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>> Welcome, everyone,
to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
I'm Tom Zinnen.
I work here at UW Madison's
Biotechnology Center.
I also work for UW Extension
Cooperative Extension, and on
behalf of those folks and our
other co-organizers,
Wisconsin Public Television,
the Wisconsin Alumni
Association, and the
UW Madison Science Alliance,
thanks again for coming to
Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
We do this every Wednesday
night, 50 times a year.
Tonight, it's my great pleasure
to be able to introduce to you
Professor Cal DeWitt.
He is not only with
the Nelson Institute, he was the
pioneering member of
the Nelson Institute back
in the very early 1970s.
He was born in Grand Rapids,
Michigan, and graduated from
Calvin College there
in Grand Rapids, and then went
to the University of Michigan
for his advanced degrees,
was also on the faculty there,
and then made the mistake of
doing a sabbatical in Madison.
[LAUGHTER]
And he saw the--
Anyway, he had no intention, he
told me, of ever coming back to
Madison, but we hired him
from Michigan.
And part of that was helping to
set up what is now called
the Nelson Institute for
Environmental Studies.
Tonight he'll be talking with us
about a very complex issue, and
that's what he specializes in
and that's cross-disciplinary
research.
He's going to be talking about
the Keystone XL, analysis and
context of climate change and
public policy.
Please join me in welcoming
Professor Cal DeWitt to
Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
[APPLAUSE]
>> Thank you, Tom.
Thank you for your welcome,
all you good people here.
I'm reminded of my 126 class,
which was a class I taught here
for 40 years in
environmental science.
That was the university course.
And tonight I'm dealing with the
Keystone XL, and I began to work
on this particular topic with
my students.
I was an active person not only
in science but also in
policy relevant science, and my
students came from many
different disciplines.
Typically, I had 24 different
majors represented in each class
I taught.
And they now are around the
world and everywhere.
There are thousands of them.
But one of the things we did was
an assignment I made to them,
and that was to do
a source to sink analysis
of the Keystone pipeline.
They were astounded at what
they found.
This was just a couple of
years ago.
And several of them wrote
articles and letters, and one of
their letters to the editor of a
local newspaper was actually
published.
So what I'm doing tonight for
you is giving you an analysis of
the Keystone XL pipeline
proposal which is being made by
TransCanada to bring
bitumen petroleum products from
northern Alberta across the
United States.
As a scientist interested in
public policy and
land stewardship, climate
stewardship, and the stewardship
of the entire biosphere,
you get into such marvelous
science here and there.
You must get into meteorology,
micrometeorology, climatology.
You have to get into soils and
geology, ecology, atmospheric
physics, and it all syncs
together in a kind of a
harmonious biospheric symphony.
I hope you'll sense some of that
as we proceed tonight.
This is the area of particular
immediate interest in
Alberta, Canada, shown here
on the right.
And on the left are the major
oil sands deposits: the Peace
River oil sands, the Wabasca oil
sands, the Athabasca oil sands,
and the Cold Lake oil sands.
Before we proceed, you might
have heard the word bit-chew-man
rather than bit-to-men.
The American pronunciation is
bit-to-men, and the British
pronunciation is bit-chew-man.
So they're both the same thing.
And another thing you should
know is that bitumen, as it
penetrates and combines with the
sand, forms a concretion.
Concrete is a binding together
of usually stones, sands, and
gravel to form a concretion.
And this is what bitumen does as
well in the oil sands.
And, for that reason, it's very
similar to the asphalt on our
highways because that is not in
fact asphalt, it's asphalt
concrete or it is called, as
many of you know,
bituminous concrete.
In front of our house we've just
had a section of bituminous
concrete laid, and, excitingly,
it's got half the bitumen in it
that is found in the oil sands.
It has 5% in contrast
with the 10%.
There are some countries, for
example Ireland, who instead of
just repaving over old roads,
they have a machine that goes
through and actually melts out
the bitumen in their asphalt,
reconstitutes it right in the
vehicle, and then puts it
back down.
So here is kind of the setting.
The dotted yellow line on top is
one possible route through
Nebraska.
The orange one is another
possible route.
But the destination you can see
here is Port Arthur and Houston.
I'm going to leave Houston out
tonight because you can do the
same analysis there, but also
because Port Arthur really sings
here in many ways as the real
destination of the first arch,
and that is from Port Morgan to
Port Arthur via a keystone.
It is our first arch.
This is what things look like on
the land in northern Alberta.
This is a photograph from
June 18, 2013, from Suncor's
Millennium mine, oil sands
operation north of Fort McMurray
in Alberta.
This was taken by Ryan Jackson
of the Edmonton Journal.
And here is tar pit number three
in Alberta.
The source of this is a really
remarkable website entitled
priceofoil.org.
You can see that there's a lot
of vegetation that is left
remaining by the magnificent
greenery here.
[LAUGHTER]
It's very, very easy to be
quickly cynical about these
things, but when you realize we
have well over 100 square
kilometers that will be
transformed, there's reason for
some repulsion at these sites.
There is another technique being
used, and it has less surface
damage.
What it does is to pump steam
down into the McMurray formation
at a temperature high enough to
melt out the bitumen and then
pump the bitumen back up and
then put it into a tank and it
then is usually transported as
diluted in an organic solvent.
Now, in looking at the Keystone
XL pipeline in the context of
climate change, it's going to be
very helpful for us to use
source to sink analysis.
I think this is a term that's
actually used somewhere, but
maybe it isn't but everyone does
it who's a scientist.
And my presentation on this and
my use of this technique is
informed very much by
conversations I've had with
Sherwood Rowland.
Sherry Rowland was a professor
of chemistry at
University California-Irvine,
and he and I had been invited to
a society of environmental
journalists meeting to speak.
And one of his sessions I
attended, and no one else showed
up, which shows maybe something
about the interest of people in
his work, which was the ozone
layer.
But this was at Robert Redford's
ranch.
And then the other component to
this source to sink analysis is
the invention by James Lovelock.
James Lovelock is the person you
probably recognize as the person
who came up with the idea that's
now called the Gaia hypothesis.
That Earth itself is a
regulating organism of a sort.
But he's a great person, a great
scientist, an independent
chemist, and the inventor of the
microwave oven as well as the
inventor of the electron capture
device used in gas
chromatographs.
The electron capture gas
chromatograph is particularly
good at identifying chlorinated
and fluoridated, halogenated
carbon compounds, and one of the
things he did was he took his
newly built chromatograph with
him on a cruise.
Rowland, for his work, along
with Mario Molina, received the
Noble Prize.
And Lovelock took his
gas chromatograph onto a ship.
This is not the ship.
It's the successor of the ship
he took.
Both of them called Shackleton.
This one called the
Ernest Shackleton, and the other
one the RRS Shackleton, the
Royal Research Ship Shackleton.
Here's James Lovelock, a really
pleasant fellow.
I know him quite well because he
responded to a presentation I
made at Windsor castle at the
invitation of a group of
24 scientists and thinkers.
I presented the case for
stewardship as a good model, and
he presented a case against it.
[LAUGHTER]
And then there were two other
speakers, a theologian and
a philosopher.
And then the Saturday morning
which ended our conference, the
winner in this was asked to give
a final lecture, and I gave that
lecture.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
But Lovelock is
an amazing person.
I should tell a little story
here because I was a guest of
the canon of George's Chapel at
the castle, and I stayed with
him, had dinner with him and his
wife, and he was the canon of
the castle and he was supposed
to be attending the services
every afternoon.
But the Queen was away, and he
had other things to do.
And he said, why don't you go
over and you can sit in my seat.
So I sat over in the canon's
seat, looked across at where the
Queen would have been sitting,
and as I sitting there,
James Lovelock came in and sat
next to me, which is a rather
surprising thing to have happen.
And as we were walking away from
the chapel toward our residence,
I said, Jim, I thought you were
an agnostic.
He said, of course I am, that's
why I go to church.
[LAUGHTER]
He's a really good thinker.
Here is his chromatograph.
It's obviously pretty simple.
What happens is that gas from
the atmosphere is brought in, it
goes through a column with an
adsorbent in it, some material
that slows up the passage of
various gases, and then at the
other end he can measure blips
that don't show here because
this is then linked to a chart
recorder and shows blips for
various chemical substances that
are in the air.
What he found on this ship,
we'll go back to his ship.
what he found on this gas
chromatograph was from a trip, a
cruise he took from on the
RRS Shackleton from UK to
Antarctica he found this blip
during the entire passage.
And he discovered that this blip
was freon 11, which is a
chlorofluorocarbon.
It has three chlorines and one
fluorine attached to a carbon,
and it is one of the
chlorofluorocarbons.
What happened is that in
Sherry Rowland's lab, he was
seeing the same blip at the
University of California
in Irvine.
The same thing.
And it was due to the same
substance.
Lovelock discovered where it
came from.
From fire extinguishers,
refrigerants, of course freon is
a refrigerant.
It was used also as a
propellent and for making
plastics, for making
foam plastics.
And it was also indestructible.
Sherry Rowland tried very hard
to break it down, and it was
kind of a gaseous Teflon.
Teflon's a very closely related
chemical substance, of course.
And it was this thing that you
couldn't break down.
And then it occurred to him and
his postdoc Mario Molina that
perhaps ultraviolet radiation
would break it down, and it did.
And then when they looked for
intense UV on the surface of the
Earth, there was none to be
found.
They had to conjecture.
They had to hypothesize that
this was being broken down in
the high atmosphere, in the
stratosphere.
And, of course, it was.
They did some really remarkable
things and other people with
them, which we could get into.
I did get to the notes that
Sherry Rowland took when he was
sitting in a lecture given by
James Lovelock.
And here are Sherry's notes.
Lovelock's data.
CCL 3 F.
Freon 11.
Inert gas and spray cans.
And then he has a point on the
bottom, crews of the
RRS Shackleton, November 1971.
It was cool to find this.
And what happened was he and
Molina, Mario Molina, wrote a
paper in 1974 in Nature, a major
scientific journal, and this is
a quote: "The dissociated
chlorofluoromethanes," this
really is carbon which could
have four hydrogens on it, which
would be methane, but it has
four halogens on it, so he's
calling it chlorofluoromethane,
"the dissociated
chlorofluoromethanes can be
traced to their ultimate sinks."
Now, this is the sink side of my
source to sink analysis.
Lovelock determined the source,
but Sherry Rowland and Molina
were committed to finding the
sink.
What happens to it.
And what they wrote in this 1974
article is an extensive
catalytic chain reaction leading
to the net destruction of O2,
which is ozone, and O,
atmospheric oxygen, occurs in
the stratosphere.
They have a lot of equations in
their article, but this is the
first one.
Chlorine, free elemental
chlorine combines with ozone,
O3, to yield chlorine oxide,
which is kind of an unknown
chemical, plus oxygen, and the
chlorine oxide then combines
with atmospheric oxygen to
produce chlorine atoms and
oxygen.
So it destroys the ozone in the
process, but it also releases,
in step two, another elemental
atom of chlorine, and it can be
done over and over and over
and over again.
This is the picture of the first
page, and I thought, wow, I've
certainly done something wrong
here because the title of the
paper is "Stratospheric Sink for
Chlorofluoromethanes: Chlorine
Atom-Catalyzed Destruction of
Ozone," and somehow this typo
got all the way to final
publication.
So when you're doing your
editing of your paper, also look
at the title.
[LAUGHTER]
So we'll remind ourselves where
we are at, and what we're going
to do now is to look at
the source.
It's really quite exciting to
look at the source, especially
when you look at it with the
very broad interdisciplinary
analysis, because if you look at
the history of the Earth, which
is a time of the lower
Cretaceous, just before that
period is the Jurassic out of
which Jurassic Park comes.
So there were dinosaurs on the
Earth, the Cretaceous tertiary
extinction had not yet occurred,
green plants were present, and
spermatophytes, the flowering
plants, already were started at
this time, and the place where
the tar sands are, the oil
sands, was at the interface of
the land and the
epicontinental sea.
Epi meaning on top of the
continent.
And if you look at these, I'm
not going to get into them in
detail.
Look at the upper one.
This is estuarine bay fields.
There were drops in elevation.
The sediments that were formed
by decaying organisms went into
those depressions, and they
combined with sand and they
converted into what we now call
bitumen.
Bitumen is just an odd mixture
of absolutely everything.
Even includes some methane, but
mainly is polycyclic aromatic
hydrocarbons.
So we have all these different
wetland systems, and on the
left, there are rises and falls
of sea level, which, of course,
make for various lenses of this
material being deposited.
This is another illustration.
The scientist here is
named Heine.
He's referenced at the bottom.
And these are other descriptions
of how these riverine,
estuarine, coastal ecosystems,
very shallow seas eventually
produce bitumen, which is the
remains of the decomposed
organisms that once lived there.
I did look up these organisms.
In fact, I have a big list of
them that I decided not to put
in this presentation because I'm
a zoologist too and I really
like those organisms and it was
really, really neat to look at
all these little worms and
things.
Anyway, it was a beautiful
place, but people weren't
around.
There were dinosaurs around but
nothing like homo sapiens.
So what I'm going to do with you
at this point is I'm going to go
back to Antarctica.
The first trip we took was with
James Lovelock so that we could
test out his electron capture
gas chromatograph.
But now we're back again, and
there are some dots here I'd
like you to look at.
One is the Vostok dot.
That's a Russian research site.
V-O-S-T-O-K.
And this one Law Dome.
Those are two locations, and
those two locations, there are
other ones too, but these two
locations are the sites of major
ice cores.
At Vostok, it's amazing.
A drill, that's at a higher
elevation than Law Dome, and
they were able to drill down
through the ice, layer upon
layer upon layer for 800,000
years of ice deposit.
It's just astounding.
And at the Law Dome, the reason
I'm really interested in Law
Dome is they've done detailed
measurements for the last
2,000 years.
Longer as that as well.
10,000 years.
But the detailed measurements of
the last thousand and 2,000
years are really exciting to me.
I've done a lot of work in
regulatory physiology in
organisms, and what's
interesting is when you see
these graphs, you'll think of
the regulatory physiology of
planet Earth.
We'll take a look here at the
set up.
It's a cold place, and inside
these buildings they're taking
the ice cores.
This is an ellipse ice drill,
and one of the cores is
horizontal here.
There's a man lifting it up to
kind of look at it.
There is a Byrd, B-Y-R-D, named
after Admiral Byrd, repository
for these at
Ohio State University, which is
a great big freezer building
where they do a lot of the
slicing work and analysis of the
oxygen, CO2, and other gases.
The drill head with a piece of
ice core is shown here,
retrieved at another place
called Dome Concordia.
And this ice is from a depth of
2,873 meters and is about
491,000 years old.
It's really cool, isn't it?
I can get kind of excited about
this.
This is the cover of Science
magazine.
The ice core contains a
continuous record of greenhouse
gases over the past
650,000 years.
Isn't that fun?
And to get the stuff out, boy,
it takes really careful
scientists to do this.
You'd see that if you looked
into the methodologies.
From the Vostok core, I have
these data from 800,000 years
ago to the present.
And what you'll see on the
right, you'll have to look at
this carefully, here's 800,000
years ago here.
There's 700,000 years ago,
600,000, 500,000, 400,000,
300,000, 200,000, 100,000, and
the present.
And here is CO2 concentration in
parts per million.
This is done by volume.
Parts per million.
And you can see that lowest here
is somewhere around 185, maybe.
The highest is around 280,
sometimes 282.
And then you'll see on the
bottom, there's a temperature
difference record as well which
can be deduced from the data.
And you see they track rally
quite well.
But the important thing to
realize here is that, first of
all, you see it's cyclic.
That's why it's called the
Ice Age cycle because this
concentration of carbon dioxide
changes from glacial to
interglacial period and back to
glacial.
But you can see that it doesn't
drop below 180.
It's really crucial.
T.C. Chamberlain, who has a
building named after him up the
street a little bit, said it's
remarkable, the Earth has never
gone to zero CO2 because all
these green plants would have
perished.
It's absolutely crucial that the
CO2 levels do not drop so far
that it threatens green life on
the planet or we're really
doomed.
And if you go too high, we get
an enhanced greenhouse effect.
But here there's quite a bit of
oscillation for 800,000 years.
Moving from 180 to 280, roughly.
I downloaded the data from the
Law Dome cores, and I plotted
the data for 2,000 years.
I started with, my computer
won't graph very well, but I
started with zero.
That's actually 2,000 years ago.
And coming up to, I'm sorry,
it's 1,000 years ago.
This is 0 AD and 400 AD, 800 AD,
1,200 AD.
So this is a thousand year span
up until the start of the
Industrial Revolution.
As a regulatory physiologist, I
was really interested in this
because what I did is I compared
this with body temperature
regulation, and I found out this
was more precise than body
temperature regulation in human
beings.
Really astounding.
So I'd like you to remember this
number: 280.
It's kind of like remembering
98.6, or 37 C.
98.6 is the average, but we
oscillate around that quite a
bit.
But here we're holding it within
one, two, three parts per
million for 2,000 years.
And the next slide I continue in
my plot, and this is the same
data but I go beyond 1600 into
1700.
And then look what happens.
It's just astounding.
It does not happen for the last
800,000 years.
Anything like this.
And it would be fun at this
point to take you on a little
trip back to 1859 to the
Royal Institution in London
where they had lectures just
like this.
Mostly every Friday night.
And in 1859, John Tyndall gave a
lecture.
It was a great lecture.
It was a demonstration lecture,
and what he demonstrated was
carbon dioxide absolutely blocks
out infrared radiation.
That was the first experimental
data that we had available, but
it was 1859.
But I'm not going to tell that
story.
I was even thinking of talking
to Tom and saying, do you think
we could set up that same
apparatus here and do that
experiment?
I could do it for you.
We would need cow's eye.
[LAUGHTER]
Because what he presumed was
that we couldn't see this
radiation because our vitreous
and aqueous humor were
absorbing it.
So he cut open a cow's eye and
poured it into his container
made out of rock salt and showed
that cow's eye humors stop the
transmission completely.
So we can't see IR, at least if
we're anything like cows.
Oh, I really miss teaching my
126 because I could pick up on
this tomorrow then.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, there are other ways we
get views of the Earth, and a
remarkable one, I think,
are the GRACE satellites.
This GRACE refers to Gravity
Recovery and Climate Experiment
written out here at the bottom.
There are two satellites, and
together they can determine the
gravitational pull of the Earth.
And as groundwater drops, like
it is right now in California,
they can measure that the Earth
is pulling less than it did
before and, from that, figure
out how much groundwater we're
losing.
But interestingly, when they go
over Greenland or other ice
sheets, they can measure the
degree to which the ice is
diminishing in mass.
And it is diminishing in mass,
of course.
Here is a surface melt on
Greenland, for example.
And this is mean sea level
anomaly.
It's a trend that we get from
the NOAA laboratory for
satellite altimetry, and it runs
from the early '90s through to
the present.
And what it shows is a steady
rise in sea level.
What are the units here on the
left?
Millimeters.
So this is one centimeter, two
centimeters, three centimeters,
four centimeters, five
centimeters.
And 2.5 centimeters is an inch;
32 centimeters, approximately a
foot.
You can see it's rising, but
it's so slow.
So what colleagues, this is
Weiss and Overpeck at the
University of Arizona, have done
is they've taken maps from all
over.
You can actually download their
website and do this for anywhere
in the nation.
And what they've done is they've
shown the new land, the new
shorelines with a one-meter rise
in sea level.
One meter, of course, is about,
well, it's 39.37 inches, so it's
about one yard.
But this is what happens.
These red areas are now
underwater.
This is New York City area, Long
Beach, Atlantic City, New Haven,
and the Hudson River area.
Here's the Chesapeake Bay where
Tangier Island is right near the
mouth.
Virginia Beach, Ocean City,
Crisfield.
And this is what happens.
One meter.
The reason I'm showing these is
that if you deal with a Keystone
Pipeline in the context of
climate change, if you really
deal with it that way, you're
going to say more than what the
environmental impact is on the
peat lands, on the forests of
northern Alberta.
You'll say more too, you'll say
more also than just what are the
impacts of the increased carbon
pollution that you get from
processing the material.
You have to also include the
material once it's been burned.
This is a very interesting one.
There are other sites like this
for Florida, more recent, but
just for consistency, these are
the same people that are doing
this study.
And here's Charleston area and
Savannah, Georgia, area, up to
Wilmington, Delaware.
This is what we got.
One meter.
And this is Baton Rouge, Lake
Charles, Beaumont, New Orleans.
This is where Valero refinery is
located.
It's gone.
So a keystone is a central stone
in an arch.
It holds all the other stones in
place and, if removed, the arch
crumbles.
We know the left leg comes from
Alberta.
Where does the right one go?
And what we do is we come up
with Valero, as I mentioned in
the introduction.
Valero has all of these
refineries.
There they are.
There's one in Aruba.
Most of them are in continental
US, and one is in Canada.
But, interestingly, one of these
is at Pembroke right there.
And that is in Wales.
When you do source to sink
analysis, you can extend it to
sinks that we also make.
They can be societal sinks.
So they can be industrial places
that take a particular product
and transform it into something
else.
And so the easiest way I found,
first I thought I was really
discovering things that were
secret, but I eventually found
you can go right to Valero and
get their investor presentation.
They say everything you have to
know.
I'm not sure why they're not
actually being read.
I suppose the investors are the
only people that read this, and
they're only interested in the
bottom line, not how it works.
So here's what they say about
themselves.
They're the world's largest
independent refinery.
They have 16 refineries and so
forth.
They have 6,800 branded
marketing sites.
One of the largest renewable
fuels companies.
They have 22,000 employees.
Their Gulf coast system is
taking advantage of global
export opportunities.
Our large complex refineries in
the Gulf Coast are competitive
due to low cost operations, feed
stocks, flexibility, and
comprise a significant portion
of US exports.
Strong international demand has
been pulling products and paying
higher values than in the US.
There it is.
To whom will you sell the
bitumen?
Well, probably the people in the
US because they're willing to
pay a lower price.
Export supporting refinery runs
on the Gulf Coast.
And what is the Valero share of
US in gasoline exports?
24%.
US shifted to exporter.
As a result of the continued
shift toward exports, US net
exports of petroleum products
have increased, as it shows
here, from 335 million barrels
per day in 2010 to 1,470 million
in 2012.
Gasoline net imports have
fallen.
And that's due to our efficiency
for efficiency in our cars,
efficiency in developing solar,
wind, and efficiency in
insulation.
In summary, acquisition improves
portfolio and creates
shareholder value for Valero.
Its acquisition includes what we
see here on the picture on the
right.
The image from the aerial view
on the right is the Valero
refinery at Pembroke in Wales.
And this is a Texaco station in
the UK.
And this is also from the Valero
website.
This is Valero operations in the
Atlantic basin.
Really international.
Branded sites they have focused
in areas of supply and cost
advantages.
Brand is Texaco, in use in the
UK since 1916.
They have a 20-year agreement to
use the brand.
And so, why don't we take a trip
to Pembroke?
This is what it looks like.
It's a very beautiful little
place.
In fact, the mayor is talking
about giving Valero a small
business loan to help them in
their operations.
[LAUGHTER]
This is a picture of the
refinery from the sea and from
the air.
And this is Valero, and these
six berths here all hold
ocean-going supertankers.
And this is a buried valley,
a buried fjord that's
extremely deep.
It's one of the deepest deep
water ports in the world, and
it's well in from the sea.
In the UK, there is UK Tar Sand
Network, there is Pembrokeshire
Friends of the Earth,
Corporate Watch.
They're very upset with this.
And if you look at this month's
issue of Oil Sands Review,
you'll see an article called
"Flow Through."
This is a review written for the
oil business, and you can
download it easily.
It's entitled "Flow Through."
"Increasingly, Canada is using
US deep water ports as a
springboard for tide water
market access.
Is reexporting going to be the
next big thing?"
And then it continues: "The old
saying where there's a will,
there's a way is providing true
in spades for North America oil
producers, including those in
the bitumen belt.
The rapid growth of crude by
rail has become the most visible
evidence of this, but another
opportunity is snapping at its
heels: reexporting Canadian oil
through American ports."
When you're doing source to sink
analysis, sometimes you don't
really want to discover what
you're finding.
I mean, you get a kind of
sinking feeling when you find
some of these things.
Here's from 2012.
I think it's from Friends of the
Earth, who already saw some of
this.
And Jim Hanson, whom you know as
a prominent and vocal NASA
scientist just recently retired,
says that fully exploiting the
tar sands would effectively mean
game over for the climate.
So let's look at the Keystone in
the context of public policy.
First of all, are we exporting
petroleum?
Some of you experienced rising
propane and gas prices this
year, and I went to the web,
and you can do this.
There's a CDIAC site.
I reference it here, and you can
have a copy of the PowerPoint.
But the important thing here is
to show that we have moved, in
2004, from exporting 400,000
barrels per day of propane, and
a close relative, propylene, to
about 3,500,000 barrels
per day.
We're exporting our petroleum
already, and the consequence of
that export should be to keep
prices up and maybe even raise
them.
The Keystone is the left
figure here.
This is a figure I've drawn from
a verbal sketch written by
William Blake, the great poet
who writes about one wheel
outside of the other wheel.
On the left is what he calls the
satanic mill.
It's the human economy, the
small circle, operating or
attempting to operate outside
creation's economy, which is the
big wheel.
And what he says in his great
epic piece "Jerusalem" is that
the little wheel, our economy,
must always operate within the
economy of the biosphere on the
right.
I wrote an article about this
for a magazine called Sojourners
in June, and this is a quote
from my article.
I found this is my research too.
The words of the head of the,
I'm sorry, the words of
Secretary of State John Kerry in
an address delivered in
Indonesia in February are
appropriate.
This is what he said, and this
is really quite interesting, I
think: "We just don't have time
to let a few loud interest
groups hijack the climate
conversation.
And when I say that, you know
what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about big companies
that like it the way it is, that
don't want to change, and spend
a lot of money to keep you and
me and everybody from doing what
we know we need to do."
That's our Secretary of State.
And this is my conclusion in the
article I wrote in June: "In the
name of gaining US petroleum
independence, more jobs for
American workers, keeping US oil
at home, reducing injection of
carbon into the Earth's
atmosphere, and supporting the
natural interest, the Keystone
XL does just the opposite."
Now I'm coming to a conclusion.
We all know Wendell Berry, who
is this wise essayist.
And from all of his thought and
study he says: "The care of the
Earth is our most ancient, most
worthy, and most pleasing
responsibility."
So I'm going to move with you
just briefly to the Netherlands,
where for centuries they've seen
the sea as a foe.
And very recently they have
transformed their thinking about
water and they have developed a
program called Room for the
Water as part of their major
effort called Delta Works.
The whole country is a big
delta, and Delta Works refers to
all the dikes and all the other
engineering that they have.
And what they've decided that
their theme will be is working
together with water.
It would be real interesting
here to look at the parallel to
climate.
Working together with climate.
Working together with water.
Now, this is a remarkable
transition in the Netherlands
because what it's doing is it's
moving villages off the river
sides, more away from the river
so that the river has room to
flow.
That's what is called
Room for the River.
And here's their hero, Wim
Kuijken, W-I-M K-U-I-J-K-E-N,
who's been appointed by the
government to be the coordinator
of it all.
He's given a $1 billion budget
per year for which he has to
account after it's spent.
He doesn't write proposals.
He acts on needs and then
justifies how it was spent.
So they are making room for the
river by redesigning their
cities.
Deltas in the Time of Change was
a conference held in 2010, and,
interestingly, in
September, 2014 is their second
conference which you might like
to attend.
It would be inspiring.
And it's in Rotterdam, and it
has people from all over the
world talking about how we
transform our understanding of
nature as an adversary to nature
as a friend with whom we
cooperate.
The Delta Project is the right
figure, on the right, where the
little wheel is inside the big
wheel.
The Valero project is on the
left.
Stewardship and the stewardship
tradition works within
creation's economy, shown on the
right.
And here's a concluding
statement.
There's one more conclusion
after this, but this comes from
a recent publication.
Planetary resilience is
paramount to the world's ability
to cope with the multiple
changes that are taking place
and interact from local to
global scales.
Planetary stewardship provides a
new and more compelling context
for social ecological
scholarship and for developing
strategies that line
sustainability science to
action.
Stewardship also opens doors for
new collaborations such as
between ecologists, religious
groups that share common goals,
or between scientists and social
psychologists for more effective
communication of science with
the public.
And to conclude with Berry
again: "The care of the Earth is
our most ancient, most worthy,
most pleasing responsibility."
I hope you've enjoyed this time
together.
There's much more to say and
much, much more to do, and I
wish us all well as we work to
serve the Earth in harmony as
it serves us with all these
great gifts.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]