problem with the climate models is that they can't include *all* the feedbacks in a warming climate system, so they leave most of them out -- and hence they end up being underestimates of the climatic changes we're seeing and going to see.

I think you'll appreciate the data a lot more if you find it yourself. If you can get yourself out of the deniersphere on the net, you'll find what you need to understand the ecological and agricultural (ie, food security) implications of, for example, climate variability.
 
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DoRightThing  CB4BBS • 6 hours ago
To start with, scientists have a pretty good understanding of what the Earth's climate has been throughout it's history, why it has changed over time and what the specific factors are that have made the climate change.

And the only factor that fully explains all the changes we can see and measure in temperatures, ocean salinity, atmospheric composition, loss of Arctic sea ice volume, changing species habitats & ranges is due to the warming from human-derived fossil-fuel CO₂ we have put back into the carbon cycle.

We have accurate, reliable data for the growth of atmospheric CO₂ and for anthropogenic emissions (for details, see Cawley, 2011). The fact that the net natural flux is negative clearly shows that natural uptake has exceeded natural emissions every year for the last fifty years at least, and hence has been opposing, rather than causing the observed rise in atmospheric CO₂.

● http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10...

It is true that the fluxes between the oceans and atmosphere depend on temperature, so all things being equal, one would expect atmospheric CO₂ to rise in a warming world.

However, the thing the fake-skeptics normally ignore is that CO₂ solubility increases with increasing difference in the partial pressures of CO₂ between atmosphere and surface waters.

In the real world, all things are not equal, our emissions have caused a difference in partial pressures, which is increasing the oceanic uptake, which more than compensates for the temperature driven change in fluxes.

● http://www.nature.com/nature/j...

The human-caused origin (anthropogenic) of the measured increase in atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ is a cornerstone of predictions of future temperature rises.

As such, it has come under frequent attack by people who challenge the science of global warming. One thing noteworthy about those attacks is that the full range of evidence supporting the anthropogenic nature of the CO₂ increase seems to slip from sight. So what is the full range of supporting evidence?

There are ten main lines of evidence to be considered:

1. The start of the growth in CO₂ concentration coincides with the start of the industrial revolution, hence anthropogenic;
● http://radioviceonline.com/wp-...

2. Increase in CO₂ concentration over the long term almost exactly correlates with cumulative anthropogenic emissions, hence anthropogenic;
● http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/gra...

3. Annual CO₂ concentration growth is less than Annual CO₂ emissions, hence anthropogenic;
● http://www.globalcarbonproject...
● http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10...
● http://cdiac.ornl.gov/by_new/b...

4. Declining ¹⁴C ratio indicates the source is very old, hence fossil fuel or volcanic (ie, not oceanic outgassing or a recent biological source);
● http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelber...

5. Declining ¹³C ratio indicates a biological source, hence not volcanic;
● http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossr...

6. Declining O₂ concentration indicate combustion, hence not volcanic;
● http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports...

7. Partial pressure of CO₂ in the ocean is increasing, hence not oceanic outgassing;
● http://serc.carleton.edu/eslab...

8. Measured CO₂ emissions from all (surface and beneath the sea) volcanoes are one-hundredth of anthropogenic CO₂ emissions; hence not volcanic;
● http://www.agu.org/pubs/pdf/20...

9. Known changes in biomass too small by a factor of 10, hence not deforestation;
● http://www.globalcarbonproject...
● http://www.globalcarbonproject...

10. Known changes of CO₂ concentration with temperature are too small by a factor of 10, hence not ocean outgassing.
● http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

The current, and ongoing, increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is due to human industrial activities. In scientific circles this is the climatological equivalent of the Earth being round - a fact so plainly obvious and supported by such a vast body of scientific evidence that to question its reality is absurd.

It quickly becomes clear that it is the humans who have caused the rise in CO₂ levels, by burning fossil fuels in the twentieth century. Every other hypothesis makes a host of predictions that do not pass the test of the evidence.

Arctic Sea Ice Decline
http://tamino.wordpress.com/20...

World Bank - Is Climate Change a Myth?
http://blogs.worldbank.org/fut...