14 DAY TRIAL // It's a good thing that Pinocchio-like incidents only happen in tales, otherwise quite a lot of people would experience drastic changes in their anatomy after more or less purposely downplaying the environmental impact of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.
For those unaware, plans to build this pipeline, which would serve to carry oil from western Canada to the mid-western US, were first announced by TransCanada Corp. back in 2008. It's 2014, but this project is yet to be given the green light.
Given the outcome of a recent investigation whose findings are detailed in a paper in the journal Nature Climate Change, it looks like a teeny tiny snowflake has a better chance at surviving a holiday in hell than Keystone XL has to be approved.
Provided that US President Barack Obama keeps his promise and remembers to take into account the proposed pipeline's environmental impact when trying to figure out whether or not this controversial project should be implemented, that is.
Not to beat about the bush, researchers writing in the journal Nature Climate Change argue that, if built and put to work carrying oil from tar sands in Canada to refineries in the US, Keystone XL will cough out the equivalent of roughly 110 million tons of CO2 annually.
To help put things into perspective, the specialists behind this research project explain that these 110 million tons of CO2 represent no more and no less than 1.7% of the US' total greenhouse gas emissions in 2012. “That'd be a big greenhouse-gas impact,” says study co-author Peter Erickson.
Interestingly enough, a report released by the US State Department a few months ago says that, all things considered, this pipeline is bound to release the equivalent of merely 1.3 million to 27.4 million tons of CO2 on a yearly basis. Simply put, its environmental footprint will likely be negligible.
According to Peter Erickson, the US State Department's report on Keystone XL fails to take into account the fact that this proposed pipeline, which will likely carry about 830,000 barrels of crude oil daily, will surely influence global oil prices and, consequently, global oil consumption, Nature informs.
Specifically, it is estimated that, when up and running, the Keystone XL pipeline will up global oil consumption by roughly 0.6 barrels for each and every additional barrel of oil that is produced thanks to it. This means that global greenhouse gas emissions will likely increase to a considerable extent.
“Our simple model shows that, to the extent that Keystone XL leads to greater oil sands production, the pipeline's effect on oil prices could substantially increase its total GHG (greenhouse gas) impact,” the scientists behind this investigation write in their paper in the journal Nature Climate Change.
“The State Department's assessment has overlooked the pipeline's potentially most significant GHG impact: increasing oil consumption as the result of increasing supplies and lowering prices,” specialist Peter Erickson with the Stockholm Environment Institute in Seattle, Washington, and his colleagues go on to explain.