Discussion for article #226192
The American Petroleum Institute found the study to be irrelevant because regardless of the pipeline, the tar sands will be developed and oil will be shipped by railroad if not by pipeline, spokeswoman Sabrina Fang said.
If it’s six of one, half-dozen of another, why bother building the pipeline?
An increase of 121 million tons of carbon dioxide is dwarfed by the 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide the world pumped into the air in 2013. That’s why University of Sussex economist Richard Tol dismissed the calculated Keystone effect as merely a drop in the bucket.
If it’s a drop in the bucket in terms of carbon pollution, it’s also a drop in the bucket in terms of overall energy production/dependency.
Kind of makes me wonder if this is about the economy of the planet or the economy of the few people with paid lobbyists who stand to make a ton of money.
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Keystone is a very dangerous proposal indeed.
I remember being very annoyed when Ed Schultz was endorsing it earlier this year. Very glad he changed his stance on that. Always liked listening to Schultz.
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If the API lobbyists are for it, I’m agin’ it.
Best,
D
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The people on the pro side of not building the pipeline or even going after the tar sands at all, are the ones trying to get us out of this global mess.
The people on the con side are the ones that got us into this mess but absolutely deny it or fail to realize the situation.
Who should we listen to?
It’s like the US debt. A hundred million here, a few billion there, trillions of dollars wars, next thing you know we are talking 17 trillion dollar debt. It added up bits at a time.
Look at carbon dioxide as our global debt. We can’t just keep adding to it, it will take us down some day, we have got to learn our limitations.
Keystone is a disaster that we will choose to not avoid. It’s insanity.
When there’s a pipeline spill that poisons the Ogallala Aquifer, we’re going to look like complete idiots. In the coming decades, the scarce resource is going to be fresh water, not oil.
One thing is for certain - Hillary Clinton is 100% behind the pipeline. Big Surprise.
There are other political problems associated with the Keystone pipeline. The environmental impact report on the project was written by a consulting firm with a longstanding commitment to TransCanada, prompting several U.S. congressmen to call for an investigation into conflicts of interest.
Other sources have reported conflicts of interest between State Department officials and TransCanada, finding an unusual degree of support inside the department for the Keystone pipeline project. Some of these findings are related to people like Paul Elliott, now working at TransCanada. Elliott was a former campaign official with the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, the current Secretary of State who is intimately involved in the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline.
This is what Clinton said about the Keystone XL pipeline in response to a question at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco event:
----> So as I say, we’ve not yet signed off on it. But we are inclined to
do so and we are for several reasons — going back to one of your
original questions — we’re either going to be dependent on dirty oil
from the Gulf or dirty oil from Canada. And until we can get our act
together as a country and figure out that clean, renewable energy is
in both our economic interests and the interests of our planet, I
mean, I don’t think it will come as a surprise to anyone how deeply
disappointed the President and I are about our inability to get the
kind of legislation through the Senate that the United States was
seeking.