“GAME OVER” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 82

staggering amounts of potential oil. h e problem had always been how
to get at it. Unlike conventional crude, which l ows easily when tapped,
Albertan oil is found in bitumen, a gooey mix of clay, sand, and oil. For
decades these deposits were considered too costly to extract. In the
early 2000s, though, rising prices and advancing technology combined
to begin to change that. By 2010, oil sands production had hit 1.5 mil-
lion barrels a day. 4 h e U.S. Department of Energy has projected that
if oil prices rise steeply, oil sands production could reach six million
barrels a day by 2030.
Indeed, typical estimates peg the total volume underground at 1.7
trillion barrels, about i t y years' worth of world oil consumption at
the current pace. h e sheer magnitude of the oil sands has led people
on both sides of the i ght over the future of U.S. energy to develop a
habit of including this source in their vision for U.S. oil. Enthusiasts talk
about how Canadian production could deliver U.S. jobs and about the
potential for North American energy independence, extrapolating the
purported benei ts of U.S. oil production to output from north of the
border. Environmental advocates have focused their energies on the local
environmental impacts of oil sands development, which can be ugly, for
several years. But in early 2011, Jim Hansen, a prominent scientist at
NASA, published some simple analysis that broadened their focus. His
calculations had led him to conclude that if the Albertan deposits were all
burned, it would be “game over” for the planet when it came to climate
change. 5 Later that year, McKibben put the pieces together and came to
a stark conclusion: the Keystone XL pipeline had to be stopped.
He was not the only one who felt that way. A who's who of environ-
mental groups backed the protests. h ey were joined by conservative
Nebraska landowners, afraid of risks posed by a pipeline that would run
through their backyards. h e disparate group had tapped into some-
thing much deeper than concern about a single pipeline. “We've got to
get of oil,” McKibben emphasized the day at er his release. “We don't
need one more huge source of oil pouring in.” 6
h e sentiment made instinctive sense, and not only when it came to
the tar sands. Americans were rapidly tapping into ever bigger pools of
petroleum. h e outer continental shelf, Alaska, tight oil, oil shale; each
source of oil raised alarms when juxtaposed with increasing concerns