Just what I have been telling you all along:
Now will he veto the bill if it arrives at his desk?
I will have more on this later.
13 thoughts on “The President On The Keystone XL Pipeline”
Comments are closed.
Just what I have been telling you all along:
Now will he veto the bill if it arrives at his desk?
I will have more on this later.
Comments are closed.
Ed, thanks.
We need folks to understand we’re at war with the climate. There’s no back-up planet. We need all hands on deck, massive federal investment in renewables.
If people can’t make the connection http://www.desmogblog.com/2014/11/14/former-treasury-secretary-timothy-geithner-warburg-tar-sands-exports between the beneficiaries in the political class as pointed out in my prior comment today in the Bernie Sanders thread, http://bloggingblue.com/2014/11/sen-bernie-sanders-hires-top-democratic-strategist-in-advance-of-possible-2016-presidential-run/comment-page-1/#comment-144112, we’re toast. Likely already are.
This shouldn’t be news to anyone, but it is.
In the meantime Enbridge wants to pump tar sands oil right through, almost literally, my back yard.
http://wisconsin.sierraclub.org/issues/Enbridge67.asp
Because we all know from introductory Econ courses that supply never affects price.
Denis, evidently, you don’t own a vehicle. If you did, you’d see that the price of gas has been on a deep slide. The Saudi Royal family has increased production of their easy-to-refine sweet crude. They want to make it unprofitable for the tar sands to produce, so they can jack up prices later on.
The only long term solution is renewables, which are exactly in line with our national security requirements. National security starts with local security. Local security starts with water, food, and energy security. That means sustainability down at the community level.
Long-term, let’s hope George W. Bush was right about hydrogen. “Mike Strizki’s Hydrogen House” http://hydrogenhouseproject.org/hurricane-relief.html
Strizki’s solutions aren’t ready for mainstream yet, but natural gas from RENEWABLE sources (NOT fracking) might be a bridge. Our current natural gas pipelines could be a big battery for RENEWABLE natural gas made from solar and wind.
The Saudis would also like to limit the profitability of the US fracking operations. And there is some sense that they also want to dull the resurgence of Russia by limiting their oil profits,
In the meantime there have been some conservative pundits supporting the idea of the US flooding the world market to lower prices. Which would totally negate the supposed effort to become energy independent while filling the coffers of the oil companies,
Oddly enough, and I’ve written about this before, but gasoline and aviation fuel remain the largest exports from the USA. Go figure.
If the oil market were a free market, your point might be correct. But oil is one of the most manipulated monopolistic markets in the world economy.
Obama is Right!
I thought about this some more, the Keystone really isn’t going to do a lot for the economy, environment, or people who don’t like eminent domain. I think though that Obama should veto this unless the Republicans really give Obama a lot in the same deal just like how Bush was able to get his war spending with a host of democratic priorities such as minimum wage in the last 2 years of his term.
Increase in Minimum Wage, Refinancing of Student Loans, High Speed Rail funds, are some things that could make a compromise happen on this if Republicans actually want it to happen, otherwise, NO!
Most polls have shown significant margins in favor of the pipeline.
Did the pollsters mention the facts?
“The cause? As I’ve saying for the past three years now, it’s the cost. The tar sands project always had a very narrow window of profitability, and now it’s all but slammed shut. Tar sands goop is fairly expensive to extract even in the warm climes of Venezuela (around $75 a barrel), but that’s still less than the cost (between $85 and $110 a barrel) of blasting frozen hunks of it out of the permafrost and mixing it with natural gas just so it can flow in a pipeline to refineries capable of handling it. With West Texas Intermediate crude oil trading at less than $77 a barrel, there’s no way Keystone XL can turn a profit moving tar sands goop.
That’s why the Norwegian firm Statoil recently halted, likely for good, all of its Keystone XL involvements.
Meanwhile, China’s economic slowdown, coupled with a growth in its domestic solar and wind power installations, is causing reduced demand for both oil and coal. In addition, other developing nations are increasingly bypassing the fossil-fuels stage of development and going straight to solar and wind power, which is good news for those of us who’d like to see CO2 levels drop for a change.”
http://firedoglake.com/2014/11/16/late-night-say-bye-bye-keystone-xl/
As long as you don’t want to eat, releasing more green house gasses into the atmosphere is fine.
I don’t know what the pollsters said, but Steve Carlson has been doing a series of posts on here citing the polls on various issues as evidence that Americans are generally progressive.
This one has it at 65-22 with 47% of those polled saying it poses significant environmental risks.
Even among democrats:
“Support for Keystone is highest among Republicans, with 82 percent backing it. But majorities of independents and Democrats also want it approved, at 65 and 51 percent, respectively. Only self-identified liberal Democrats lean against, 47 percent to 36 percent.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/new-post-abc-news-poll-keystone-xl-project-overwhelmingly-favored-by-americans/2014/03/06/d74c58c6-a4a1-11e3-a5fa-55f0c77bf39c_story.html
Dan, Obama signing the Keystone would be a huge mistake, because this is an oil company issue and if we want to create jobs, there are a lot of other ways to do it that benefit the public and are better for the environment in the long run that the Republicans are against because they are Republicans.