Keystone Oil Pipeline A Disaster for the Working Class

The U.S. bosses are determined to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Alberta, Canada, to Texas to increase their profits at the expense of workers’ lives and livelihoods.  Recent months have seen mass demonstrations, including encirclement of the White House, to protest this project.  Pipelines inevitably leak, the more so as they corrode with age, and can contaminate entire water supplies.  While the oil projected to flow through the Keystone XL will be extracted with difficulty from tar sands in northeast Alberta, the project has become relatively profitable because of the rising international price of oil. 

Regardless of when Obama decides to permit this cross-border pipeline (most likely after the November election), the working class in both Canada and the U.S. will be the loser. Unchecked, the continued burning of fossil fuels will bring the world closer to the tipping point where global temperatures could rise beyond reversible levels.  (See THE COMMUNIST, Winter 2010, “Global Warming Driven by the Profit System...Only Communism Can Create a Sustainable World” at www.plp.org).   Only after state power is seized through communist revolution will the world’s workers be able to guarantee a safe environment for themselves and their descendants.

The Keystone issue

Tar sands oil is known as “sour” crude.  It contains far more corrosive elements than the “sweet” crude derived from large underground oil lakes, like those in the Middle East and under the oceans.  Sweet crude is also more easily extracted, but it is being depleted faster than new discoveries can replace it. Sooner or later, it will likely run out. 

For the time being, Obama has put off a decision on Keystone XL because of the public outcry led by liberal environmental forces, an important constituency for his reelection bid this fall. But when leaders of the anti-pipeline demonstrations, particularly from the organization 350.org, claim victory, they also obscure the rest of the story. Two other pipelines, in operation since 2010, already cross into the U.S. from Alberta: the Keystone Phase 1 and the Alberta Clipper (see map; the dashed line is the proposed Keystone XL). Meanwhile, the oil industry’s umbrella lobbyist group, the American Petroleum Institute (API), continues to press its bought-and-paid-for politicians for approval of the Keystone XL.

Because of the delay, Canadian bosses are seeking to build an alternative Northern Gateway pipeline directly westward to the Pacific coast to ship the crude to China.  But Prime Minister Stephen Harper is meeting his own opposition from environmentalists already up in arms about the Trans Mountain pipeline ports near Vancouver (see map). They fear the potential destruction of Canadian forests and coastal areas by oil leaks from both pipelines and tankers. 

Obama, backed by the API, claims that the Keystone XL would create thousands of new jobs for workers in the U.S.  Such hyped and misleading claims are aimed to divide people concerned about the environment from unemployed workers, who are urged to believe that their joblessness is the fault of the environmental activists.  This ignores the fact that those most hurt by damage to the environment, as always, are the working class.

The Keystone XL, like the existing Keystone Phase 1 pipeline, was slated to pass through the middle of Nebraska. This is where the Ogallala Aquifer lies underground, feeding fresh water to agricultural states in the middle of the U.S. As global warming from fossil fuels shifts rain patterns, the aquifer is shrinking at an accelerating rate. This phenomenon threatens to expand drought conditions well beyond Texas and into the nation’s breadbasket.  Pipeline leaks of sour crude will only hasten its destruction.  

No simple reform, like blocking the Keystone XL, will prevent the long-term disasters posed by global warming.  All capitalists, forced by their system to continually maximize profits, ignore the future beyond the next business quarter. They will guarantee that highly profitable fossil fuels remain the world’s primary form of energy.  To save our class and our planet, the world’s workers will have to crush the capitalists’ hold on power and rid the world of the plague of capitalism forever.