Joe Nocera's op-ed in the New York Times yesterday deserves a response and a reiteration of the facts surrounding the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. President Obama rejected the pipeline's permit last month when the GOP, in a political stunt, forced his hand to approve it without even the final route evident.
Let's put the rhetoric aside, and simply focus on the facts. Nocera wants us to believe that approving this pipeline is a matter of national security. He also seems to think that we should all be kicking ourselves because the Canadians are flaunting a tar sands sale trip to China.
Nocera might ask himself how likely this oil is really to go to China from Canada if Keystone XL is not built. He might ask why the oil companies are looking to bring tar sands almost 2000 miles south rather than just send it across British Columbia for export to Asia.
The answer can be found in the deep and fierce opposition to a new tar sands pipeline in Canada -- especially by the First Nations of British Columbia. In fact, those First Nations this week sent letters to President Hu of China and to the Chinese people letting them know their tar sands grievances in advance of Prime Minister Harper's trip this week.
The Keystone XL tar sands pipeline would not make the United States of America safer. Why? It would not make us safer, because the majority of the processed oil was already scheduled for export to foreign countries. That's' right, this Keystone XL pipeline's Canadian tar sands oil would have no positive impact whatsoever on America's national security.
Canada wanted to send the dirtiest oil on the planet through the heart of America so that they could access export routes. And they proposed getting there by bringing the pipeline right over the Ogallala Aquifer, one of America's most important repositories of fresh water. Along the route, Democrats and Republicans alike opposed it.
Nocera never mentioned that a first pipeline just like the proposed Keystone XL, built by the same foreign company, TransCanada, had over 12 spills in the U.S. (30 if you count Canada) in just its first year of operation. Some of those spills have yet to be cleaned up.
It's kind of like last month when Nocera waxed poetic under the headline "BP Makes Amends," extolling the virtues of the oil giant. In it, when referring to the Gulf shoreline, he said, "The beaches are sparkling," when in fact, in the first 10 days of this year some three tons of tar balls have washed up on the beaches of Alabama and Mississippi.
But I digress. Throughout his entire column, he gives not a whiff of mention to a clean energy future or economy or so much as a nod to the viability of any alternative form of energy. Even though it's a fact that clean energy investments can create four times as many jobs as similar investments in fossil fuel energy.
In fact, when it comes to jobs and the Keystone XL pipeline, the State Department estimated it would create only 20 permanent jobs and about 5-6,000 temporary construction jobs... not the hundred thousand jobs proponents of the tar sands pipeline have been citing.
The Keystone XL pipeline doesn't deliver on jobs or national security, it jeopardizes public health and safety and the president was right to reject it. And tar sands are not just "a little dirtier" than traditional crude as Nocera notes. Producing synthetic crude oil from tar sands generates three times the global warming pollution and the extraction process uses vast amounts of energy and water.
I would be remiss if I didn't call attention to Nocera's calling out of "all right-thinking environmentalists" who oppose his other panacea, natural gas. Call me what you will but I don't believe any of us should turn a blind eye to how it's accessed or to the many documented cases of big oil and gas companies blasting unidentified toxic chemicals deep into the earth in people's back yards, eventually poisoning groundwater and ruining lives and communities.
Nocera says that he guesses the president really wanted to approve the Keystone XL pipeline and implies President Obama would have approved it if it weren't an election year. I think the president ruled in the national interest after assessing the real facts in the matter of this ill-conceived Canadian pipeline.
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It has the potential to balance our nations financial circumstances/woes and ultimately pay off our National debt and all we owe to foreign nations. This is our key and it's up to us to take the lead and forge ahead to the future and serve this technology to the rest of the globe as oil producers now serve petroleum; not keep looking in the rear view mirror for the answers.
The answers and solutions don't live in the past, the answers to our concerns and problems rest within the now and our future. Look ahead. We have the potential to create unlimited jobs for every American if we can envision our future without looking in the "manual" constructed from past solutions. Let's change the conversation instead of beating one another with arguments about solutions that are no longer sustainable and that have outlived their usefulness.
I expect it to be back--as those guys never give us trying to ruin mother nature--and i expect that after the elections he'll sign off on it, "with reservations," just like he did indefinite detention.
And I don't want to hear from the "drill, baby, drill" people on this, thank you very much.
In any case we must say no to this project.
It's a pipeline that goes across us. This is like letting a neighbor run their hose through your backyard. There's no advantage to you, you're just doing your friend a favor.
A garden hose? Sure, no problem.
A hose filled with toxic, rotten-egg-stench-sulfur-fumed sludge that your neighbor's wife doesn't want in their yard because it already leaked a dozen times? Hell no.
Sound familiar?
When Canada's oil company laid pipe in North Dakota only 18% of the workers were USA citizens.
Thank you for responding to my comment. What makes you think the number of permanent jobs would be so low? Solyndra was estimated to create many more jobs too and that didn't turn out too well. So if expectations were so high for something like that and yet failed, why can't the opposite be true for something like this?
Also, could you show me where you found that info on North Dakoka where only 18% were American workers? That's a great tidbit of information and I'd love to learn more about it. Thanks @Visionrider, greatly appreciated
Dude! A "fact", really.
Much of this "investment" has resulted in failed companies and NO jobs. And all the taxpayer money came from government. Keystone is funded by private money, that costs the taxpyers NOTHING, we only get jobs, increased GDP from refinning, and gas taxes when the fuel is sold.
WE, the taxpayers and the government make money. And pipelines are the SAFEST way to move oil. Spills are much more likely with truck or rail or ship transport.
You watch too much Fox News, Chuck.
Welcome to the 21'st Century.
I am in favor of Canada developing this resource if they desire to do so. In Canada. Canada should build their own Refinery, on site, process their own raw resource and refine and market themselves.
This year, it all changed. The old farm field that abuts the forest was now a paved parking lot for pipeline service equipment. The old rock & dirt roads running through the forest were now paved.
Service vehicles raced up & down the newly paved roads like they were qualifying for the Pocono 500. And, additional pumping devices not only screeched & clanged, but echoed off the hillsides like fingernails on a chalkboard. It was the anti-outdoorsman experience on steroids.
And, it was apparently steroids that the government lacked when they originally purchased the land for the forest. They never bothered with the subsurface or mineral rights that are still privately owned. The road to hell -paved with good intentions? Well, it's paved now & there's nothing good about it.