Decisions are trade offs. The cost of resources will become more scarce here. Which means the poor will pay more for their fuel prices. If you believe that no one will be injured, you are looking at level one impacts. Any decision needs to be looked at as a trade off.
Russia, China, India, and Iran must be so happy with the ways we shoot ourselves in the arm. Fracking moved us closer to getting away from the Middle East, but the pipeline cancellation, the fracking fights, and the anti-nuke efforts is forcing us to get closer to them.
Pipeline spills affect drinking water and ecology for US citizens. Fracking has externalities that again, can directly hurt our populace and ecosystems we live adjacent to. Nuclear is just hard to do right, and I for one am glad we are careful with where/when we deploy it.
I disagree with this framing that "we shoot ourselves in the arm." As a US citizen I think a better way to think of it is that we insist on proceeding with caution when it comes to diversifying our energy supply, and while in the short term we do have a dependence on foreign fossil fuels, there are certainly many efforts being made to reduce that. And many of these efforts don't involve looking for more non-renewable oil.
If you think of our energy supply as a long-running software service that can't go down, replacing foreign oil with fracking+local pipelines is like replacing old short term dependencies on new short-term dependencies that we pay maintenance cost on. Negative externalities must be factored into those cost decisions. Similarly nuclear is like building a very complex internal service that, if done right, will pay huge dividends, but if done wrong, can be quite catastrophic and expensive.
> As a US citizen I think a better way to think of it is that we insist on proceeding with caution
As others have pointed out, this isn't going to stop the oil from being pumped, as it is still economical (though less so, and dirtier) to move by train.
The keystone pipeline project has been thoroughly studied. All we have done is make sure that the Canadian oil field externalities are now even higher.
It is not at all unfair to call it foolishness rather than caution.
Caution in the case of Keystone XL is about potential spills, not the actual pumping of the oil. It's okay that oil is being pumped there, if the economic engine so demands. It's good that it's being transported by rail, because it's less likely to create an (additional) environmental catastrophe.
You might say it's dirtier to move the oil by train, I'd say it's responsible and a price worth paying to protect sensitive ecologies from inevitable pipeline leaks. You say externalities are higher, I say your worst case summed externalities are lower.
Surely the many efforts being made to reduce dependence on foreign fossil fuels all fall into the bucket of nuclear, fracking and small amounts of windmills/solar, but those can't make up the difference any time soon due to intermittency alone. So you seem to be saying you're against all the ways of reducing dependence on foreign fuels but are sure that dependency will be reduced.
> So you seem to be saying you're against all the ways of reducing dependence on foreign fuels but are sure that dependency will be reduced.
First of all, if foreign fossil fuels are a dependence, and we are striving to remove that dependence, it is worth considering what our new dependence will be on. Is it going to be on local fossil fuels, extracted at great cost to our own quality of life? I'd hope not. The global economy is already interconnected as hell, we don't need to be in such a rush that we make a bad decision rewiring our supply chains. We should implement a superior replacement first, and we're definitely in the R&D phase of that.
Secondly, I'm certainly not against all ways of reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and I resent that you present it as a binary. Fracking and nuclear are cool technologies, but it's pretty damn important to scrutinize how and when they're being deployed. Slow is good in this case. I'm very against using "oh no we're dependent on foreign fossil fuels" as a rallying cry to avoid environmental due diligence and to ignore all the negative environmental externalities that occur from the realities of dirty energy. Like, building a long oil pipeline is not externality free. The physics of such an endeavor make it so that spills are basically unavoidable, and often difficult to find before damage is done to the long term health of ecosystems and humans.
In terms of "how will we remove our dirty energy dependence" at large, I think it's fair that nobody has a real answer yet. The problem is not "the US depends on dirty foreign fossil fuels" -- the problem is that "everyone depends on dirty fossil fuels." Most countries understand at some level that they need to fix this.
My money is on a combination of fixing the issues that prevent renewables (including wind/solar/geothermal) from making up the better part of our energy budget (and sure intermittency/storage is part of that story, though if you're that aware you must know that tons of innovation is happening in this space too right), and renewable fuels (hydrogen, ethanol, etc).
For just rearranging the US energy dependence graph there are potential solutions to be had that are cleaner than fracking like leaning harder on natural gas which is relatively plentiful here. It seems likely that we could do more nuclear, but when you get into the weeds of suitable nuclear sites the story isn't as optimistic as you might naively think. And again, nuclear is not as clean as folks might imagine.
In general I think it's dangerous to look at the picture and be like "okay looks like X, Y, and Z are the only solutions" ignoring the timescale over which you have to solve the problem, the metric by which you measure the gravity of the problem, the total cost of potential solutions including all enumerable externalities, and potential / ongoing technological advancements.
Russia, China, India, and Iran must be so happy with the ways we shoot ourselves in the arm. Fracking moved us closer to getting away from the Middle East, but the pipeline cancellation, the fracking fights, and the anti-nuke efforts is forcing us to get closer to them.