[sjg1729]

From How To Save a Planet, a podcast I like:

Alex Blumberg: ...and, [pipeline company] Enbridge says, stopping the pipeline won't stop the development of tar-sands oil. The oil will just travel in less safe ways, like by rail.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: But Tara says that argument is missing the entire point.

[Attorney and activist] Tara Houska: The idea is always like, you know, we're replacing old ones that are leaking. How about instead of replacing them and expanding them—which is what you're actually doing—you decommission the old one and pull it out of the ground and clean up the earth that you've contaminated?

Ayana: I like that option better.

Tara: And there's always, like, this premise of, well, it's gonna get shipped anyway. No, it's not. Like, that's the whole point. No, it's not. Your industry is on its way out. And that's the point. And we all know that. You can't sit there and say, "Oh, well, it's gonna go by rail or it's gonna go by ship anyway. No, it's not. The tar sands are on their way out. And that's the reality.

https://gimletmedia.com/shows/howtosaveaplanet/76h4r25

[willis936]

If it would be just as cheap to ship via train or boat then why make the pipeline? If it costs more to ship then it costs more to sell and less of it will be sold. That, in itself, devoid of any bigger picture market predictions, is a huge win for humanity.

Fuck underpaying for carbon emissions. There need to be some current winners made into losers if we pretend to be humans that care about the future of humanity.

[shawnz]

You could get the safety and efficiency advantages of pipelines while still creating the same cost increase through taxes.

Blocking pipelines is not a logical way to achieve that cost increase. That would simply make oil more expensive because it's now less safe/efficient. That does not actually cause the externalities to be priced in like a tax could achieve.

[mavhc]

Also once you build the pipeline it's now got to be used for years to pay back the cost of building it.

Would be funnier to let them build the pipeline, and then not let them use it.

[shawnz]

> And there's always, like, this premise of, well, it's gonna get shipped anyway. No, it's not. Like, that's the whole point. No, it's not. Your industry is on its way out. And that's the point. And we all know that. You can't sit there and say, "Oh, well, it's gonna go by rail or it's gonna go by ship anyway. No, it's not. The tar sands are on their way out. And that's the reality.

I think this is purposely confusing two different arguments.

Nobody can deny that oil use is becoming less and less attractive and that is a good thing for everyone.

But if it is "on the way out", what's the need for blocking the pipeline? The need is that actually there are still significant usages of oil remaining even though it's "on the way out".

So those significant remaining usages actually DO add validity to the argument that blocking the pipeline will cause additional demand for oil trains/tankers. Otherwise there wouldn't be a need to take any action at all.

[evgen]

The demand for shipping the oil via train or truck will also diminish over time as these horrible and expensive oil reserves are eventually made too expensive to extract. If you build a pipeline and put in the investment then you have standing infrastructure and sunk cost that will compel people to keep pulling out the tar sands oil, even at a loss. If they are forced to use tankers then the (higher) cost per barrel for transport is paid immediately and by the supplier instead of foisted off on some bond holders somewhere.

Pushing the transportation demand to trains/tankers is a GOOD thing, it makes everything visible and obvious and it prevents the oil company from hiding the factors that make this reserve the pile of flaming dogshit we all know it to be.

[WorldMaker]

> But if it is "on the way out", what's the need for blocking the pipeline?

It's economics. Shipping by pipeline is cheaper per gallon than shipping by rail/truck/ships. Even accounting for the huge capital costs to build the pipeline in the first place, once a pipeline is secured the marginal costs of shipping additional gallons is so much lower there would be more prices at which it would be profitable to extract tar sands oil versus if the tar sands extractors have to also account for the increased marginal costs of rail/truck/ships.

Tar sands extraction has already seen mass stoppages when the Saudis flooded the supply chain with oil and dropped the oil costs below what was profitable. (Tar sands extraction is worse for the environment than classic oil drilling and thankfully at least some [though never enough] of those externalities are at play in its costs versus oil drilling.)

Right now the price is up again and tar sands work probably is going back into place and it probably will still be shipped by rail/truck/ship. So the short term problem is the same.

But stopping a pipeline today keeps the pipeline from being a fully depreciated asset for oil sands five/ten/fifteen years from now when the supply/demand curve potentially invert and oil is super cheap again (because demand is way down). The higher marginal costs on shipping especially matter then, because potentially it stops tar sands extraction from again being profitable in far more frightening high supply/low demand periods. In that case it should mean less supply gets put onto the market, especially from high cost extraction techniques such as tar sands.

[epistasis]

The claim about carbon cost of shipping has no numbers attached to it and is most likely completely deceptive. It doesn't account for the energy return on energy invested of tar sands being 3x-10x less than conventional oil, an EROEI of 5 versus 18-50:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment

We do not need this oil in particular, there's more than enough other oil, so there's no foregone conclusion that we are going to extract these tar sands.

Further, the need for stopping this particular pipeline is that we are not transitioning quickly enough, and it's a bad capital allocation that hurts our ability to make the investments we do need.

The pipeline isn't being installed to lower the carbon load of bringing the oil to market, it's only there to reduce costs, which means that there will be greater amounts of that oil brought to market, versus cheaper oil from other sources that don't require as much energy intensity. The pipeline only exists for these particular oil investors to profit, instead of other ones in other parts of the world.

[ignoramceisblis]

The "logic" employed here is:

"We were told or otherwise made to believe your industry should stop doing what it's doing. Therefore, you should stop doing what you're doing." ("I know the future. You don't exist. So you might as well stop existing now.")

The irony is this person has no idea of "the reality." If the reality was that the pipeline served no purpose, had no value, it would not have gone through the lengthy process it's already been through. And if tar sands oil had no value, it wouldn't be retrieved.

But it will be. It will be retrieved and it will be transported, somehow, for the simple fact that people and industries use it. And if you choose a costlier method of transport, then people will feel those costs. Simply saying "No, it's not gonna go by rail or go by ship. Because I said so." is blind arrogance.

https://www.climatechangenews.com/2021/06/10/tar-sands-compa...

The oil will still be extracted. It will still be transported to the entities who use it.

[Tiktaalik]

People do more of things that are cheap, do less of things that are expensive.

The point of the pipeline was to lower the cost of moving oil, which would have accordingly increased oil production.

The goal of environmentalists is to make oil production as expensive as possible. Increasing the costs of transportation is part of that.

[bawolff]

And yet y'all keep using oil.

If you don't like oil, there's an easy solution, stop buying it.

[dmos62]

Most oil you buy indirectly. By buying groceries for example. Most non-local groceries could not be sold without oil-based transportation. In fact, if we stopped having oil-based transportation, we'd face starvation. Alternative fuel trucking and shipping is just not there yet in terms of scale.

[pjc50]

"I would like to change society"

"And yet you live in society and participate in its processes! Clearly this invalidates everything you have to say"

[wyattpeak]

That's not a remotely easy solution. It's just easy to state.

If someone can afford solar panels and an electric car (or don't need a car to get to work), more power to them, but that doesn't describe the vast majority of society.