Research

The Obama administration’s decision on the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline is a choice about our climate future. Tar sands are one of the most carbon polluting sources of oil on the planet, and limiting tar sands expansion is critical to fighting dangerous levels of climate change. Climate scientists, energy experts, and even Wall Street and industry analysts agree that the oil industry’s plans to expand tar sands development are not possible without this pipeline.

Building Keystone XL will actually create a surplus of heavy oil on the Gulf Coast and force Canadian producers to regularly export their dirty oil into the world market. It is therefore clearer than ever that Keystone XL will facilitate more tar sands production and the increased Greenhouse Gas pollution that goes with it. Building the pipeline will clearly not meet the criteria of no significant increase in carbon emissions set by President Obama. The sooner that Democrats and Republicans wake up to the fact that Big Oil works only in its own interest and not in the national interest, the sooner we may start to move towards the clean energy future we so desperately need.

Existing analyses of the impacts of tar sands fail to account for a byproduct of the process that is a major source of climate change causing carbon emissions: petroleum coke - known as petcoke. Petcoke is the coal hiding in North America's tar sands oil boom.

In the world today, global warming is our collective cancer, and despite dire and clear warnings, the oil industry is still smoking away. The best climate science in the world tells us that in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, we need to limit global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius.  But the amount of new oil production the industry is bringing online over the next eight years is exponentially more than we can afford to burn and stay under two degrees.  We simply cannot afford to burn all the oil that the industry is capable of producing over the next few years, and in the long term.

Keystone XL will not lessen U.S. dependence on foreign oil, but rather transport Canadian oil to American refineries for export to overseas markets.