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| Landrieu: soft on oil |
After a vote in the right-wing dominated House of Representatives approving the Keystone XL Pipeline project, Senate Democrats voted to block a similar bill in the Senate by one vote. The President still needs to approve any pipeline that crosses a US border. The
bitumen pipeline from Alberta, Canada is an environmental disaster. Approving it would be totally inconsistent with the administration's expressed committment to reducing CO₂ emissions; but the entire oil industry and the Canadian government is pushing hard for approval. The project is considered a major link to even more exportation of bitumen, the most
unclean form of petroleum. Without the high capacity pipelne direct to Gulf coast refineries, strip mining for tar sands--hugely destructive of the boreal forest, toxic, and energy intensive--is barely economic.
Even though the vote may cost the Democrats another Senate seat in oil-soaked Louisiana (
Mary Landrieu, former chair of the Energy Committee, who lobbied for the bill),
US Person thinks the Senate Democrats did the right thing for the country and the world. With gasoline prices projected to go below $3.00/gal
[see chart],
the pipeline is not needed to meet America's energy needs. Nor is it a 'job creator' as its hucksters constantly claim. If built it would create fewer than fifty permanent jobs according to the State Department, which rubber-stamped the pipe's environmental assessment. What the pipeline does do is give Canada access to international oil markets at the expense of the United States' national interest. Climate stabilization will be impossible if tar sands are exploited at the rates planned by Keystone's developers. The UN's environmental program report says the world will face
"severe, widespread and irreversible" effects from climate change unless all greenhouse gas emissons fall to zero by 2100. It's no
joke, Sherlock.
