As related in a recent Beacon (Sept. 12: “Amid Protests, Montana Welcomes Keystone”), we have now seen all of our major Democrats, including Gov. Brian Schweitzer, and Sens. Max Baucus and Jon Tester express their support for the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. In explaining their decision, they list only the obvious short-term benefits of this project and not one of them mentions the greatest reason for why that pipeline should not be built. That reason, as most scientifically literate persons know, pertains to the additional CO2 that will be sure to be put into the atmosphere by the full development and use of the vast tar sands of Alberta.
These supposedly progressive and knowledgeable politicians certainly know that the atmosphere now contains 40 percent more CO2 than it ever has in the last million years and that it is rising at an ever increasing rate of over 2 percent per year? Hopefully, they also know that CO2 is the most important permanent greenhouse gas and that the new higher levels we create every day with business as usual energy policies will last for at least a thousand years.
The politicians I referred to above are likely to live long enough to witness the short-term benefits of their recommendations. With luck, however, they will not have to witness the mess that will also be caused by the slow but relentless additional warming of tar sands-derived CO2. And they will also possibly not have to deal with the future hostility of our youth and yet-to-be-born who will have every reason to despise the leaders of our generation for their self-serving shortsightedness.
The only remaining hope we appear to have now of blocking the Keystone XL Pipeline is that a far more courageous Democrat is presently residing in the White House. If President Barack Obama can bring himself to say “no” to the pipeline, perhaps then our Montana Democrats might also be inclined to do the right thing – reluctantly, of course – while letting the president take the heat in his own upcoming election.
We have witnessed a similar “Profiles in Courage” moment before. We now know that former President Jimmy Carter was absolutely right in promoting profound changes in our nation’s energy policies back in the ’70s. Unfortunately, President Ronald Reagan’s “party on” attitude with respect to fuel consumption helped him win the election of 1980 and we did then party on for the next 30 years. While we are now suffering the ensuing hangover, the only response to this mess the Reagan-doters of today have is to deny the well-known and time-tested science associated with atmospheric CO2 and to hope and pray that it ain’t so. It therefore saddens me to see that our Democrats are only marginally better. When the going gets tough, they don’t deny the most important aspect of climate change science, they simply ignore it.
My own hope is that President Obama, like Carter, also does the right thing and that a policy of limiting total CO2 emissions finally gains real traction in the USA – even if Obama then does lose his reelection next year. There are more important outcomes than winning the next election.
Eric Grimsrud is a retired atmospheric scientist living in Kalispell.