As numerous cynics expected, the Obama administration is giving every sign that it will choose to support the Keystone XL pipeline, even if it means the end to the climate as we know it.
“It’s not perfect, but it’s a trade off,” [Secretary of Energy Steven] Chu said.
Meanwhile, it's curious that the most passionate voice in opposition to the pipeline in this nation's most influential newspaper…comes from food columnist Mark Bittman.
Sacrificing the environment for profits didn’t stop with [George] Bush, and it doesn’t stop with genetically modified organisms. Take, for example, the Keystone XL pipeline extension. XL is right: the 36-inch-wide pipeline, which will stretch from the Alberta tar sands across the Great Plains to the Gulf Coast, will cost $7 billion and run for 1,711 miles — more than twice as long as the Alaska pipeline. It will cross nearly 2,000 rivers, the huge wetlands ecosystem called the Nebraska Sandhills and the Ogallala aquifer, the country’s biggest underground freshwater supply.
If Keystone is built, we’ll see rising greenhouse gas emissions right away (tar sands production creates three times as many greenhouse gases as does conventional oil), and our increased dependence on fossil fuels will further the likelihood of climate-change disaster. Then there is the disastrous potential of leaks of the non-Wiki-variety. (It’s happened before.)
Proponents say the pipeline will ease gas prices and oil “insecurity.” But domestic drilling has raised, not lowered, oil prices, and as for the insecurity — what we need is to develop wiser ways to use the oil we have.
They say, too, that the pipeline could create 100,000 new jobs. But even the Amalgamated Transit Union and the Transport Workers Union oppose the pipeline, saying, “We need jobs, but not ones based on increasing our reliance on Tar Sands oil.”
Sounds as if union officials have been reading the writer and activist Bill McKibben, who calls the pipeline “a fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the continent,” and NASA scientist Jim Hansen, who says the oil Keystone will deliver “is essentially game over” for the planet.
Game over? No problem, says the State Department, which concluded that the project will have no significant impact on “most resources along the proposed pipeline corridor.” The Sierra Club quickly responded by calling the report “an insult to anyone who expects government to work for the interests of the American people.”
I do expect that, and I am insulted. President Obama can deny Keystone the permit. A truly environmentally friendly president (like the one candidate Obama appeared to be) would be looking for creative ways to leave fossil fuels underground, not extract them. Perhaps he doesn’t “believe in” global warming at this point, like many Republicans?
"Energy security" is what matters, says the Obama administration.
Apparently, according to his press secretary, the continuing protests on Pennsylvania Avenue haven't been a topic of conversation inside the White House.
Q: Is the President aware of the protests?
MR. CARNEY: I haven’t talked to him about it.
Depressing. Unsurprising, perhaps, but depressing.
Kit Stolz 
He is, after all, a coal state politician.
LikeLike