Canada Trip Is Big Test of Obama Climate Policy

President Obama's trip north to talk tar sands with the Canadian prime minister is a big test of how deep his climate policy will bite, and how successful he will be on the international stage in drawing world leaders together to confront climate action.

The stakes are high, and that's why he's taking with him Gen. Jim Jones, his national security advisor; Larry Summers, the chairman of the National Economic Council; and Carole Browner, the White House's energy and climate coordinator.

The Obama administration has already earned high marks for steps to promote clean energy and pave the way to a low carbon economy, thanks to the green components of the economic stimulus package and bold moves by the EPA. Now comes the hard part: slowing and stopping continued investments in dirty energy. The Canadians are counting on the U.S. failing to break its addiction, and they're offering the Alberta tar sands to feed the need.

The tar sands is the biggest energy project on the earth and one of its dirtiest. In a full page ad that ran in USA Today, Forest Ethics (source of the accompanying illustration) described the project's impact this way:

Producing oil from Canada's Tar Sands releases massive greenhouse gas emissions, consumes huge amounts of energy, contaminates fresh water and fish, produces toxic wastes and destroys vast forests along with their birds and wildlife. And now, downstream indigenous communities are suffering higher than normal rates of cancer.

Even so, Canada understands its economic future to be synonymous with exploiting the tar sands and has shown no intention of honoring even the mild emission reductions its commitment to the Kyoto Protocol requires. When Obama crosses the border to meet with Prime Minister Stephen Harper, he's essentially going to be negotiating with the Bush-Cheney administration in a kinder, gentler Canadian exterior but oil-soaked to its core.

Since the U.S. pulled out of Kyoto, the American public has been led to believe that the obstacle to a climate treaty is China, for Bush pointed at China and said no deal unless they promise reductions, too. The real problem is actually much closer to home. If Obama can't bring Canada on board the climate bandwagon, there's little chance that China or India will be persuaded to pursue clean development, that the EU will do anything remotely adequate, that Australia will curb its coal-based export prosperity, and so on, and a global solution will become impossible. 

That's why Obama was careful to frame his responses to an interview with CBC in global terms. When asked if he thought the tar sands was "dirty oil," he avoided the trap and framed his response this way instead:

... the dilemma that Canada faces, the United States faces, China and the entire world faces is how do we obtain the energy that we need to grow our economies in a way that is not rapidly accelerating climate change.

I think that what I’m suggesting is that no country in isolation is going to be able to solve this problem. So Canada, the United States, China, India, the European Union, all of us are going to have to work together in an effective way to figure out how do we balance the imperatives of economic growth with very real concerns about the effect we’re having on our planet.  

He also showed his savvy. Canadian industry and government are framing the tar sands issue as a choice between "dirty oil" from Alberta or "bloody oil" from the Middle East. Indeed, Preston Manning, a conservative elder statesman of Canadian politics, skillfully laid out this stark choice in a Globe and Mail op-ed last week.

The best response to the "dirty oil" argument is to ask those who use it what they consider to be "clean oil." Surely they cannot mean oil from those parts of the world, particularly the Middle East, where security of supply can only be guaranteed by vast military expenditures and military action if and when armed hostilities break out, even if such supplies have a lower carbon footprint than petroleum products derived from oil sands. Oil mixed with blood is not "clean oil."

Frame the problem in that binary way and there really is only one choice, but Obama proved too smart to fall for that false gambit. He's forcing at least a triangulation of thinking by insisting that climate change is an equal leg of the economic stool. He told CBC that if the U.S. and Canada cannot collaborate to reduce greenhouse gases,

then we are going to have a ceiling at some point in terms of our ability to expand our economies and maintain the standard of living that is so important, particularly when you have countries like China and India that are obviously interested in cashing in.

A ceiling on the standard of living because of environmental concerns? That's what he said. It's a far cry from Bush I's famous pronouncement that the American way of life is non-negotiable.

Perhaps that's an optimistic reading of a skillful politician's words. Bloomberg news thought he said something different to the CBC. They put it this way:

Oil extracted from tar sands in Canada can be made a clean energy source, and the U.S. will work with its northern neighbor to develop the technology, President Barack Obama said. 

That's an understandable reading for a reporter writing for a business audience, but it's wishful thinking and not quite what Obama said. Here are his actual words:

I think to the extent that Canada and the United States can collaborate on ways that we can sequester carbon, capture greenhouse gases before they are emitted into the atmosphere, that is going to be good for everybody.

Ultimately, I think this can be solved by technology. I think that it is possible for us to create a set of clean energy mechanisms that will allow us to use things, not just like oil sands, but also coal. The United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal, but we have our own homegrown problems in terms of dealing with a cheap energy sources that create a big carbon footprint. So we’re not going to be able to deal with any of these problems in isolation. The more that we can develop technologies that tap alternative sources of energy but also contain the environmental damage of fossil fuels, the better off we’re going to be.

That's another clever response from Obama, pointing to a solution that's a decade or two away (if it ever materializes) when the negotiations with Harper are going to focus on the here and now. The Canadians want to double output from the tar sands to 3.3 million barrels a day by 2020. They want to send it via pipeline to its closest and most energy hungry partner -- the United States -- without much regard to the enormous carbon footprint of doing so.

But section 526 of the U.S. Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 already bars U.S. federal agencies such as the military and the postal service from buying synthetic or unconventional fuels if they create more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels. That means oil from tar sands. And now President Obama, with his sights set on Copenhagen and eventually forging a global climate deal, is adding pressure to the mix, and he knows very well that neither is there currently nor will there be technology available to sequester carbon emissions in the 2020 time frame. 

Still, that's the official talking point. It's what Denis McDonough, a spokesperson for the president, kept repeating in a press briefing on the upcoming trip. Notice how labored and convoluted this response is, and it becomes obvious that it's not an straight answer:

A couple things as it relates to -- I think that the president would hope to be able to make some progress on cooperative energy technologies, building on some of the success that we've had on some experiment -- experimental or test-level capabilities on things like carbon capture and sequestration. I'm sure you're aware that the economic recovery package includes about $3.5 billion for CCS, and it's the kind of innovative technology, I think, that we're all going to have to get our hands around if we're going to make the kind of progress that we all believe we need to on climate and to meet the president's goal that he laid out in the campaign and as reiterated as president-elect and then as president to see the kind of reductions in carbon output, carbon emissions, that are going to be necessary to stave off some of the worst impacts of climate change.

The wild card on the table is a proposed Trans-Canada gas pipeline from Alaska. Gov. Sarah Palin sent the president a letter asking him to discuss it with Prime Minister Harper, while Harper, on his own steam, just put it on the agenda. That ought to be a tip off. Sarah "Drill, Baby Drill" Palin wants to sell Alaska's gas to Canada. Canada, the oil state, wants to buy it. Why? Because it needs the gas to process the tar sands. It's a trade that would send a relatively clean burning fuel to Canada in exchange for dirty oil.

Here's how an op-ed that ran in the Anchorage Daily News last week explained it:

...now that Canadian natural gas is in decline, the tar sands industry is looking to other sources, like Alaska.

When you look at a map of the proposed Alaska pipeline, you'll see that it ends in Northwest Alberta, just a short hop to the tar sands. If the pipeline is built by the proposed 2017 completion date, by that time the tar sands could need the equivalent of roughly half the gas coming from Alaska. Delivery of gas to the Lower 48 could be sparse.

Despite the arguments about Alaska gas being a "clean burning" and "low-carbon" source of energy, in fact sending this gas to the tar sands would produce exactly the opposite result. Producing a barrel of oil from the tar sands leads to three times the greenhouse gas emissions as a barrel of regular oil. Some have characterized this process of turning relatively clean burning natural gas into carbon-heavy oil as "reverse alchemy" -- the equivalent of turning gold into lead.

The oil and coal industry is hard at work planning an endless fossil future. It's what they do for a living, and they have tremendous power -- both political and financial. Obama's climate policy will not succeed, however, if he allows business-as-usual and politics-as-usual to continue. You can't lift a board that you're standing on.

Obama is too smart to try, and the solution proposed publicly to the tar sands problem -- carbon capture and sequestration -- is too long term and speculative to be taken seriously. It's a temporary placeholder for difficult talks and a big upcoming test of what to do about climate and energy policy right now. 

How serious will Obama be about kicking a habit that hurts? Instruction for the president is available in that old Henny Youngman joke.

Guy walks into a doctor's office.

Sez, "Doc, it hurts when I do that." 

Doc sez, "Don't do that."

See also:

Video: Oil Patch Canadians Wary of Obama's 'Anti-Hydrocarbon' Policy

A Must-Read Book on Tar Sands for Obama Before His Trip to Canada

Dirty Oil Video: Canada's Tar Sands Explained

A Tale of Two Disasters: Coal Ash and Tar Sands Tailings

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