Junk Science Week: Keystone’s $10-million beetle mania.

When government-promoted biodiversity crawls under the door, cost-benefit analysis – not to mention common sense -- seems to fly out the window. One startling recent example is a beetle capture and relocation programme being forced on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline at a cost of close to $100,000 a beetle. More, presumably, if the requisite number of beetles fail to come to their own farewell party.

Biodiversity is one of those concepts that seems unarguably “good,” but, like its co-conspirators, sustainability and corporate social responsibility, its very breadth and vagueness makes it a happy anti-hunting ground for those who oppose development, seek to bring the corporate sector to heel, or simply like scaring schoolchildren. It has been used as the basis for a $3.6 billion blackmail attempt by the government of Ecuador, and appears seven times in the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement, which has collapsed in acrimony and lawsuits.

Keystone XL, which proposes to take 830,000 barrels per day of diluted bitumen from the Alberta oil sands to the refineries of the Gulf Coast, has been subjected to unprecedented analysis. Its route has already been moved once in order to minimize ecosystem risks to the Sand Hills area of Nebraska. Now, as part of its own mammoth environmental review, the U. S . Fish and Wildlife Service, USFWS, has insisted that the project’s sponsor, TransCanada Corp., relocate American Burying Beetles (ABB) from a Nebraska section of the proposed pipeline, which awaits Presidential approval in the face of fierce opposition from environmental groups.

The burying beetle is indeed custom made for Prime Time-lapse Nature TV. It recycles birds and small animals by burrowing underneath their bodies, covering them up, then rearing its young on the subterranean carcasses.

TransCanada has been given elaborate instructions on how to trap the black and orange spotted insect using thawed-out pre-frozen laboratory rats. The trapping process involves building little ramps to buried plastic drums, from which the dead rats are raising a stink. From there the beetles are to be moved, after being marked, to a safe location, kind of like witness protection. TransCanada is also required to remove animal carcasses from the construction site, lest some beetles get homesick and wander back into the killing fields.

All pipeline workers in areas of ABB habitat will have to be educated about the beetle, and refrain from bringing dogs and cats onsite (do people bring cats to work?). The company must produce “a full color Endangered Species Card with a picture of the ABB” along with comprehensive information. Other provisions include the shielding of artificial pipeline-related lighting. All beetle injuries or deaths must be reported.

The company estimates that it will successfully relocate 119 beetles. The total cost of the

programme is around $10 million. That works out to the aforementioned jaw-dropping $100,000 a pop.

The ABB is already subject to several well-financed and meticulously monitored recovery programmes, and is now present in eight states, so while its numbers are in secular decline due to such factors as habitat loss, it is not close to extinction. Ironically, one of the reasons for loss of habitat is the conversion of land to grain farming to make ethanol to fight climate change, from which the beetle is also inevitably declared to be under threat.

It has been calculated that ethanol production in fact leads to increased emissions of carbon dioxide, as well as raising grain prices for poor people. Now we can add another victim, one with six legs. Ethanol is, however, great for farm votes.

Without wishing to be castigated for insensitively courting “biotic holocaust,” one can’t help wondering if the relocation funds might not have been better used elsewhere. Aren’t there quite a few people in America who could benefit from a $100,000 relocation? Significantly, Fish and Wildlife has, in recent years, diluted its cost-benefit calculations to ignore inconveniences such as private property, or, apparently, any trace of perspective. That biodiversity is effectively a stick with which to beat back development is obvious from a statement released in 2011 by the Center for Biological Diversity, which referred to oil sands oil as “widely considered the dirtiest on the planet,” and to the pipeline as “an environmental disaster in the making.” Shortly afterwards, the State Department issued a report noting that the pipeline would have “limited adverse environment-

U.S. Wildlife service forces pipeline’s builder to spend $10-million to save 120 Nebraska beetles

al impacts.”

The USFWS – which is part of the Department of the Interior -- has demonstrated a clear bias towards radical environmentalists via a manoeuvre known as “sue and settle.” NGOs that are cosy with the administration are encouraged to ring suit, thus “forcing” it to make a deal that it wanted anyway. Significantly, the biggest such deal was with a group including the aforementioned Center for Biological Diversity, under which Fish and Wildlife claimed it had to take legal action on some 750 species. The immediate result was to restrict development on millions of acres of private property, thus threatening to shut down oil and gas activity and grazing operations.

The burying beetle may not be the end of Keystone XL’s regulatory travails, which are primarily based on junk claims about its impact on the climate. The junkiest was that of ex NASA scientist and global warming maven James Hansen, who said that the line’s construction would mean “game over” for the planet. Assessing the line’s planetary impact is based on the notion that carbon dioxide emissions have a calculable “social cost.” Recently, the Obama administration quietly hoisted that figure. I plan to deal with that junk calculation later in the week.