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Record W2315195020 · doi:10.2118/0215-030-twa

Keystone XL Pipeline: Rhetoric vs. Economics

2015· article· en· W2315195020 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Craig Pirrong

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Way Ahead · 2015
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEnergy
TopicEnergy, Environment, and Transportation Policies
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsKeystone speciesLegislationPoliticsLawPolitical scienceLaw and economicsEconomicsEcology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Tech 101 There are about 180,000 miles of oil pipeline in the United States, but all of this mileage put together has not generated 1% of the controversy as a pipeline that would add a mere 1% to the total— the Keystone XL Pipeline connecting Alberta’s oil sands to refineries in Texas and Louisiana. Since it crosses an international boundary, Keystone requires US State Department approval, which has not been forthcoming under the Obama administration. Keystone has become a cause célèbre on both sides of the political aisle. President Obama has made numerous statements criticizing the pipeline and has vetoed the legislation mandating its approval. Conversely, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had promised to make Keystone the first legislative priority in Congress when he took office. Many arguments have been advanced against Keystone. First and foremost, opposition to the pipeline rests on environmental objections. Environmentalists deem crude oil produced from Canadian oil sands to be uniquely damaging due to its carbon intensity when compared with other types of crude. When the environmental arguments failed to gain considerable traction, opponents shifted to economic arguments. These include assertions that Keystone will not reduce at-the-pump gas prices in the US, and that most Keystone oil will be exported. Unfortunately, these political and environmental arguments have created more heat than light. A straightforward economic analysis of Keystone demonstrates that its benefits will not be as great as its advocates say, but they will be material. The environmental effects are likely modest and outweighed by the economic benefits. The Economics of Keystone The direct economic effect of Keystone is quite straightforward. It would reduce the cost of transporting crude oil from Canada to the US Gulf Coast. Without Keystone, rail is the most economical way to transport the oil to the Gulf refineries. US government reports estimate that rail shipment costs about USD 10/bbl more than transportation via Keystone. This means that the benefits in terms of reduced transportation costs are on the order of USD 8 million/day, which is USD 10/bbl multiplied by the 830,000 BOPD Keystone can transport in lieu of more expensive trains.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.947
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.025
GPT teacher head0.238
Teacher spread0.213 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2015
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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