In the TED Book Keystone XL: Down the Line, Washington Post reporter Steven Mufson and photographer Michael Williamson travel the entire length of the proposed project and reveal starting realities about its impact on everything from the environment to town economies to people’s lives, in the areas through which it passes.

As debate over the Keystone XL boils over, it felt like the right time to ask Mufson a few questions. Below, his take on this highly controversial proposed project.

Why are Canada and the United States now in a rush to expand oil exporting? 

Canada is already a major oil exporter — in fact, they’re the biggest source of U.S. crude oil imports. Companies producing oil in the tar sands in northern Alberta are looking to double production there — and they need more ways to move that oil out. Currently, the limited options for transporting oil only pile onto the costs of production. The biggest and most natural market is the United States, both because our economy is big and because U.S. refineries on the Gulf of Mexico have been modernized and upgraded to handle low-quality crude oil like that coming out of Alberta. Once the crude oil is refined, it’s easier to sell in the United States or abroad. The United States both exports and imports refined products, though given the size of the U.S. refinery industry and relatively flat U.S. gasoline consumption, the volume of U.S. exports of gasoline and diesel has increased.

You say the pipeline is a Rorschach test of how Americans view energy issues. Can you elaborate?

For four decades, we have thought about oil as a scarce resource. We imported more and more at higher and higher prices and went to distant frontiers, whether onshore or offshore, to find oil and gas. The sheer scale of the oil sands in Alberta has been Exhibit A of those extremes. The Saudi oil minister has often said that prices had to stay above $60 a barrel to keep the Canadian oil sands economically viable. All of a sudden, the trends reversed and a slew of oil prospectors – like the North Dakota fracking pioneer Harold Hamm who is profiled in the book – and energy experts are talking about U.S. energy abundance. Imports have dropped nearly in half. U.S. oil output has climbed over 7 million barrels a day and the International Energy Agency has forecast that U.S. output will surpass Saudi Arabia’s by the mid-2020s. Canadian oil sands would compete for U.S. refinery space with Venezuela, and North Dakota, Louisiana and Texas shale oil has enabled the big refiner Valero to stop importing light, sweet crude oil.

It’s partly a matter of interpretation and partly a matter of outlook. There are the folks who worry about climate and make calculations about booming demand across the developing world. And then there are the optimists and industry people who see more opportunity – which in the case of prospectors and drillers translates into profitable opportunities.

So which is it? Are we energy rich or energy poor? The truth lies somewhere in between. Yes, the United States has surprising new resources at home, and U.S. consumption may have hit a plateau as fuel efficiency rises. This is a big benefit for the U.S. balance of trade and the domestic oil and gas industry. And while U.S. oil independence remains elusive, the Keystone XL pipeline would help make North American oil independence conceivable.

Why are two in ten Americans against the pipeline?

Opposition to the pipeline has three main themes. First, some oppose the pipeline because of climate concerns. The process of extracting oil sands crude – a mixture including low-grade petroleum known as bitumen –gobbles up much more energy than the process of conventional oil drilling. So it emits more greenhouse gases. Second, some people fear pipeline leaks, either near the vast Ogallala Aquifer in the Great Plains or in rivers that must be crossed. And third, some people – many on ranches and farms – oppose the use or threat of eminent domain to force them to sign deals with the pipeline builder and owner, TransCanada.

What are the environmental downsides?

In addition to those environmental issues, the pipeline is being built to provide outlets for oil from the oil sands in Alberta. Half of the oil sands are produced by a process that is akin to strip mining. Trees in Alberta’s vast boreal forest are cut down, wetlands and topsoil are peeled back, and black sands are taken by gigantic dump trucks to facilities that mix the sands with warm water to separate out the useful bitumen. The other half of the oil sands are produced by injecting steam in the ground and sucking up the petroleum. Alberta is vast, but visiting the big mining and drilling sites still makes quite an impression.

The pipeline itself would have no significant environmental impact – unless it leaks. The company has tried to address those concerns by saying it would drill deep below rivers and by making the pipe extra thick in some places. And it has sensors that alert TransCanada’s computer-monitoring center, in Calgary.

Why do some believe that tapping sands oil is ethically better than helping the economies of Saudi Arabia and Venezuela?

One key argument in favor of the pipeline is that it would bring the United States greater energy and national security. Many proponents say the United States would be more secure importing oil from Canada — a democratic, stable ally — than from Venezuela or the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez was no great friend of the United States but much of Venezuela’s crude oil is also low quality, like Alberta’s, and Venezuela has been a major supplier to the U.S. refineries. So it might be more of an ethical issue. Would we rather buy from a democracy, or an Islamic state run by a royal family or from a country run by the heirs of the fiery populist ruler Chavez?

What will happen if the pipeline is rejected by Congress and the President?

Good question. One possibility is that TransCanada might file suit saying that the process was improper. But it is more likely that TransCanada would look to alternatives, most likely a line to Canada’s east coast and eastern markets. In addition, railways would step up efforts to add tank cars and tracks as they have done in North Dakota already. Foes of the pipeline hope rejection of the permit will slow down development of the oil sands, but the State Department’s new environmental impact statement issued in March says the oil sands crude will find one way or another to get to the Gulf Coast refineries.

Tell us a little about the effects of the project on the Native American cultures of the proposed area.

Many Native American tribes, especially in Oklahoma, have no problem with the pipeline. In Oklahoma, formerly called the Indian Territory, people have not been strangers to oil booms. But some Native Americans and their tribal leaders are bothered by the thought that the pipeline might inadvertently disturb ancient burial sites or other sacred grounds.  Indeed the pipeline’s route from Niobrara River in northern Nebraska to northern Oklahoma follows almost exactly the route, or Trail of Tears, that the Ponca Tribe followed when forced to move in the 1800s. In South Dakota, Native American tribes have also been outspoken, saying that the Keystone XL crosses treaty lands. The pipeline would narrowly miss the state’s reservations. But it has unearthed more than a century of mistrust and grievance among Native Americans.

Photo: Bloomberg/Getty

Gaus has contributed an essay to the new TED Book, City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There, an anthology born out of The City 2.0 TED Prize and produced in partnership with The Atlantic Cities. In the essay, he writes about the need for better local food sources in cities and the exciting potential of aquaponics.

Here, we ask him a few questions. 

So, what is aquaponics and why is it good for cities?

Aquaponics is the combination of commercial fish rearing (aquaculture) and cultivation of plants in water (hydroponics). Aquaponics does not require extensive land use or fertile soil to grow plants. This makes it particularly attractive for urban agriculture, where both space and fertile soil are limited. 

You launched your company with the idea that it was time for aquaponics to grow up. What does that mean? 

Growing up means becoming a competitive force in the way food is grown in the city.

Aquaponics and its application in urban agriculture is a relatively new phenomenon. The technology and its commercial scale are still in an early stage of development. In order to provide a meaningful contribution toward food security and global awareness on urban resilience, we need to drive solutions that are robust and scalable.

Why is it so important to find large-scale urban food solutions?

In order to meet the global demand for food by 2050, The Food and Agriculture Association of the United Nations estimates that food production needs to double. While access to new arable land can only increase this by 5 percent — and agricultural intensification and efficiencies are peaking — new technologies and solutions are required to help solve the problem.

Urban agriculture has the potential to transform city-dwellers from “suckers” of natural resources to better-balanced consumers and producers — with local food production and greater resilience. This makes a lot of sense for both the planet and the people; it would have a big impact on the way cities are becoming more self-sustainable.

How do you envision aquaponics taking off in the future?

We are getting a lot of requests from all over the world for our solution. Our goal is to provide the tools, services and the brand for urban farming in the city. I think we need both a bottom-up as well as a top-down approach to achieve scale. Of course, community-based initiatives are important, but enterprise-level activities as well as public and governmental support are also required. Why shouldn’t a large supermarket chain or a large public hospital grow on its own rooftops? We see market-based initiatives or “urban farmers” as true entrepreneurs in their cities. The eco-net of financing, technical support and distribution networks needs to be created as well.

City 2.0 is available for Kindle and Nook, as well as through the iBookstore. Or download the TED Books app for your iPad or iPhone. A subscription costs $4.99 a month, and is an all-you-can-read buffet.

The City 2.0 is an online forum that showcase stories and projects for urban innovation, and also doled out 10 grants for thinkers with great ideas for cities throughout 2012. Here, meet 8 of the winners and hear their fascinating ideas »

Do city people really like to share more? Emily Badger of The Atlantic Cities suggests a new and fascinating phenomenon in urban areas — that city dwellers are moving toward a culture of shared ownership of everything from cars to power tools.

Badger shares this thought in an essay from the new TED Book City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There, an anthology that suggests bold ideas for how we can create thriving cities. Born out of The City 2.0 TED Prize and produced in partnership with The Atlantic Cities, the book features essays from 12 authors, tackling topics ranging from transportation to food to public art.

Yesterday, we heard from City 2.0 essayist Diana Lind on why cities should be highway-free. Today, we asked Emily Badger to tell us more about her vision of sharing within big cities.

In your essay, you suggest that a culture of sharing has arisen in cities because of limitations of physical space. What’s created this culture?

All over the world, the populations of cities are swelling. This is the acceleration of a long-running transition as societies everywhere become less rural and more urban. So the question then becomes: Where do we put all of these people? And how will they live together? Ideally, we need cities to grow in population without expanding at an equal rate in geographic size. We need urbanization without sprawl. And so this means we need to try to accommodate more people within the footprint of existing cities. That means more people living in apartments instead of detached homes. That means using a car-share instead of individually owning cars. That means using public parks instead of private backyards — all simply because there just won’t be enough space in crowded cities for everyone to individually own all of these things.

Is there also an economic reality causing all this sharing?

A lot of people learned during the recession that it was financially unsustainable to have a 4,000-square-foot house and two or three cars. The “sharing economy” sounds like a nice idea for altruistic people willing to give rides in their cars to strangers. But sharing is also fundamentally a way for people to cover car payments or monthly rent bills. I suspect there are a lot of people on Airbnb who wouldn’t be able to afford their homes if they couldn’t make some money each month renting out a spare bedroom.

Sharing isn’t a new idea. Tell us a little about the history of urban sharing and how we drifted away from it.

We have always shared a lot of things, especially in cities. We share books at the library. We share transportation in a subway car. We share washing machines at a laundromat. Cities in many ways are historically a kind of shared commons. But, particularly in the U.S., we started to move away from that mentality after World War II — and a lot of the rest of the world, especially the developing world, has followed our lead. A lot of people moved out of cities for a more spacious, suburban lifestyle that simply didn’t require us to share assets in the same way. Culturally, we came to prize large private homes over apartments, multiple cars over public transit, and personal appliances over laundries. Now that demographic trends are shifting back into cities, though, this story is starting to change.

What are some of the downsides of sharing?

I don’t want to sound like sharing is awesome in every way! Obviously, we give up some comfort and convenience when we don’t individually own things, and there’s a tradeoff there. I live in an apartment, and sometimes I have to listen to my neighbors through our shared walls and ceilings. If you do Zipcar or have a bike-share membership, it is entirely possible that there may not be a car or a bike waiting for you exactly when and where you need it on short notice. Sharing always implies some kind of risk: that you may not be able to get what you need, that you may not like the person you’re dealing with, that someone may damage your power tool while they’re borrowing it. But for a whole variety of reasons — including financial, environmental and physical-space considerations — we know that more and more people are opting to take this risk with a lot of things no one thought anyone would share 20 years ago.

City 2.0 is available for Kindle and Nook, as well as through the iBookstore. Or download the TED Books app for your iPad or iPhone.

The City 2.0 is an online forum that showcase stories and projects for urban innovation, and also doled out 10 grants for thinkers with great ideas for cities throughout 2012. Here, meet 8 of the winners and hear their fascinating ideas »

City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There is a new TED Books anthology that seeks to answer some of the key questions about how to develop thriving cities — tackling everything from issues of sustainability to infrastructure to the happiness of urban dwellers. Born out of The City 2.0, a broad initiative for citizen-powered change that began with the 2012 TED Prize, this collection of essays offers potential answers to the question: How can we ensure that our cities are sustainable, efficient, beautiful and invigorating? Produced in partnership with The Atlantic Cities, the 12 authors featured in this book offer fascinating ideas, from transportation to food to public art.

Over the next three days, we’ll hear from three City 2.0 essay authors. Today, we sat down with Diana Lind, the editor-in-chief and executive director of Next City, to discuss her essay that envisions cities without highways.

Why do highways have a bad effect on cities?

While highways connect cities that are hundreds of miles apart and allow us to move people and goods across this vast country, many highways were built at the height of suburban development. They are not designed to bring people into cities so much as to allow people to drive past them. As a result, these highways often bisect neighborhoods, cut cities off from their waterfronts and obstruct the natural development that occurs along boulevards and streets. The land beside or under urban highways is often underdeveloped, creating no-go zones that are bad for the city’s economy, safety and appearance. Highways carry loud, polluting cars, and research has shown links between road pollution and asthma. The impervious highway surface creates stormwater runoff and heat-island effects, which are bad for a city’s resilience in climate change. And unlike other kinds of property, highways don’t generate tax revenue, preventing dozens of acres from being productively used. Simply put: highways are a blight on livable cities.

I don’t think we should keep investing in highways. In this era of climate change, downtown revitalization and population density, they can no longer be the solution. As cities see their highways become structurally obsolete, it’s a perfect time to start thinking about how to connect cities through other modes of infrastructure.

What are some of the alternatives to highways?

Any plan to replace a highway needs to account for the cars that will be displaced. Ideally, you replace a highway with more transit options so people can take a bus or train instead of a car. In New York, when the city decided not to replace the West Side Highway, it cleverly took federal highway funds and used them towards improving transit. In San Francisco, a former highway was replaced with a trolley line. The footprint of the highway itself might become a boulevard, property for new development, a park or a bike lane. On a larger scale, our national network of highways should be replaced with a better rail network that allows people the option of taking a train between cities rather than having to choose between driving or flying.

You say in your essay that more walkable neighborhoods contribute to lower foreclosure rates. Why would that be?

It’s plain math. Imagine a couple that has to pay for two cars in addition to a mortgage; they’re less likely to be able to handle their monthly bills. Each car costs the average driver nearly $9,000 a year. Compare that with a monthly MetroCard pass in New York City — it’s less than $1,250 a year, and that’s as expensive as public transit gets. If you can bike or walk to take care of your daily needs, life gets even cheaper. The money saved on not owning a car actually helps keep people in their homes.

You also say that there’s a connection between highways and obesity. Share more on that!

It’s really a connection between obesity and driving. Researchers have found that driving and obesity have a shocking 99 percent correlation. The more you drive, the more likely you are to be obese, because you have less time to walk for daily errands and otherwise be active.

What have been some of the benefits of replacing highways in New York and San Francisco?

There have been many. Removing the highways has increased area property values, significantly reduced car traffic along these thoroughfares and reconnected both cities to their waterfronts. Local gems such as San Francisco’s Ferry Building and the Hudson River Park in New York are just two examples of how improving the area instead of improving highways has resulted in deeper investments in the city’s assets.

City 2.0 is available for Kindle and Nook, as well as through the iBookstore. Or download the TED Books app for your iPad or iPhone.

The City 2.0 is an online forum that showcase stories and projects for urban innovation, and also doled out 10 grants for thinkers with great ideas for cities throughout 2012. Here, meet 8 of the winners and hear their fascinating ideas »

At TED2012, Ramirez talked about a crisis in education: The problems of our time require creativity and nonlinear thinking, and in the United States, students simply aren’t being prepared to come up with the solutions we’ll need. Now, in her new TED Book Save Our Science: How to Inspire a New Generation of Scientists, Ramirez shares what she sees as the best way to inspire new learners — a commitment to improving science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education. In the book, Ramirez takes a hard look at the cultural and historical reasons why STEM education has declined in the United States over the last few decades. Her plea: We need to bring it back.

Curious to hear more about what can be done to make STEM fun again, we asked Ramirez a few questions about her new TED Book.

What inspired you to write this book now?

There is a line in the poem On Crime and Punishment by Khalil Gibran that says, “He falls for those ahead of him, who though faster and surer of foot, yet removed not the stumbling stone.”

As a scientist who has walked along this bumpy STEM pipeline, I wanted to leave clues and a map on how to navigate it. Save Our Science is the map. It’s not only for those within the pipeline, but also for the whole STEM ecosystem. Everyone feels helpless in this education crisis. Save Our Science is a manifesto to recharge and empower everyone. In it, I am acting as an on-the-ground Secretary of Education, attempting to help all Americans feel empowered to make change. This book spells out how we — teachers, parents, citizens, politicians — can use all the pieces that are working and arrange them in a way that will make the US a leader in STEM education again. It includes actions that individuals and groups can take to get the education system back on track.

Why is STEM education so vital?

First, most of the jobs of the 21st century will require people to be comfortable with science and math — not only the content and information, but the mindset that comes from these fields, such as trial-and-error and the skill of asking good questions.

Second, all the focus on testing is not allowing children to be children. That is, there are few opportunities for kids to explore something inspired by their curiosity, and few chances to get their hands dirty. Some might say that American childhood is under attack and with it all the key human development steps needed to make whole and healthy adults. STEM is like a training camp for key skills like encouraging curiosity and patience, and making friends with failure.

It has been shown that the ability to self-regulate — in other words, patience — is a better marker for success than IQ. There’s the famous marshmallow experiment, where children are given a marshmallow that they can eat now, or they’d get two if they wait 15 minutes. It was found that those who waited (less than 30% of them) actually did better in school. In this microwave era, STEM teaches children patience; you can’t rush an experiment. For example, try to quickly make rock candy from sugary water. You can’t! It takes time and requires patience. But it is so worth it! Learning to wait is a muscle that is lacking but important for human development. STEM provides human skills and virtues that will make our children successful down the road.

What key changes can we all make to improve STEM education?

Save Our Science suggests action items everyone can do to make STEM more fun and engaging. It could be a shop owner installing a 3D printer; or a mechanic having bike-repair nights in the neighborhood; or restaurants showing the chemistry of cooking. Parents can take stuff apart with their kids and learn together how things work. Show science videos at malls, in movie previews and at the dentist’s office. Of course, policymakers could learn more about what really works from other countries. The bottom line is, if we lather engaging STEM opportunities everywhere, we are going to change the cultural thinking about science.

I’ve seen it in my own town. I was having carpets cleaned in my home for Thanksgiving. The cleaning guy immediately recognized me from my science videos that play on the local cable channel in town. Our conversation moved from chitchat about the weather to an intense discussion of science. He talked about what he learned on the video, and then we started actually coming up with ideas for another video. He emphatically made suggestions. But that is not the point; the point is that he got it. He got that science was for him, and he could demand more, inspired by his curiosity. Science was part of his language now, and we were having a real conversation about real issues. Making science accessible and engaging is the first step to individual ownership of the concepts, and is the first step to making real change in STEM education.

How do you personally make STEM education more fun?

I am a STEM evangelist and try to make it fun in a number of ways. If I am at a cocktail party, I’m that person who will pull out a party trick. In my case, it is a small piece of memory wire that I store my wallet. This material changes its shape when you heat it with a match. If you want to see adults show childlike enthusiasm, this wire does it every time. After I show the wire demo, then I wait. Some people will be hooked and will ask what is going on. I’ll make analogies between atoms to members of a marching band, where each individual makes a small change, but the whole is a pronounced change. You can see this wire in action in this small TED-Ed video here.

As for younger people, at Yale I created a science lecture series for kids called Science Saturdays. Here, children get to learn about science from experts in an age-appropriate but not-dumbed-down way.

For a broader reach, I created a series of short science videos call Material Marvels, which have been seen all over the globe. I try to make science appealing with outlandish demonstrations (that often need a blowtorch), or make silly analogies — like that solar cells are sandwiches of silicon. These videos are playing on local television in my town, and I am surprised by their impact. When I go to the barbershop, gas station, or even at church, occasionally someone will come up to me to say they watched these videos. One woman recently said to me, “Hey, I saw you on TV doing science. I loved it, not because I know you, but because you made it fun. And I am an English major!” That is a huge testimonial to the impact of making science enjoyable and putting it where folks have access to it. People will come if you build it, and bring science to them in a way that is palatable.

In my classroom, I do some of the same outlandish demonstrations, but I also add lots of group discovery. Students learn better from their peers, so I’ll start a lesson and have an in-class assignment that they will do together. This is a less threatening approach for learning and, I’ve been told by my students, is fun.

Also, I’m an author. Right now I’m writing a book about American football through a science lens, called Newton’s Football, for Random House. With my collaborator, Allen St. John, we are using football as a model to describe the hot topics in science like chaos theory, the physics of football helmets, concussions, and other nuggets in a fun, big-think, non-preachy way. I think football fans will like a new way to look at the game, and non-football fans will gain a new point of entry to the game.

All in all, my joy is learning new things and translating what I’ve learned so that other people understand it too. In essence, I am acting as a science conduit and translate science so that it seems relevant to everyone. That is my mission, anyway.

Save Our Science is available for the Kindle and Nook, as well as through the iBookstore. Or download the TED Books app for your iPad or iPhone. A subscription costs $4.99 a month, and is an all-you-can-read buffet.