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Pivoting the climate debate from oil to coal

Early on in the furious battle over the Keystone XL pipeline, a new slogan began to appear at rallies: “Keystone XL = Game Over for Climate.” That phrase, “game over for the climate,” originated in a May, 2012, Times Op-Ed, by James Hansen, who was at the time NASA’s most prominent climatologist. Hansen has said many times that he was misquoted—he was referring to the full development of the Alberta oil sands, not the pipeline per se. Nonetheless, the equation with Keystone stuck.

The exploitation of the oil sands, with a potential assist from Keystone, promises dramatic impacts on the environment, of course. Development in northern Alberta threatens to eventually destroy a pristine boreal forest the size of Florida, and extracting the “oil” (actually a toxic bitumen sludge; hence the alternative designation, “tar sands,” favored by activists) produces seventeen per cent more greenhouse-gas emissions than traditional drilling does. The crude is also highly corrosive, meaning that the pipeline is virtually certain to leak. The first portion of Keystone, from Alberta to Oklahoma, sprang fourteen leaks in its first year of operation.

But the notion that this will mean “game over” has its flaws. First, if the game is over, what are we supposed to do next? Second, it places so much emphasis on the fight over oil that it overshadows another battle, looming right now, with even higher stakes—over coal. Not to minimize the importance of oil, but coal is the single biggest contributor to global warming, and the reason China, which between 2005 and 2011 was building a new coal-fired power plant every week, overtook the U.S. as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

For activists, pivoting the fight from oil to coal would not necessarily be easy. Coal has no single, tangible object, like the pipeline, to focus on, nor does it have villains like Charles and David Koch, who are, through Koch Industries, the biggest single foreign leaseholders in the oil sands, and who are emblematic not only of the power of Big Oil, but of deeper affronts to our democratic process. Coal is a highly vulnerable opponent, however, because unlike Big Oil the industry is in a long-term decline.

In the coming year, the Environmental Protection Agency is planning to issue new regulations aimed at cutting pollution from the nation’s antiquated coal-fired power plants. These plants account for thirty-eight per cent of all U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions; their average age is forty-two years, and some date back to the Eisenhower Administration. The regulations will be fought largely at the state level and in the courts, and could end up in the Supreme Court, which agreed last Tuesday to hear a challenge by industry groups to an earlier set of E.P.A. rules limiting mercury emissions from power plants. Each state will be asked to design its own suite of measures to achieve, by 2020, a thirty-per-cent reduction in emissions from 2005 levels. States may choose to do this, for example, by upgrading their plants, switching from coal to natural gas, improving energy efficiency, or supporting renewable energy development. If they fail to comply, the E.P.A. will impose a federal plan.

Though the legal challenge to the E.P.A. regulations may largely be decided in the courts, the Senate will fight them, too. The charge will be led by lawmakers from the three biggest coal-producing states in the country: Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky; John Barrasso, of Wyoming; and, on the Democratic side, Joe Manchin, of West Virginia. Coal-state Democrats can be every bit as strident as Republicans on the issue. “It’s clear now that the President has declared a war on coal,” Manchin said last year. “It’s simply unacceptable.”

These are the clarions of an industry that has been declining for decades and is now under siege from the glut of cheap natural gas, which has transformed the nation’s energy economy. Kentucky produces less than half as much coal as it did in 1990. Thirty years ago, the state had forty-eight thousand coal miners; today, it has twelve thousand. Wyoming, which accounts for forty per cent of U.S. coal production, is in healthier shape, but, with the nation’s power plants in decline, the state’s coal producers desperately need new markets. To that end, a couple of years ago, they began looking for ways to ship tens of millions of tons of coal to Asia. They were especially eager to get their product to India, because Wyoming coal, which is strip-mined from the Powder River Basin, is low in sulfur, and India’s own coal, which is being dug up as fast as the new government of Narendra Modi can manage, is notoriously dirty.

Some big environmental groups, such as the Sierra Club and 350.org, have recognized that the need for shipping terminals may be the coal industry’s Achilles’ heel. Right now, the only major coal-export facilities on the West Coast are in British Columbia. But with those Canadian terminals already stretched to capacity, the coal companies would have to build new ones, likely in the Pacific Northwest. A slew of projects have been proposed in Oregon and Washington, which would mean obtaining permits from two of the bluest and greenest states in the country, both of which are phasing out their own coal-fired power plants. Washington’s only plant will be shut down in 2020; the only one in Oregon will close in either 2020 or 2025. Only two significant projects are still alive, both with the capacity to ship tens of millions of tons, in Washington. One is in Longview, on the Columbia River, and the other near Bellingham, on Puget Sound.

The proposed terminals face further rounds of environmental review and intense local opposition, and the companies have their backs against the wall. Three years ago, global demand for coal seemed unstoppable; since then, the price of coal has slumped. Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs withdrew from the Bellingham project, in which it had held a forty-nine-per-cent share. The industry has tried to put a brave face on the trend. “Energy markets have short-term market fluctuations,” said Ken Miller, the C.E.O. of the Ambre Energy subsidiary that hoped to build the Longview terminal. But that was a year ago. Last week, with no upturn in sight, Ambre announced that it was abandoning the project.

The long-term viability of the market is precisely the industry’s problem: when it proposes to build new shipping terminals, retrofit existing coal-fired power plants, or, much less likely, build new ones—they have a lifespan of forty or fifty years, remember—it can no longer be confident of the coal market. On November 18th—a few days after President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping announced a landmark deal at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, in Beijing, in which both sides agreed to caps on greenhouse-gas emissions—China made a commitment to cap its coal consumption by 2020. India, which this week unveiled the details of its long-anticipated plan to double its own coal production in the next five years, is now left to play China’s old spoiler role in talks about a new global climate treaty, which resumed on Monday, in Lima. These initiatives are also one more piece of bad news for U.S. coal producers, who had seen a big opportunity in Asia.

Even if they don’t fully accept or understand the science on climate change, G.O.P. leaders do grasp the logic of the market. In places like Kentucky, coal is a risky long-term proposition, which brings us back to Mitch McConnell. McConnell is many things, but he understands how to limit political risk. Despite his own “war on coal” rhetoric, a look at his campaign contributors suggests that he knows where the future of energy lies. Prior to the midterms, McConnell was deluged with cash from half a dozen major natural-gas producers. They’re the ones—much more than Obama and the E.P.A.—who are engaged in a war on coal. And they’re winning.

All of which is to say that, if Obama approves Keystone XL, it would be a terrible signal for him to send, denting the climate legacy that he has done so much to build, through both the E.P.A. power-plant regulations and the deal with China. But the game would be far from over. In many complex and important ways, the game is very much on.

Source: www.newyorker.com