There are times when I think that Jonathan Chait may be, to borrow the old marketing slogan from The Clash, the only pundit that matters. There are also times, alas, when he sounds like a dog with a new chew toy. The wrangle he got into a few weeks back with Ta Nahisi Coates was one example of this. His insistence that opposition to our old friend, the Keystone XL pipeline, the continent-spanning death funnel that will bring the world's dirtiest fossil fuel from the environmental hellscape of northern Alberta to the refineries of Texas, and thence to the world, is a bad idea for the environmental movement is another. He's now taken off after Chris Hayes on the subject.

Chait's basic point is that opposition to the pipeline has become monomaniacal, and that it diverts the environmental movement from pursuing a number of strategies to combat climate change. This argument, of course, obviously falls into the walk-and-chew-gum-at-the-same-time fallacy. Unfortunately, the argument also pushed Chait inevitably into soft-pedaling the overall environmental impact of the pipeline project -- and, more important, the environmental impact of tar-sands exploration and use generally.

The first premise is that building the Keystone pipeline would unlock such a staggeringly large amount of carbon into the atmosphere that it would make any effort to mitigate climate change nearly impossible. Hayes cites a 2012 Rolling Stone article by Bill McKibben, the key figure in the anti-Keystone movement. In that piece, McKibben cites a forecast by James Hansen that Canada's tar sands contained 240 billion metric tons of carbon, which was the basis for Hansen's claim that approving the pipeline would be "game over" for the climate. But, as Ryan Lizza noted as an aside in a generally laudatory story for The New Yorker, this estimate was far too large. The amount of carbon recoverable under currently existing technology is 22 billion metric tons, less than one-tenth that amount.

This, of course, does not take into account the fact the extracting the tar sands is an environmental calamity in and of itself. (See above photo.) It is making people sick. It is poisoning groundwater. It has become devastating to fish and wildlife. This, of course, does not take into account the fact that TransCanada has been negligent in its maintenance of its existing pipelines, and it does not take into account the possibility of a spill that would seep into the Oglalla Aquifer. To define the environmental impact of the project merely by the amount of carbon it releases into the atmosphere is to tell about one-eighth of the story, and even there, I do not share Chait's faith in the State Department review, or in the magic Beltway conjuring words, "center-left."

And even that much-reduced figure further assumes that blocking the Keystone pipeline would keep that oil in the ground. The U.S. State Department, as well as numerous center-left environmental experts, believe that blocking the pipeline would simply spur Canada to develop alternate routes for exporting its oil.

Again, Chait ignores facts on the ground. The opposition in Canada to transporting this poisonous glop is better-organized, and better situated legally, than it is in this country. Canada takes its treaties with its indigenous people more seriously than we do. Its environmental regulations are less riddled with loopholes. And local governments are getting fed up with being pushed around by the extraction industries. (Chait can ask the Enbridge people about that, if he'd like.) In any case, the they're-going-to-dig-it-out-anyway argument ignores the legitimate environmental concerns of the people who live on the land through which this pipeline will pass. If you're going to write from that standpoint, and if you're going to argue resistance-is-futile, you at least should get your ass out to Nebraska and talk to the ranchers there.

So, we have two empirical premises where Hayes is mistaken. First, the environmental impact of Keystone is far smaller than Hayes implies even if you disregard the conclusion that Canada will find other ways to move the oil. (And if you accept that conclusion, the environmental impact is negligible.) And second, the practical alternative, far from being nonexistent, is actually quite potent.

This is just silly. It depends upon an absurdly limited definition of "environmental impact." And it also depends on an absurdly limited, zero-sum definition of the place of environmental issues in our politics. The people in Alberta are going to keep getting sick because of tar-sands extraction whether or not the United States complies with the "Copenhagen targets." The groundwater there is still going to be poisoned. The land is going to continue to be rendered uninhabitable to most species. Legislative maneuvering on a carbon tax is going to be irrelevant to the farmers in the Great Plains who suddenly discover their land is no longer arable. We can do what Chait wants as regards climate change, and we can also still resist this project on the merits. And closing things out with some snottiness about "organizing" doesn't exactly help your case, either.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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