U.S.-China climate deal reverberates north and south
Obama's new 2025 climate goals as announced in a deal with China equates to subtracting 20 to 24 Keystone XLs from the American landscape. Predictably, Republican heads are exploding.
WASHINGTON—Imagine a vast American army of climate-cleaning tractors plowing up dozens of Keystone XL pipelines, dumping their cold steel remains in the recycling bin, quashing their greenhouse gas emissions forever.
If you take the raw U.S. numbers at face value, that is the magnitude of President Barack Obama’s ambitious new 2025 climate reduction targets, announced late Tuesday in a surprise deal with China.
There are many ways to express the scale of carbon removal laid out in the unexpected handshake agreement between the world’s two largest polluters.
You can measure it at the tailpipes of millions of American cars and trucks, you can measure it in millions of homes worth of heating and cooling, you can measure it by decades of global air travel.
Or you can measure it in units of Keystone XL pipelines. And if you do, the new American targets — which aim to double the pace of reductions, bringing U.S. emissions 26 to 28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2025 — add up to 20 to 24 Keystone XL pipelines, according to the U.S. State Department’s own figures.
Here’s the math: Obama pledge would subtract an additional 539.91 to 659.89 million metric tonnes (MMT) of annual U.S. carbon dioxide emissions between 2020 and 2025, over and above the earlier 17 per cent target that the U.S. and Canada agreed to in 2009 in Copenhagen.
The U.S. State Department, meanwhile, in its Final Environmental Impact Study in January, estimated Keystone XL’s peak annual life-cycle GHG emissions at 27.4 MMT. The numbers crunch out at equal to 20 to 24 pipelines.
Not surprisingly, Republican head are exploding.
Coming exactly a week after the U.S. electorate handed control of Congress back to the GOP, leading conservatives portrayed the deal as the work of a delusional Barack Obummer, Job-Crusher-In-Chief. They vowed to block the move at every turn, and to push harder than ever for the long-awaited approval of the controversial Alberta-to-Texas Keystone XL project.
How Obama intends to deliver in what is shaping up an extremely combative final two years in power remains nebulous.
But as the Washington Post noted in its detailed unpacking of the agreement, getting China to shake hands for the first time ever on carbon limits is no small thing. Depending on how the rest of the world responds, the China-U.S. climate deal could mark the first big shift back toward global action.
"Reductions by the two countries are not only essential to try and prevent the warming that science links to increased emissions but also set a path forward for other countries,” the Post concluded.
Close watchers of the Canada-U.S. energy file, meanwhile, remain mixed on whether Obama now intends to nix Keystone XL. As recently as last week, the president downplayed the pipeline as a “small aspect” of the total U.S. energy picture, saying “Let’s keep in mind this is Canadian oil, this is not U.S. oil.”
But Obama now faces not only Republican opposition but a boiling revolt by oil-friendly Senate Democrats, who are pushing to bring the pipeline to a rapid vote as leverage to save the seat of embattled Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu, who faces withering odds in a runoff election next month.
Obama would then be forced to approve — or veto — the Canadian pipeline, ending once and for all six years of cognitive dissonance. Approval would devastate much the environmental constituency that has built Keystone into a defining climate issue. But others argue that the new deal with China gives him all the cover he needs, enabling the view of Keystone as a tempest in a tarpot, a minor carbon-raising factor in a much grander scheme to bring America’s overall numbers down.
For Canada, Obama’s new climate targets drive home the widening gap between Ottawa and Washington. Though both countries came away from a deal in Copenhagen five years ago with matching targets, only the U.S. is on track to meeting theirs. Canada, by contrast, is expected to fall short by half, according to Environment Canada’s most recent analysis of emission trends north of the border.
“Canada has long justified its own failures to limit the growth of greenhouse gas emissions by pointing to heavy emitters like the U.S. and China, but that excuse does not stand up to scrutiny,” the Calgary-based Pembina Institute said Wednesday in a statement.
But the U.S.-China deal means “Canada has run out of excuses” and now must act comprehensively “both to do our fair share to address climate change, and to help Canadian industry compete in a world that is increasingly pursuing lower-carbon energy,” Pembina said.
Warren Mabee, an energy policy expert at Queen’s University, suggested the overlapping issues of Keystone XL and Canadian inaction on climate could converge, with Obama making pipeline approval conditional on new emissions reduction pledges from Ottawa.
Mabee also noted that China’s promise to curb greenhouse gas emissions would almost certainly involve cuts in coal consumption, with likely consequences for Canada.
“This will hit Canada to some extent as we do export coal from B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan into the Asia-Pacific market, but these are very small exports compared to oil and gas,” he said.
But China’s shift could also involve increased demand for cleaner-burning natural gas, which could be good news for Canada “if we can get our projects off the ground,” said Mabee.
U.S.-China climate deal reverberates north and south
