About 80 per cent of the emissions attributable to a barrel of oil occur during the downstream combustion of refined fuel in a vehicle – not during the upstream production of crude oil. These downstream emissions occur in equal amounts whether the fuel was made from light or heavy oil, or the crude oil was produced by conventional or unconventional methods. So concentrating on killing a single pipeline merely distracts from the real challenge – to develop the low-carbon fuels, technologies and ubiquitous systems that will be key to moving the world off oil.