The days when your mater and pater gave you your first 100,000 shares of a company, and you held on to that stock for the rest of your life and uttered a hearty "huzzah!" when the dividends would roll in, are long gone. Which is why we billionaires in the petrochemical industry, as we reach Peak Oil, when offered the choice between securing the long-term well-being of our companies by making the agonizing shift to renewable energy sources, or embarking on a mad, hungry dash for every last barrel of oil that can be squeezed out of the most remote and inaccessible ends of the planet, it was a no-brainer: We're putting our chips on the Alberta tar sands, baby!
But the only way to make all that sand and clay-soaked bitumen that takes four times as much energy to extract worth our while is to pump it to our refineries in Texas so we can sell it on the world market. That's where the Keystone Pipeline comes in. Our flurry of fat campaign contributions has already bought us much of the political good will we need for the project to move forward: last Wednesday, the Nebraska legislature voted to let the governor there approve the project, determine the route and use eminent domain to wrest the right of way from less-than-enthusiastic ranchers and farmers.
But before we can move forward full-bore on this, we need to neutralize all those environmentalist whiners who have shown an annoying degree of persistence as they protest our every move. And the most effective way to silence them is to win the rest of you over to the positive side of our ledger. We don't want to tout some mythical environmental benefits of extracting oil from these dirty tar sands. Our PR flacks at our Petroleum Institute have done such a fine job confusing you about the reality of climate change, so bringing up the environment might just remind you that there is an environment worthy of even a small part of your attention. And if we push too hard on the idea that this new source of ungodly profits for us will somehow lower the price of the gas you buy, someone's bound to counter that we're not even going to sell the proceeds to Americans -- it's all bound for the world market where the power-hungry Chinese are going to pay top Renminbi for it.
So we're telling you that it's about jobs. You all like jobs, and you're all kind of anxious about keeping, losing or finding them. We've got a nice-looking actor in our ads, posing as one of our engineers assuring you that the Keystone Pipeline "could create over half a million jobs here in the U.S.!" We're running our ads on MSNBC where most of those environmentalist whiners are tuning in. The pipeline "could" do a lot of things. It "could" create over a half a million jobs if it leaks, just trying to clean up the Oglala Aquifer that provides 30 percent of America's water. What it will do though, is allow us to keep minting money for ourselves for the foreseeable future.
Truth be told, we don't have to push that hard to sell all of you on a new source of fuel, however remote or destructive accessing it could be. Witness the impatience that Louisianans mustered after Mr. Obama placed a moratorium on deep-water drilling after the big BP Deepwater Horizon spill destroyed even more of their state's natural beauty a few years ago. The science of climate change has been out there for a long time, and only in the last few years, as we've been charging you absurd prices at the gas pump have you awakened to your hankering for hybrids. You don't really want to change your behavior. And neither do we.
We're like the owners of a bakery that specializes in very sweet, fatty confections, and you're like an obese diabetic teenager. We could urge you to stop killing yourself by stuffing your face with our delectable profiteroles. But where's the profit in that? Or we could stop making sweets and switch over to healthy ingredients that your body actually needs to thrive, but we don't know the first thing about healthy food. We're really good with butter and cream and sugar, and anything we put in our display case that isn't laden with all of these is bound to infuriate when you can't get your sugar fix. So instead, we will continue to assure you that there's nothing wrong with your diet, health and weight and that it's okay to keep sucking down the éclairs. Yes, there will be a reckoning. You've got a date in the unforeseeable future with a diabetic coma, but oh, how happy you'll be in the meantime.
We're not just selling you oil. We're selling the comforting illusion that everything's okay. So just keep on driving that SUV and pay no heed to the more and more obvious effects of Climate Change, and we'll keep squeezing oil out of the most remote and inaccessible ends of the earth. Let's keep dreaming together for as long as we can!
Follow Clifford J. Tasner on Twitter: www.twitter.com/TheBillionaires
Enbridge, the company pushing the pipeline, has had hundreds of pipeline spills over the last ten years, including the U.S. mid-west's worst ever spill that had the same tar sands as they want to transport in the new pipeline. They have also had explosions that killed people.
Oil companies have given more than $20 million to Repub politicians for their (cough) "reelection campaign" funds and would like this pipeline put through before the public can examine the facts.
British Columbia, the province next to Alberta, wouldn't let the company pass the pipeline through their province because of the dangers involved.
Import a raw material.
Use the most energy efficient method possible to transport the raw material to the factory.
Upgrade the raw material to a much more valuable good suitable for direct consumption by consumers.
Sell this consumer good both domestically and on the global market. Use the most energy efficient transportation methods available to deliver the consumer good.
Sounds reasonable to me.
Now, for some reason, when the raw matieral is bitumen, the import transportation method is a pipeline, the factory is a refinery, the consumer good is diesel, gasoline and propane, and the delivery method for the consumer good is more pipelines (for domestic consumption) and supertankers (for export) .... then, then, then, .... the whole thing stops being a sensible economic plan and instead becomes an insidious plot hatched by evil billionaires!?
Nope. It's still a good plan. That's why the pipeline will be built.
Thanks for playing though .... now find a new "emergency" to scream about.
Just because something can be marketed, manufactured and sold doesn't mean that it _should_.
I think the expensive and dirty oil should be developed but not to simply maintain, "business as usual"
The only real emergency I see is the number of people with their heads in the sand when it comes to the warnings of science.
Huh various people!? Yeah that's a tough standard.
Look, the population as a whole supports KXL. I laid out the reasons why. The reasons make sense.
Thanks for playing, this game is over. Pipeline is getting built!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pipeline_accidents#United_States
Wrong, the responsible thing to do is to try to find alternative sources of energy!
As far as the potential for harm from the land-line, the belief that the aquifer could be damaged is completely and utterly false. Even at its closes point, the Midwest aquifers are still over 10 feet below topsoil. Since oil (especially bitumen) is so think and viscous, even a large spill would not 'sink' into the ground and contaminate the groundwater. In fact bitumen is anywhere from 50 to 2000 time more viscous than water. This property stalls oil from moving easily through the ground, thus nulifies any chance it could reach groundwater:
http://www.research-equipment.com/viscosity%20chart.html
Hell for years oil was placed in earth seepage pools before being transported and no damage was done to aquifers. these were literally lakes of exposed crude oil (Texas intermediate - which is LES viscous than the oil from Alberta) in unlined dry bed pools in places that have delicate aquifers (TX, OK, CA, PA) and not a single water system was contaminated
I estimate humanity has until around 2050 before the collapse and the start of the self-inflicted dieback of Homo sapiens.
Can a car or a tank of gas release oxygen, govern the atmosphere, naturally regulate and moderate the climate, naturally sequester Earth's heat trapping gases, provide the nitrogen cycle and the entirety of Earth's biogeochemistry, create fresh water, create and renew a life sustaining, living soil and create the very life zone of the Earth, her biosphere? I have provided a mere handful of ecosystems "life-supporting services", including man's protection and safety from human disease pathogens that cause epidemics, released when man kills ecosystems.
Even the dumbest of birds is not so stupid as to kill his only nest and all the reasons he breathes. The problem is, man cannot see what is a living, life giving Earth and what is dead as Mars planet. Man exists only because of the Earth and the Earth is only life giving and sustaining because of her natural ecosystems, and ecosystems are only as life giving as their biodiversity, or native plants and animals, exactly what this pipeline will devour.
President Obama HAS pushed to expedite the lower half of KXL.
President Obama WILL approve the Northern section of KXL in the upcoming months.
Canada WILL continue to produce the oil tar sands regardless of what the U.S. does or doesn't do.
KXL WILL produce long lasting jobs past the construction of the pipeline.
Exporting products is, has and always will be important to our nations economy and GDP.
American oil companies are owned (Through investments) by over 100 million U.S. households with a median income of $68K per year.
I really wish we could just send all the people who think we can rape and pillage the Earth of her resources to their own planet that they can willingly destroy for themselves and their future generations.
It's true because I saw it on Fox News.
Jobs for Canadian workers who would build the pipeline!
Jobs for the Chinese factories that will fabricate the parts!
Jobs for the foreign Supertankers who will take that much needed oil to other countries!
Who says our beloved Congress isn't interested in creating jobs?
There are a lot of American union workers and a huge steel plant in Arkansas that are waiting for this thing to get going and wondering what the heck you are talking about.
If they are wondering what the heck I'm talking about perhaps they should spend a few minutes doing some research on the subject. For some time now, I've learned that it is wise, if you really care about a subject, to do research, using legitimate and independent sources, on any claim made by a Republican politician. Particularly about economics and social welfare.
India.
http://www.politifact.com/georgia/statements/2012/apr/11/johnny-isakson/isakson-keystone-pipeline-employ-20000/