The Keystone XL Pipeline is not the problem. Approval of the pipeline will not be “Game over for climate” anymore than the resurgence in Afghani poppy production is “Game over for heroin addicts.”  Like America’s misguided War on Drugs, the attack on the Keystone XL pipeline approval is confusing cause and effect, symptoms and disease.

After decades of fighting, it’s pretty clear that the War on Drugs has failed. The reason is that drugs are not the enemy; addiction is the enemy. Fighting the wrong enemy has wasted countless billions of dollars, imprisoned millions of our citizens, and given rise to vast empires of narco-traffickers, destabilized nations and allowed terrorist networks to thrive. However, it’s done little to reduce drug use, addiction, or any of the associated the problems.

Progressives, scientists, and others in the reality-based community view the “drug problem” not as a military challenge, but as an educational and public health challenge.  When drug addiction is viewed as a disease, we can fight the disease through prevention, education, and treatment. If we legalized some drugs, controlled them and taxed them to pay for treatment, education and abuse prevention, we could have a healthier, wealthier and wiser society. Why don’t we view oil addiction the same way as drug addiction?  

The cause of climate destabilization and ocean acidification is not oil, pipelines or tar sands, but the fact that our economy is built around fossil energy, and the climate impacts are not included in the financial cost. Shutting down the pipeline is like busting one drug cartel: the demand for oil doesn’t change, the supply is still there, and the problems associated with it don’t go away.  Rather than fight this battle and certainly lose it (yes, the pipeline will be approved eventually; the political and economic beneficiaries are too many and too powerful),  we need to redirect this massive income stream towards something that actually solves the problem.

Here’s a sample proposal: Tar sands oil will displace imported oil from Saudi Arabia or Venezuela, but has a 40% higher enviromental impact. Let’s levy an fee to offset that difference as it crosses our nation.  Use this fund to offset carbon impacts by planting hundreds and thousands of acres of forests, funding research and adoption of renewable energy technology, and promoting green jobs and energy efficiency.  Let’s add a cleanup reserve for possible spills.  

In terms of political calculus, we need these protests to give the Obama administration cover to do the right thing.  We need more arrests, civil disobedience, outraged letters to Congress, so keep it up, all of you.   The President will compromise, that’s his specialty, and maybe we’ll get a carbon tax that only applies to tar sands oil, but it will be the first step in our long path out of addiction. 

I’m not going to make the argument that more compact cities are better for the planet, create jobs, make people happier, etc., because many many people, including Dave Roberts, have done it already.  Sensible progressives and environmentalists have been railing against sprawl for decades, and in some places, even had small successes in moderating it.  However, it’s been an uphill battle, because the economy of the built environment is skewed toward sprawl, and fighting it is every bit as satisfying and effective as swimming up a waterfall.  What I will do is highlight the massive, Keystone XL-dwarfing importance of . . . wait for it . . . a potential shift in home mortgage underwriting guidelines that takes transportation costs into account.  

I know, not as sexy as Bill McKibben in handcuffs, but way more important.  Here’s why: 

Buying a house is hugely subsidized by the US government.  If we’re not in a massively inflated housing bubble, this subsidy makes buying a house into one of the safest and highest yielding investments possible. Therefore, everyone wants to buy a house. Houses cost less well outside the urban center. This is primarily because raw land is much cheaper where there are no jobs, urban services, or infrastructure.  Construction costs might also be slightly lower, and there are frequently fewer regulations, fees, and taxes, which bring down the total cost.

If I want to get a piece of Uncle Sam’s largesse, and I make a moderate salary, I have to drive ’til I qualify i.e. look farther and farther from the urban center.  This is because when I apply for a mortgage, the bank only looks at the monthly payment and my salary.  They assume that if I only spend 30% of my income on my mortgage payment, I’ll be able to pay off the loan — location doesn’t matter. However, if I live in the outer ‘burbs, my family will need at least two cars, and might spend as much on transportation as on housing. That’s not counting the massive headaches and wasted time from getting stuck in traffic, but the bank does not count transportation cost when they write the mortgage.

The bank doesn’t care about my transportation cost because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government sponsored agencies that buys or guarantees the majority of the mortgages in this country don’t care. Despite the fact that my family could easily as much on transportation as on the mortgage payment, that cost is not included in their qualifying guidelines. If we started calculated the cost of car ownership, gasoline and maintenance costs, suddenly the entire economic landscape shifts from one of greater car dependency towards one of greater sustainability. Go and see the landscape for yourself. 

To get off fossil fuel, we need to make our cities and towns more compact, walkable, and efficient. If we can make this one simple change to the economy, it moves from the realm of Sisyphisean task  to the realm of distinct possibility.  

A buzz-worthy idea.

Problem 1: Bee populations are mysteriously dying. Read more about colony collapse disorder and the threat it poses to agricultural production. 

Problem 2: Vacant land near airports cannot be used for development. FAA regulations prohibit many economically productive uses because having a plane crash-land on an office park is bad.

Problem 3: Ex-convicts and others struggle to find jobs in the weak economy.

Solution: Create a beekeeping project that uses vacant land in the flight path and trains ex-convicts in the art and science of beekeeping, selling the resulting honey and beeswax to support the program. Because the hives are largely unattended, otherwise-vacant land can be used productively. Since agriculture production depends on bees and other pollinators, we have a strong incentive to promote beekeeping and train unemployed workers to tend them. 

Read a full article about the project, buy the beeline-brand products, and support the program, which is run by Sweet Beginnings and the North Lawndale Employment Network. Then go badger your local port commissioner and job-training agency about getting something similiar started at your nearest airport.

More in Grist:
   •  Profile of Sweet Beginnings founder Brenda Palms-Barber
   •  Movement for metro pollinators is spreading

Also check out:
   •  Seattle’s Pollinator Pathway Project

As the debt showdown between President Obama and top House Republicans drags on, you’ve probably been hearing about the billions in tax subsidies we give to the oil and gas industry each year. And if you haven’t been, you should be; eliminating those subsidies would be a great way to reduce spending without raising taxes or cutting services.

So what does all that money go toward? And aside from a broken climate and oil spills, what exactly does it buy?

Fossil-energy companies get tax exemptions, free access to drill on public land, special accounting rules to hide profits, protection from foreign competition through import tariffs and regulations … and the list goes on. We give so many favors to oil and gas companies that it’s hard to keep track. Luckily, the determined wonks at Taxpayers for Common Sense have done it for us. The charts below tease out the biggest oil and gas subsidies hidden in various laws and accounting rules for 2011-2015. With more than $55 billion in targeted benefits for the industry and nearly $23 billion in general business subsidies, it’s nothing to sneeze at.

In the early 1900s, it might have made sense to give the young oil and gas industry a boost, but today it’s one of the largest, most profitable industries in history, obviously no longer in need of handouts from Uncle Sam. Check out the chart below comparing total subsidies to the net profits of the top five oil companies.

Some Republicans are saying, “Hey, these aren’t really government spending, they are just tax deductions. Cutting them would be raising taxes, something we can’t afford to do in a recession.” This is where political and economic realities part ways. From an economic standpoint, there is no difference between giving someone a tax break of $100 and giving someone a check for $100. Either way, the treasury is out a hundred bucks.

In a recent article in National Affairs [PDF], economist Donald Marron calculates that about $600 billion in spending is hidden in the tax code, or nearly 20 percent of the federal budget. Marron writes, “Because tax cuts often sound more appealing to policymakers and voters than spending increases — especially in today’s political climate — the temptation to spend through the tax code is enormous. And the confusion surrounding such spending allows politicians to claim they are saving taxpayers’ money when, in fact, they are really spending it.”

For the most part, these tax preferences are not simply “loopholes” or errors in the tax code. They are spending disguised as tax breaks. As the debate in Washington rages on about how to reduce spending, the billions in spending hidden in the tax code deserve the same close scrutiny as entitlements, defense, and domestic programs.

The oil industry and their political shills in Washington also argue that axing these subsidies would raise the cost of gasoline, but again, economic reality gives lie to their rhetoric. The cost of gas depends primarily on global oil supply and demand (more on gas prices here). While the U.S. sucks up 25 percent of global oil production, we have only 1.5 percent of proven reserves. No matter how much we “drill baby drill,” or how much we stick it to the oil companies, we can’t substantially affect the global supply and therefore price of oil. It is the rising demand in the developing world and the threats to production in unstable countries that determine how much we pay for gasoline here at home.

Subsidies to the gas and oil industry are completely unnecessary and do nothing to relieve pain at the pump, yet they cost American taxpayers billions. The companies don’t need them and we can’t afford them; it’s time to end them.

See also: David Roberts on whether we should end all energy subsidies.

1. People who live in sprawling metropolitan areas, spend more time commuting in their cars; and

2. Measuring traffic congestion without considering the length of the trip is not the best way to go about it. 

Yes, you could have guessed that — a 6-year-old child could have guessed that. But not the U.S. Department of Transportation. An “industry-standard” measures for traffic congestion used by the Texas Transportation Institute as part of their annual Urban Mobility Report which is used to help allocate multi-billion dollar infrastructure investments that shape our communities for centuries to come. So it’s kind of a big deal that their methodology shows lower “congestion” and “commuter stress” for cities that are sprawling, than they would if they only used peak traffic travel time. Another Big Oil Conspiracy spawned from Texas to keep us chained to our cars? Probably not, but the effect is similar. 

In an alternate methodology, Driven Apart compares the total number of peak traffic hours in a metro area (how much time we actually spend stuck in traffic, rather than the distance-neutral indices used by the Urban Mobility Report, and comes up with very different results). 

Driven Apart shows that the people in Nashville, Oklahoma City, and Birmingham spend the most time in their cars in traffic, with Chicago, New Orleans, and Milwaukee spending the least. This is in contrast to the UMR rankings that have L.A., D.C., and Atlanta as the most congested and Buffalo, Rochester and Cleveland as the least.

CEO’s for Cities calculates that if all metro regions performed as well as the top tier cities in their report, their residents would drive about 40 billion fewer miles per year, and save about $31 billion a year. And that’s not even counting the increase in quality of life we would enjoy by not having to spend the extra 40 hrs a week in traffic.

In essence, the UMR methodology shows how quickly you move, but not whether you’re getting where you’re going. Perhaps if we planned our cities and roadways for maximizing access to destinations rather than as a way to move cars around efficiently, maybe we’d get somewhere.