Alaska's Lesson for Keystone Pipeline Opponents

The Obama administration has delayed a decision on construction of the 1,200-mile Keystone XL pipeline, citing environmental concerns.

But critics of the proposed pipeline should look at the example of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS), which has proven ecologically benign since it was completed 37 years ago.

"The lesson of the Trans-Alaska pipeline is that we can build pipelines in ways that protect the environment while yielding large economic benefits," according to Stephen Moore, chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, and Joel Griffith, a senior research associate at Heritage.

The $5.2 billion Keystone pipeline to bring Canadian oil to U.S. refineries could boost North American energy independence and create 15,000 jobs or more. Yet environmental groups like the Sierra Club warn that it is a "climate disaster in the making."

That's what environmental groups claimed about the 800-mile TAPS beginning in 1969.

The Wilderness Society stated that the Alaska pipeline threatened to do "grave and irreparable damage to the ecology." James Moorman, counsel to the Environmental Defense Fund, warned that "disastrous oil spills" were "inevitable." Friends of the Earth President David Bower claimed we were approaching the "point of no return in a race to oblivion."

In March 1970, the three groups sued to block the pipeline. A court injunction and other legal issues delayed the project until Congress passed the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Authorization Act in November 1973, despite warnings from those like Rep. John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, that it posed an "extreme" hazard to wildlife, Moore and Griffith noted in an article for the Wall Street Journal.

Since its completion, TAPS has delivered more than 17 billion barrels of oil worth more than $1.5 trillion in today's dollars from Alaska's North Slope to the Port of Valdez, and the dire warnings about the pipeline have proved to be inaccurate.

When a magnitude 7.9 earthquake struck Alaska in November 2002, the pipeline did not buckle.

A study in 2002 delivered to the American Society of Civil Engineers found that "the ecosystems affected by the operations of TAPS and associated activity for almost 25 years are healthy."

And a 2011 census showed the Western caribou herd, which pipeline critics predicted would be negatively impacted, numbered about 325,000, four times the pre-pipeline count.

Keystone opponents point to the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, but that was a tanker accident, not a pipeline disaster.

Yet Keystone critics persist. Billionaire climate activist Tom Steyer, a major Democratic contributor, warned President Obama in an open letter earlier this year to reject the Keystone pipeline or face a rebellion from some of his most loyal supporters.

But Moore and Griffith added: "The naysayers were wrong 40 years ago, and policy makers should give scant credence to their arguments against Keystone today."