It's not often that a paper in a climate change journal declares United States government scientists wrong about volumes of environmental work they have produced after four years of extensive analysis, but in Nature Climate Change, an economics article has done just that.

It's commonplace to say we need to accept climate science in a climate science journal so this deviation from accepting climate studies is out of the norm. Why the change?

In the world of a la carte environmental science, where the scientization of politics rules, science studies that agree with the positions of wealthy donors are accepted without question, but science studies that do not are undermined.  And these studies fell afoul of fundraising goals because instead of being about CO2 caps, the Obama administration science studies on Keystone XL found - again - that it was safe for the environment. 

Safe is, of course, relative. Are 400 additional miles of modern pipelines under the most rigorous environmental scrutiny in the world unsafe compared to the 20,000 miles of pipeline already there? Sure, but studies had to be done just the same. And they were. Twice, because activists really, really expected the president to overrule science behind the scenes.

Not the pristine paradise we are led to believe, good luck spotting Keystone's 400 in the 20,000 miles of other pipeline already there. There hasn't been this much manufactured pastoral public relations hype since ANWR. Credit: PennWell MAPSearch 

The Keystone XL pipeline only became a political hot button once environmentalists finally heard of it - which was shortly before it was about to be approved.  We have to single out progressives when it comes to Keystone XL because liberal scientists did the study, so it can't be them that is the problem, and not all Democrats agree with progressive demonization of science, just like not all Democrats are anti-vaccine, anti-biology or anti-nuclear energy. It just happens to be that all of those people vote for Democrats so people tend to incorrectly use them interchangeably.

Former Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer is a Democrat, for example, and in 2012 he said of the anti-science progressives against the pipeline, "Ninety per cent of these jackasses that are complaining about the Keystone pipeline in Washington, D.C., one year ago wouldn’t have even known where the Keystone was."

Representing the anti-science side in this case is Peter Erickson, a Senior Scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute in Seattle. At progressive Seattle think tanks, being a senior scientist means having a B.A. in geology and then working as an environmental activist. If a BA in geology were undermining climate studies, he would be dismissed, but in a write-up about the paper, Gene Russo at Nature engages in a delightful bit of false equivalence and displays  Erickson's credentials prominently in letting him declare all those scientists wrong. 

It may be confusing for environmentalists who want to know which progressive positions on science they should be for and which they should be against. That is understandable because the President is both for and against Keystone XL. As recounted in Science Left Behind, he was for it, former Energy Secretary Steven Chu said, but then the President was against it. Then he ordered another study because he said he didn't trust his own scientists the first time and then he postponed a decision again and blamed Republicans for that, then he said he would fast-track an extension to it, even though he hadn't approved the actual pipeline to be an extension to - he even agreed to fast-track his Extension From Nowhere over Native American burial grounds.

The progressive group in Seattle wastes little time on science or even environmental issues, despite the letter being in a journal devoted to climate science, they instead write on economics and say that the government is going to end up costing the planet more by not importing oil on giant tankers from terrorist-funding dictators with no environmental oversight.

So if you are wondering how a paper that did no actual research and admits it did not even see any State Department models and therefore concedes that their analysis cannot make an actual prediction still merited a definitive headline like "Pipeline emissions up to four times worse than predicted" in a Nature publication, well, you will never get a job in science journalism or at a progressive Seattle activist group asking questions like that.

Citation: Peter Erickson, Michael Lazarus, 'Impact of the Keystone XL pipeline on global oil markets and greenhouse gas emissions', Nature Climate Change, August 10 2014, DOI: 10.1038/nclimate2335