San Francisco, September 19, 2011

United States Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar made an appearance at Climate One at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco primarily to discuss water issues. In addition he made some comments regarding energy, climate change, and fracking fluids, excerpts of which are included in this video.

Selected Excerpts:

Interior Secretary Salazar

Question by Greg Dalton: “When Barack Obama clinched the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008 he gave a speech with which he said people would look back on his presidency as a time when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal. Since that time the administration has opened up 2.3 billion tons of coal mining in Wyoming, the Arctic potentially to drilling, and potentially on track to approve a Keystone XL pipeline which would bring some of the dirtiest fuel from the Alberta tar sands to Texas. So how does that record square with the presidents pledge address climate change?”

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar:
0:40 ‘I think, Greg, what one must do is put the issue in the context of what it is that we’re doing on energy, and I think that when you look at the President and the energy team and the programs that we have put forward we are doing more that what has been done in the time of history.’

‘The time will come when the Congress will awaken to the need to have a comprehensive energy and climate change legislative framework’

‘On fuel efficiency, our vehicles are going to be getting forty to fifty miles to the gallon we’re going to be saving billions of barrels of oil a year. That means less CO2 that’s going to been burned. We’ve embraced a whole new ethic on what we’re doing with renewable energy, from solar to geothermal to wind – that is moving forward. We’ve invested billions of dollars in efficiency and in new materials to try to deal with the energy issue which is really the nexus between what happens here on Earth and the changes in climate. Now, have we been able to do as much as we wanted to do? The answer is no. We wanted to pass comprehensive energy and climate change legislation bills, we worked on that very hard.’

‘…Our own view as an administration is that the time will come when the Congress will awaken to the need to have a comprehensive energy and climate change legislative framework. … the principles that will keep driving this agenda forward in the years and the decades ahead, are at the end of the day about national security and the fact that now we’re so dependent on countries that really don’t have our interests at stake, our economic security, because we are now sending 750 billion dollars a year overseas, and finally the environmental security of the planet. ‘

Coal:
3:04 ‘The fact of the matter you know coal is one of the greatest emitters of C02, and there are ways in which you can deal with that, including the conversion … of coal plants over to natural gas which is much less CO2 emitting. But … almost 50% of our electricity comes from coal supplies so we need to find the right way to transition from coal to the new energy world, and in addition to that and something which we worked on very hard, is to find a way to find a future for coal supplies in the United States by finding a way of burning it cleanly so you won’t have the same problems of the past.’

‘And so it’s carbon capture and sequestration, and moving forward to those kinds of projects which hopefully we’ll be able to find that one of the most abundant energy supplies that we have here in America will have a place in the future energy portfolio of the country.’

Fracking fluids:
‘Seven or eight months ago we brought together a group of industry leaders and others, the Department of Interior to talk about fracking and disclosure. My sense is that many of the responsible actors in the industry want to make sure that there is disclosure of fracking fluids, because they see it as I see, they see it as David and I have seen it over the last several years, and that is that unless industry is forthcoming and is disclosing its fluids that it’s injecting into the underground, it’s going to become the Achilles heel that essential destroys any future for natural gas industry in shale here in the United States. And so, we’re in the process of making some decisions that we’ll be to be rolling over the next several months about how we’re going to deal with the issue of fracking fluids on the public estate, which is huge, because between lands that we control at Interior, as well as those that we control on behalf of the Department of Agriculture, there are about 700 million acres in the United States.’

Report by James George

Sept 8, 2011 San Francisco

Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org and Paul Hawken, author of Blessed Unrest, spoke before an enthusiastic crowd at Climate One at the Commonwealth Club. The event, “Blessed 350”, focused on issues of climate change and systemic transformation .

Selected Excerpts

“So we’ve got to adapt to that which we can no longer prevent, but even more importantly probably, is to prevent that which there is just no way for us to adapt to.” ~ Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben 0:00 “The fact that we’re in a period of economic trauma probably is a good sign that we need to start thinking much more systemically about what we’re going to do differently. My guess is that the economy that we’re moving towards looks less to growth than to durability and resilience and security. And it’s probably going to be far more – the trajectory will be more in the direction of local instead of the ever expanding outward globalism that’s relying on an endless supply of cheap fossil energy to make it possible.. I think we’re in one of the really interesting moments that has a lot of promise and the only real worry is that climate change is happening so fast that it may knock the props out from under the whole thing before we can get where we need to go. ”

“Just to give you the easiest example: the place you can see this new economy emerging is in food. And it’s been wonderful to watch, as the local food movement has grown and the number of farmers markets have doubled and then doubled. That’s the fastest growing part of our food economy. Fast enough that last year the USDA said that there are actually more farms in America instead of fewer for the first time in a hundred and fifty years which is great. ”

“I live in Vermont, which is one of the headquarters along with the bay area of this sort of local food movement. When we had hurricane Irene dump more rain on Vermont than ever has fallen there – and direct consequence of the fact that the warm air holds more water vapor than cold – when that happened at the end of August it wiped out every farmer in the state. There’s nothing growing there now. I mean everything was flooded and submerged. Our best local farms underwater. We’ve got to take on these environmental challenges to have any hope of being able to do the kind of really interesting transformative economic work that’s possible now.”

“What we need from Obama is conviction, and spine and a clear vision of the future…. And no Congress can stop him from being a human being. And no Congress can stop him from being a father to two beautiful children and saying I am going to do everything I can to insure that my daughters have a livable world. Nothing stops him from doing that.” ~ Paul Hawken

Paul Hawken 2:13 “But what do we really need to change? What we need to change is the system, and the system cannot change until there is a manifest crisis that is shared and the pain is shared. That’s just the way human beings are; I’m not wishing it upon us. Whether it’s a climatic crisis like two force five hurricanes climbing up the coast in the same year that really makes an impression, or whether it’s economic or whether it’s both because they’re not unrelated, I don’t know what it will be. But in the meantime, what I see happening, and why I wrote Blessed [Unrest], and why I see Bill doing 350.org, is that it’s extraordinarily important for people to build and create the basis for a future; it’s more than resiliency, it’s what’s going to succeed in an ecological sense the system that’s in place now. It may look marginal, the small farm or NGO may look inconsequential. But as I said, there’s no such thing as inconsequential action – there’s only inconsequential non-action.”

Bill McKibben 4:44 “I think that we’ve got two tasks now to save society. The interesting and powerful fun one takes all our creativity, is to figure out how to build these beautiful resilient interesting local and regional economies that can roll with the punches. That’s really where I wish I could spend all my time, that’s what I mostly write about, and Vermont where I live is a place like California which is a leader in it, and nothing I’d rather due. I was home 50 days last year I think, because the second part of this task, the emergency part, is making sure that we don’t push so hard that that can’t happen. So far we’ve raised the temperature of the planet one degree, but the climatologists are quite robust in their consensus that that will be four degrees by centuries end unless we get our act together very very fast.”

Bill McKibben 5:37 “You can’t adapt to change at that level. So we’ve got to adapt to that which we can no longer prevent, but even more importantly probably, is to prevent that which there is just no way for us to adapt to. We’re already pushing the outer limits. We’ve moved out the Holocene, the ten thousand years of benign climatic stability that underwrote the rise of the human civilization and we’re into something else. And the question is how deep into that something else are we gonna go? And if you think it’s hard for us to adapt to those things in California that has plenty of money, I mean, one of the pleasures of helping start 350.org is that we work in every country in the world except North Korea. So I’ve been everywhere, and you know, this is already a matter of life and death, and all too often death for people in place after place after place around the world. And of course the horrible ethical irony of that is that the places that are hit hardest are the places that have done the least to cause the damage. We don’t just have a practical onus on us to do something, we have a profound moral one too.”

Bill McKibben 7:08 “Our problem is far and away caused by the fact that the fossil fuel industry, which is the most profitable industry on earth, has all the financial means at their disposal to keep us from taking action and clearly they are willing to us it. They are willing to keep going, the record profits they’re making for another five or ten years, even if it means the ruination of the planet. There’s nothing polite about the political fights that we’re now in… If we cannot break the power of the fossil fuel industry to delay change and action then we can’t do anything. And that’s the work that we’re about . And that’s why people are going to jail. And that’s why people are doing huge things, you know 350 we’ve had these great enormous days of action on every country on earth. It’s why people are stepping up. And that’s what the battle is, people versus very concentrated pockets of money”

Bill McKibben 9:30 “Everybody who got arrested was in coat and tie or a dress, you know. And the reason was to kind of demonstrate to the rest of the world who the radicals in this scenario are. The people who work and Chevron and Shell and Exxon are radicals. They are willing to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere in order to get money. That’s as radical an act as any person who ever lived has undertaken. ”

“Those of us who are trying to preserve the world in something like the form we once know it are in this sense deeply conservative. And it’s importance to get that across. To understand what the ideologies around this fight really are.”

This is already a matter of life and death, and all too often death for people in place after place after place around the world. And of course the horrible ethical irony of that is that the places that are hit hardest are the places that have done the least to cause the damage. We don’t just have a practical onus on us to do something, we have a profound moral one too.” ~ Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben 10:21 “We know the thing that we have to do. Everybody who’s ever looked at it knows that if you put a serious price on carbon to reflect the damage that it does to the environment then we would begin to move much more quickly and gracefully in the right direction. The only reason we don’t do that is because of the incredible power of the fossil fuel industry to prevent that from happening. …Look Exxon made more money last year than any company in the history of money. In our political system that gives them way more power than they deserve.”

“And they’re using that power to prevent change from happening. And they’re using that power right now to try to make sure. You now, and all those companies. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Which the bigger contributor to elections in the last cycle was the US chamber of commerce, and they put 94% of their money into the campaigns of climate deniers. They used that power to retard what scientists and economists and everyone else knows that we need to do and that’s the shameful part.”

Paul Hawken 11:31 “What we need from Obama is conviction, and spine and a clear vision of the future. And that is totally absent. And he has that bully pulpit any time he wants it. And no Congress can stop him from being a human being. No Congress can stop him from being a father to two beautiful children and saying I am going to do everything I can to insure that my daughters have a livable world. Nothing stops him from doing that. And that’s what’s missing from the Obama Administration. The dysfunctional politics, that’s another issue … a real issue and a terrible issue. But that isn’t preventing him from standing up.”

Bill McKibben 12:14 “And there are issues on which Congress doesn’t get in the way. That’s one reason why we focused so hard on the Keystone Pipeline. Congress has not a thing to do with it. The President will either sign or not sign something called a Presidential Certificate of National Interest, and if he doesn’t sign it, then they cannot build this pipeline. His call. I mean, you know, he’s a basketball guy. It’s a twenty foot open jump shot from the top of the key and he’ll either take it or pass off, you know. And we’re doing our best to help him sort of nerve up to do it. They’ve made – did a couple of good things. We’ve got better mileage than we used to and there was some money in the original stimulus bill for a green things. Not anywhere near as much money as say the Chinese put into their similar stimulus bill. They’ve done a lot of bad things on their own. Earlier this year they opened up 750 million tons of coal underneath Wyoming for mining, and it wasn’t something Congress made them do, Ken Salazar and the President decided to do it. And that’s the equivalent of opening 300 new coal fired power plants. We can’t afford to be doing this any longer. Everything we know about the science of climate change says we’ve got to keep carbon in the ground. And if you can’t do that , we really can deal with it.”

“There’s no such thing as inconsequential action – there’s only inconsequential non-action” ~ Paul Hawken

Paul Hawken 13:34 “..and I think the same thing holds true in terms of renewable energy. And I think that in some ways the progressive movement has given a hall pass to some renewable technologies that are not renewable, and solar is one of them. It’s not renewable because you’re using high intensity energy, in this case Chinese coal powered plants, to make a low intensity generator that can’t turn around and make itself, and so therefore it’s not renewable. And second, it is the most toxic form of energy per kilowatt hour on the planet besides the tar sands, save for a meltdown at Fukushima.”

Greg Dalton “That’s because the photovoltaic cells, what goes into them…”

Paul Hawken “Oh it’s a witch’s brew. You have hexaflouride gases that are 25,000 times more powerful than CO2. And they’re escaping from the sintering ovens in China. A quarter ounce escapes and you have a net effect on environment in terms of increased carbon emissions, not negative….”

Paul Hawken 15:14 “There’s no point in making a renewable energy generator that has a three or five to one return on energy. That energy return on energy invested is laughable. It’s close to what the tar sands have: two or three to one. We came from a hundred to one world, that’s the oil and coal world. For every unit of energy that you put into the earth, a hundred units of energy came back, and that’s what we’re accustomed to The fact is surplus energy is the feedstock of civilization, and when you do not have surplus energy, you do not have civilization, you have hard scrabble existence. So you’ve got to be thinking about renewable technologies that have a really magnificent return on the energy invested, not a paltry one. So for all these reasons all I’m saying is that incumbent solar—thank you for getting us to where we are—is not going to take us to where we want to go”

Bill McKibben 17:28 “Oh there’s gotta be sooner or later a global agreement of some kind. I mean I don’t think there’s any other – this is the first global problem that we’ve ever had. If we can’t get, and we’re not going to get America, and China, and other big problems to agree without some serious pressure from the other countries of the world. You know, everybody’s going for the next sort of international negotiations in Durban this fall. And hopefully one of the things that’s going to happen there is the entire continent of Africa, the top half of which is locked in to a devastating drought right now, will be putting serious pressure on the world. That’s one of the things we do at 350.org, is try to mobilize the whole planet, and most of the people on that planet use so little carbon that they don’t have any effective way in their own personal lives to change the outcome, but politically they can put a lot of pressure on those of us who should be changing things.”

“Copenhagen the movie did not end the way that it was supposed to end. I mean we had a hundred and seventeen nations that we managed to sign on to this 350 parts per million right. That’s good, but they were the wrong 117 nations, all the poor and vulnerable ones. And the rich and addicted ones, led by our country, undermined that meeting and have done nothing since. The State Department has been, under President Obama, a complete and utter failure at getting any kind of international momentum going towards an agreement. We’ve got to change that.”

Bill McKibben 19:10 “Eventually – and here’s the thing about climate change, eventually this is going to happen. Eventually there are going to be enough bad things that have happened that people all over the world will be saying we have no choice but to do something. Sooner or later we’ll do it. The problem is, ‘sooner or later’ is the issue, because the physics and chemistry of climate change do not give us a very long window to operate, and if we choose later instead of sooner, than we might as well really bother frankly, because the problem will have passed the point where it is any longer susceptible to our amelioration”

Paul Hawken 23:46 “You know I think it’s importance to understand that we live in a very violent culture. I mean violent every step of the way. It’s not just violence in Iraq and Afghan. It’s violence to our children the way they’re educated. It’s violence to women – women know this the world over. It’s violent the way we treat our soils in agriculture. We’re violent to our forests. Our thermo-industrial system is violent in terms of chemistry. I mean every single aspect of what we do in this culture is violent. And what we’re talking about is moving to a world and a civilization that starts to looks at nature as mentor, that basically imitates. What we see in nature is is that life creates the conditions that are conducive to life and you don’t do that with force, you don’t do it with coercion. You don’t do it with power-over strategies.”

Q: “The United States got wealthy off of fossil fuels, and is not really willing to go along with the Kyoto approach or offer any reparations for the climate damage that we’ve already done. What can we hope for in terms of an agreement, I mean if Obama goes ahead with the pipeline, and when the petroleum price was getting too high and he opened the reserves to lower it, is there any way the United States can get up to the bully pulpit and say let’s make a deal. What can we offer?”

Bill McKibben 25:14 “Look, at the moment there’s no possibility right now for a global deal just like there’s no possibility for anything happening in Congress right now. We’re clearly not there, that’s why our job is to build a political movement big enough to force our leaders to actually lead. And that’s not something that has happened around climate until recently. The reason why we started 350.org was because at a certain point after sort of having written the first book about this and gotten a watch for fifteen or twenty years while nothing happened, it dawned on me that the strategy of having scientists whisper in the ear of politicians about what the biggest problem in the world was, wasn’t working, because while they were whispering in one ear, the fossil fuel industry was bellowing in the other ear about what they were gonna do. ”

“We’re never gonna have the money that the fossil fuel industry has, so we better find an alternate currency to work in, and that currency has gotta be our bodies and our creativity and our spirit and our passion. That’s what political movements are about, that’s what we’re trying to build. When we build one, as we build one, new political possibilities open up.”

Report by James George

San Francisco, August 30, 2011

Climate One at the Commonwealth Club held a panel discussion Monday on the Keystone XL pipeline, “Canadas Oil Sands: Energy Security or Energy Disaster?”.
Panelists (left to right): Jason Mark, Earth Island Institute.
Alex Pourbaix, President of Energy and Oil Pipelines, TransCanada
Carl Pope, Chairman of the Sierra Club, Cassie Doyle, Consul General, Canada

Representing TransCanada in favor of the pipeline, Alex Pourbaix argued that the United States will continue to rely upon imported gas for decades to come, and that Canada gas offers the U.S. increased energy security from a friendly source with similar values. Cassie Doyle, Canada’s Consul General also highlighted the Canada/US friendship theme, mentioning that Canada and the U.S. have similar environmental standards and the same greenhouse gas emission reduction targets. “Canada has adopted a GHS reduction target that’s exactly the same as the U.S”. Ironically, these common targets exist because Canada weakened its targets from its earlier Kyoto commitment and now matches the weaker U.S. targets offered in Copenhagen of 17% below of 2005 levels by 2020, which are said to be equivalent to a mere 3 to 4% below of 1990 levels.

“If we burn all the conventional crude that there is in the world, we would fry the planet. If we burn all the conventional crude plus a lot of unconventional crude, we doubly fry the planet. We really can’t afford to become dependent on this much oil.” ~ Carl Pope

Carl Pope, Chairman of the Sierra Club, said that in addition to being dirty, the tar sands oil won’t even deliver on the promise of increasing the U.S. fuel supply, since most of the oil will ultimately be exported from the U.S. after being refined in Texas, so that the United States essentially assumes environmental risks and costs without benefit. Further, the construction of the pipeline extends a dangerous U.S. oil addiction rather than moving toward renewable energy.

Jason Mark of the Earth Island Institute, explained that tar sands oil has a higher carbon footprint than other types of oil in part because the extraction processes requires pumping steam into the ground, an energy intensive, greenhouse gas emitting process. He framed the issue as an important policy choice as to whether or not the United States will move away from fossil fuels. He suggested that U.S. fuel consumption may in fact drop as tighter fuel efficiency standards come into effect. Whereas Cassie Doyle highlighted the billions of dollars of contracts going to aboriginal companies in the tar sands region, Jason described communities in the region as being torn apart and mentioned lawsuits by the Beaver Lake Cree against the government for violations of treaty rights,

” If you’re a First Nation People, if you’re a Beaver Lake Cree and you’re seeing your homeland being destroyed and you’re being told, well you can either work in our mines, you can take a government handout, or you can starve. That’s just not very fair.”

When the mic was opened up for audience questions, Rose Braz of the Center for Biological Diversity, stepped up and put the panel’s discussion into the context of the events unfolding in the nation’s capital, where there has been ongoing civil disobedience with hundreds of arrests in protest of the pipeline.

“As of today more than 600 people have been arrested in front of the White House … climate scientists, farmers, climate activists, communities of faith. People from all across the country, all ages …putting that line in the sand, saying no more expansion of this oil infrastructure, and really calling on President Obama who has this within his power. You know this is not a Congressional discussion, this is not something that has to happen in international negotiations. We are saying this is a line in the sand, this is a long overdue moment when we need to say no more to our carbon addiction. … the people really are standing and being arrested as we speak right now”

Those arrested, which now number over 1200, include well known actors, activists such as Bill McKibben & Naomi Klein, and indigenous leaders including Debra White Plume, granddaughter of Chief Red Cloud, and Tom Goldtooth.

“We need to say, the fossil fuel era was the twentieth century, it’s over, and we’re going to invest in the future. And we cannot afford for tar sands oil to be the future” ~Carl Pope

Selected Excerpts from the Panel Discussion:

Alex Pourbaix:
00:00 “Most of the forecasts that are out there, including the forecast from your federal government, would expect that that oil demand in the U.S. will likely remain stable for many years to come. So were at the point where it is very apparent that U.S. is going to need to continue to import oil for a number of decades and really were now down to the question of where you want that oil to come from.”

“The oil sands really represent the engine of economic growth for Canada for at least the next five decades. If the U.S. market were to be closed off … they’ll continue to develop and produce that crude.” ~ Alex Pourbaix

“Canada’s already the largest importer of oil to the US. And we would expect … with growth of production with the oil sands, we have the ability to add significantly more imports to the U.S. So it’s a question of energy security. If you take a look at the other countries that import oil to the U.S., they are largely countries that in many cases do not share the values of Americans, and in certain cases are actively against a lot of those values, and to suggest that those other countries are more responsible environmental citizens than Canada, really begs comprehension to me. Canada has proven itself to be a very good steward of the environment. We have excellent transparent environmental rules for the development of our resources. And I think of when you get down the point of where do you want to get your oil from, it is far more compelling to be getting your oil needs from Canada rather than getting it from other countries such as Libya, Nigeria, or Venezuela.”

Carl Pope:
1:37 “So what’s going to happen with this oil, is it will be shipped to refineries in Texas and will be refined into diesel, some gasoline, some jet fuel, and a large part, perhaps all, of that diesel, jet fuel, and gasoline will be exported to Europe and Latin America. The United States will bear the environmental risk, the United States will face higher oil prices, in fact the state department estimates that building this pipeline will increase – in the official EIS which Alex is otherwise going to defend – the official EIS says that America’s export bill will go up 1.5%, 6 billion dollars a year, if we build this pipeline in any of its options.”

“So this is really not what it’s being presented as. This is not a way to give America more access to affordable secure tar sands oil, albeit dirty. That’s the story you hear, yes it’s dirty but you get these other benefits. We’re not going to get these other benefits. The oil companies are going to make larger profits, that’s who’s going to benefit – cause the oil is not going to stay in the United States to bring our prices down. They are very clear about the fact that they think prices in the Midwest for oil are too low. They don’t like the fact that we’re not right now paying OPEC prices for oil in the Midwest. We are on the coasts, because on the coasts, the oil that comes here is – OPEC can manipulate the price. OPEC is not able to manipulate the price in the American Midwest and that’s what they’re trying to change.”

Q “How does Alberta oil compare to other crude oil in terms of its carbon content…?”

“The question is really, is the United States going to be complicit in burning megatons more of carbon dioxide that is going to fuel runaway climate change”

Jason Mark:
3:26 “It’s got a bigger carbon footprint. If you just take even some of the most conservative figures which come from Cambridge research associates, they say to get a barrel of oil from the Canadian Tar Sands to the retail pump is thirty to seventy percent more green house gas intensive than the average barrel of oil consumed in the United States. Now if you actually go what’s called wells to wheels, the whole life cycle, it’s still five to fifteen percent more carbon intensive. Now maybe five to fifteen percent doesn’t sound like a huge number, but at this point in time, I don’t think we can afford any increase in greenhouse gas emissions or greenhouse gas intensity. … and especially some of the new processes that are coming on line, which is called in situ extraction where they inject steam into the ground. That takes a lot of energy to do that. Canada is using one fifth of all of its natural gas just to extract tar sands oil. You have to use a lot of energy to create some energy. And so the greenhouse gas intensity is much higher than the average barrel of oil, and I think that to me that is one of the most compelling claims. I was really surprised, you know the U.S. State Department said that this pipeline will have no significant environmental impact. As a journalist I felt that was the classic example of the headline writer not actually reading the story. Because when you go into that report, you see that the state department itself says that … according to US Department of Energy numbers, oil from the tar sands are 17% more greenhouse gas intensive. That’s a significant environmental impact, to spill all of this oil into the atmosphere, and I don’t think we can afford it.”

Alex Pourbaix argued that the GHG emissions of oil sands crude was unfairly being compared with WTI, a light sweet crude, rather than the more commonly used, and more carbon intensive, heavy crude:
8:22 “The problem is, is that WTI in no way shape or form represents the average barrel of oil that is consumed by refineries in the U.S. The refineries in the US are increasingly using heavy oil in their refinery runs. That makes sense, heavy oil is a lot cheaper than light sweet oil. And light sweet oils supplies worldwide are decreasing because it was the highest quality it was the easiest to find. We’re seeing the slate of oil production across the globe moving increasingly to heavy. So when you think about what happens if no more Canadian oil is allowed to get to refineries in the U.S. gulf cost. Those refineries spent tens of billions of dollars to configure themselves so that they can run these heavier crudes. These heavier crudes are cheaper. If Canadian oil does not get to them, they will source heavy crudes elsewhere in the globe and you will get the same emissions being produced worldwide.”

“There is a big difference between assuming that by stopping Keystone XL you’re going to stop the development of the oil sands. The oil sands really represent the engine of economic growth for Canada for at least the next five decades. If the U.S. market were to be closed off for incremental barrels of Canadian oil, it is not a fair assumption to assume that the people in the oil sands will stop developing that crude. They’ll continue to develop and produce that crude. They’ll do it reliably and they will do it conscientiously. But it will go to other markets, but the globe and the atmosphere does not respect borders.”

Carl Pope:
10:18 “So the reality is that the world cannot long term – there’s enough conventional crude – if we burn all the conventional crude that there is in the world, we would fry the planet. If we burn all the conventional crude plus a lot of unconventional crude, we doubly fry the planet. We really can’t afford to become dependent on this much oil. You’re right, the issue is demand. But it is not necessarily the case that the only way to change course is just to go after demand. We’re going after demand, Canada is going after demand. I think that this is a bad project from a bad industry from a fundamentally good country, I want to be clear I don’t want to trash Canada. We’re not so great. But what we discovered was once you build these facilities, once you build this infrastructure for an oil dependent economy, it’s much more expensive to move off of an oil dependent economy.”

“Tar sands oil basically doesn’t really make economic sense unless the price of oil is north of $80 a barrel. The world cannot afford to continue to produce huge volumes and consume huge volumes of $80 a barrel oil. That will make Alberta rich, it’ll make Saudi Arabia rich, it’ll make North Dakota rich, it’ll make Alaska risk, it’ll make Venezuela and Kuwait rich, but it will impoverish the rest of the world. We need to be putting the dollars that are currently going in to developing the tar sands into – Canada needs to be developing an economy that is not dependent for the next five decades on the growth of the tar sands industry, because if the tar sands industry grows for the next five years, Canada’s permafrost will all melt.”

“We cannot afford in the United States to have Canada give us another fix – and this is another fix – for our addiction to oil. And we cannot afford to become the transit pipeline for continuing to feed oil to Europe and Latin America. The world needs to get off oil.”

Jason Mark
12:25 “I just simply don’t understand this argument that, well if we don’t take it [tar sands oil], someone else is going to take it, so we therefore should just take it? I mean, that’s not the question on the table. The question is really, is the United States going to be complicit in burning megatons more of carbon dioxide that is going to fuel runaway climate change. I mean if the Chinese want to jump off the atmospheric version of the Golden Gate bridge, that doesn’t mean that we have to jump off to the bridge as well. I mean , I just don’t get it. The choice here facing Americans, Alex, is fundamentally , do we want to be consuming more oil? And I agree with you, I don’t want to get lost in the weeds on a conversation about the fractions of a percent. The question really is, as Carl said, do we continue to make investments that leave us on the path of a carbon intensive economy, or when do we start to make the decisions – when do we make the hard decisions that say we’re going to stop using oil, or we’re going to decrease our dependence on oil. And this is one of those litmus tests. This is one of those places where we draw a line in the sand, we say we have to start someplace. And the place to start is by saying no to the Keystone XL pipeline. Because, otherwise we just keep postponing the future. Oh we’ll eventually get around to decreasing our dependence on oil. This is a place where we say, nope, we’re going to take a u turn and start pursing a clean energy economy.”

Alex Pourbaix:
13:40 “You know the U.S. is going to consume oil at some level which will probably require imports for a very very long time. The U.S. can choose to deprive themselves of this source of oil, but the oil is going to be developed as I said before, and I think there are a lot of easier targets if people really want to make a meaningful impact on reducing greenhouse gas consumption in the U.S.”

Carl Pope:
14:10 “Our coal footprint is enormous, it is criminal, it is toxic, it is coming down. But it is very interesting when we debate the coal issue with Peabody coal they make exactly the same argument that you make. They say if you don’t use our coal here in the United States, those people over in China or India are going to burn it.”

“That’s the argument they use to rebut our effort to get American investment dollars and American focus on clean energy substitutes. Keystone XL is making exactly the same argument. If you don’t take it, it’ll go somewhere else. If we don’t give it to you, you’ll take it from somewhere else. The argument we’re making is 1) We don’t need it, 2) We can get off oil. 3) There are actually lots of things that are cheaper as a way of transporting than oil at $8 a barrel. $8 a barrel is not a bargain, and that’s what tar sands oil has to cost at volume.”

“We need to move this country – and I would hope that Canada would move itself but I’m not Canadian so that’s ultimately up to you – we need to say, the fossil fuel era was the twentieth century, it’s over, and we’re going to invest in the future. And we cannot afford for tar sands oil to be the future.”

Carl Pope:
@26:04 “We have already reached the earliest of the tipping points. The weather that you experience for the rest of your life will have been influenced by the increase of greenhouse pollutants in the atmosphere. There are more severe tipping points coming. We don’t know precisely what the level of damage is at a specific atmospheric concentration of carbon and methane. But we know that we certainly cannot have confidence that we are not getting close to what most people would consider catastrophic tipping points. And it is clear that the longer we continue to believe, that “oh we’re running out of sweet crude, but there’s all this heavy stuff, gunk in the ground, and we’ll just use that. That’s not sending us the right message. One of the important things about stopping the coal fired power plants that were going to be built in the United States was, it sent America’s public utilities a message, get serious about renewables. If we stop the Keystone XL pipeline, it will send America’s public industries a message, get serious about getting off of oil.”

“The economic benefits for both Canada and the United States of the oil sands development can’t be underestimated. It is a major economic driver.”

Cassie Doyle
15:56 “The communities around the oil sands have received significant economic benefits from its development, in employment, in funding going into companies. For instance, Aboriginal companies in the oil sands have received billions of dollars of contracts, have gone into those communities around the oil sands. So, I mean like any kind of boom, this is a major energy play, the largest in North America, you’re going to get concerns around kind of an overheating of the economy. But the economic benefits for both Canada and the United States of the oil sands development can’t be underestimated. It is a major economic driver.”

Jason Mark
16:35 “Many First Nations feel that the tar sands development is systematically shredding the rights that they’ve been guaranteed under treaties with the Canadian government. And so, you know there’s some commentators in Canada that like to set up this dichotomy between supposedly ethical oil from Canada and conflict oil from other countries. And in fact there’s no such thing as fair trade gasoline. Conflict and strife follow oil you know like white on rice, I don’t know, it’s just part of the package, and you see that conflict in the First Nation’s communities, that are really torn apart, where yes some people have these companies that are doing very well… and at the same time, many people there feel and see that their traditional cultures and the ecosystems on which they have always depending are really being destroyed. You’ve got at least one First Nation, the Beaver Lake Cree, who have filed a lawsuit against both the Canadian Federal Government and the Government of Alberta, saying that their treaty rights have been violated by the tar sands development there. Now that’s going to slog its way through the Canadian courts for quite a while, but if the Canadian Supreme Court were to find that in fact this development has violated their First Nation Rights, it’s going to be very hard to say that this is ethical oil or that this is somehow better than other places. I agree with Carl that yes, the First Nations Aboriginal people of Canada have more rights, than say the Ogoni people of the Niger Delta, or than say, women in Saudi Arabia.”

“But I don’t know that that’s really much of a consolation. If you’re a First Nation People, if you’re a Beaver Lake Cree and you’re seeing your homeland being destroyed and you’re being told, well you can either work in our mines, you can take a government handout, or you can starve. That’s just not very fair.”

Alex Pourbaix:
21:11 “We are comfortable with our state of the art pipeline that we’re going to be very safe in that area”

Carl Pope:
21:20 “I’m sure that BP was comfortable they could produce Macondo safely. I’m sure that Tokyo Electric was confident that their power plants would survive the earthquake and the tsunami. The fact is, there are some situations in which, yes you may have a very long track record of something catastrophic not happening, but when something catastrophic happens, you can’t undo it. And the question is, which is being raised particularly in the state of Nebraska, particularly in the context of the routing of this pipeline through a particularly sandy, an area of the state which is viewed by people of the state as being particularly at risk, why shouldn’t we adopt yet another layer of safety, and reconfigure the routing of this pipeline. Because whatever reassurances and confidence TransCanada may have, they have had pipeline spills, every pipeline operator has had pipeline spills, most of which don’t end up being catastrophic, but one of these days one of them will. The bigger the pipeline and the more vital the water source, the higher the risk of a catastrophic spill”

Cassie Doyle
23:40 “Can I just say that I think that whether or not the Keystone pipeline is built that will not have any impact on the amount of carbon that the United States as a country uses. So I think that there has been an unfair targeting, because as we mentioned there are still tankers coming in, you know, bringing millions and millions of barrels of oil into the United States via tanker which are a much less safe.”

Report by James George

June 17, 2011 San Francisco, California

Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Senior Attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, spoke at Climate One at the Commonwealth Club just prior to the San Francisco premiering of the new coal film which he participated in “The Last Mountain“.

In these excerpts Kennedy compares economic and environmental aspects of dirty fossil fuels vs. clean green alternatives, such as solar and wind.

See also Video: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Comments on Nuclear Power

June 17, 2011 San Francisco, California

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. spoke at the Commonwealth Club before the S.F. premiering of the coal film “The Last Mountain“. Here he responds to a question on nuclear power.

Partial Excerpts:
“There’s not a single utility in this country that will build a nuclear power plant today unless 100% of the construction costs are paid for by the federal taxpayer. Why is that? And then at the end of the life cycle of the plant, we have to store their waste for 30,000 years which is five times the length of recorded human history. What kind of subsidy is that? What kind of deficit spending is that to dump on our children.?”

“…If you’re safe, then get an insurance policy and compete in the free market. You know they can’t get an insurance policy. The insurance industry won’t write them a policy because they’re too risky to insure. And if they had to write them a policy it would be so expensive they couldn’t compete in the marketplace”

“…In a capitalist society, the insurance industry is the final arbiter of risk. You go home and look at your homeowner’s policy. Every homeowner’s insurance policy in this country has a provision in it which says, this policy does not insure you against radiation contamination caused by a nuclear power plant. So you are now insuring yourself against their mistakes. No other industry gets that gift. That is a huge subsidy.”

See also Video: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on Clean & Green vs. Dirty Energy

Report by James George