It is striking how tar sands and the Keystone XL pipeline have brought folks collectively around concern for our water and local weather. In Canada, communities such because the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and the Beaver Lake Cree are combating to guard their well being, waters, and lands from the leaking dams of toxic waste and the destruction of strip-mining for tar sands. In British Columbia, over 100 First Nations have taken a robust stand in opposition to tar sands pipelines crossing their land and waters. In Nebraska, ranchers equivalent to Randy Thompson — who was arrested with me at a White House protest this week — are saying no to the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. Water and local weather stroll hand in hand with threats as massive because the dirty vitality path of tar sands. A dirty power future means buying and selling our water for tar sands, and that is not a selection any of us need to make. It takes two tons of tar sands — strip-mined or drilled from the forest floor — to supply a single barrel of tar sands bitumen, a low-grade, excessive-sulfur crude oil that have to be extensively refined to be become gas. Producing bitumen generates thrice the carbon pollution of producing typical North American crude oil. And the extra refining required to show this crude into gas solely makes matters worse. Tar sands producers have already destroyed an area the scale of Chicago creating an industrial wasteland of toxic sludge dams in the heart of Canada’s boreal forest, one of many last actually wild locations on Earth and the normal territory of Aboriginal communities who have lived on these lands for thousands of years. If it continues, the whole sacrifice area will probably be as massive because the state of Florida. Its proponents argue that we must build Keystone XL as a result of the tar sands will likely be developed anyway. This isn’t true, and even business insiders in Canada understand that the enlargement of tar sands production is just not inevitable and really carefully tied to whether or not the Keystone XL project is built. All presently proposed alternate options to maneuver tar sands to a deepwater port for export face problems. Each of the proposed tar sands pipelines to the Canadian west coast are stalled. The Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline is extremely unpopular and faces legal opposition from sovereign Aboriginal communities. A senior petroleum advisor not too long ago mentioned: “I personally do not suppose Northern Gateway will undergo anytime quickly or if it ever will.” If Canadians oppose tar sands pipelines working by way of their backyards, there is no motive People ought to take on this risk. Efforts to maneuver tar sands to the Gulf Coast by means of Keystone XL and to the U.S. East Coast for export are being met by similarly sturdy ranges of public opposition. The oil industry claims the pipeline will create tens of hundreds of jobs. It will not. The pipeline would create, roughly 6,500 development jobs, only a few of which could be local hires, in line with the U.S. State Department. A Cornell University research concludes that the pipeline would actually kill extra jobs than it will create, by reducing funding within the clean vitality economy that already employs 2.7 million People. What this all comes right down to is a startling willingness to take dangers with our health and our youngsters’s future so as to help the oil industry relatively than the American people. On this case, we are being asked to take the risks of oil spills and local weather change. More risks for fewer jobs. That does not sound like a sound way ahead for the American economic system to me. And lots of in business agree — so long as they aren’t in the oil industry. The pipeline would cut via the guts of the nice Plains, land of more than 250,000 ranches and farms, placing our croplands and food producers liable to oil spills throughout the American heartland. The route crosses the precious Ogallala Aquifer, where millions of Individuals get their drinking water. Additional, Keystone XL would cross more than 1,500 waterways, from the Yellowstone River in Montana to Pine Island Bayou in Texas, threatening them with the sort of accident that dumped nearly 1 million gallons of tar sands oil in Michigan’s Kalamazoo River in 2010, in a spill that has been the most costly onshore pipeline catastrophe in U.S. historical past. And we can’t depend on the security document of a company comparable to TransCanada, whose first Keystone pipeline to the Midwest skilled over a dozen leaks and spills simply in its first 12 months of operation in Petroleum Equipment the US. The pipeline would terminate at Texas refineries and ports alongside the Gulf of Mexico. From there tar sands crude might be exported anywhere on the planet. Certainly, that is a part of the business plan for a few of the businesses that have promised to buy the oil, turning tar sands into diesel for export. Army consultants advise that the Keystone XL pipeline would perpetuate our deadly oil dependence and won’t make us more secure. The pipeline is a conduit to the previous. Fairly than deepening our addiction to fossil fuels, it’s time we did what presidents reaching again to Richard Nixon have called on us to do and reduce our dangerous dependence on oil. What’s more, the president has both the authority and the duty to limit the amount of industrial carbon pollution emitted from energy plants — which accounts for 40 % of the nation’s carbon pollution — underneath the Clean Air Act. Taking this motion will set the best course for lowering carbon pollution domestically and send the precise indicators that the U.S. is ready to lead globally. NRDC has laid out a common-sense plan that will reduce carbon pollution by 26 p.c by 2020, present jobs to 1000’s of People, and save households up to $700 a year in electricity payments. This low-cost, massive-profit plan tailors state-extensive carbon targets to every state’s vitality combine, lets power corporations choose essentially the most cost-effective means to succeed in the goal, and drives investment in vitality effectivity so consumers can gentle, heat, and cool their properties and run their companies with less electricity. These standards will deliver Americans as a lot as $60 billion in public well being and environmental benefits in 2020, at an inexpensive value to the utility industry of $4 billion a yr to wash up smokestacks and promote vitality effectivity — about 1 percent of utility revenues. That is an important return on funding for our future. So be part of us Sunday in Washington at the Ahead on Climate rally to say no to soiled fuels, no to the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, sure to carbon limits on dirty power plants, and yes to climate leadership. We deserve better than a dirty energy boondoggle.