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Here’s Why Keystone XL Is the Wrong Choice for Our Nation
Here’s Why Keystone XL Is the Wrong Choice for Our Nation
The new Republican majority in Congress wants to force approval of the Keystone XL pipeline for dirty tar sands oil. President Obama announced he will veto bills that bypass the official review of Keystone XL.
There are plenty of reasons to block these bills and this pipeline.
Keystone XL would carry the dirtiest oil on the planet from Canada through the American heartland. The vast majority of it would be shipped overseas, while people here at home cope with the threat of contaminated water and difficult-to-clean-up oil spills.
Polluters are fighting hard to get Keystone approved. The oil and gas industry pumped $53.1 million into last year’s congressional campaigns–87 percent of which went to Republican candidates. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell raked in$608,000 from the industry for his 2014 campaign, and now he is putting Keystone XL at the heart of his big polluter agenda.
But this isn’t just a battle over industry influence. This is a choice about the kind of nation we want to live in.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
In 2014, Canada Lost Its Reputation as a Environmentally Friendly Liberal Wonderland | VICE | United States
A recent column in the Canadian Press by Alexander Panetta examined the changing reputation of Canada to our lovely American friends. His central thesis is that Canada, once known as a liberal haven thanks to its free health care and dank BC bud, is now being regarded as a conservative stronghold where corporate tax breaks make running Burger King easier and where oil exports are on the rise. But for others, Canada’s lefty image has taken a hit because of the way the government has taken to treating the environment and the indigenous populations.
The Keystone XL pipeline, as Panetta notes, has obviously opened up a major rift in the United States between environmentalists and business-friendly conservatives—Panetta cites a Montreal-based firm called Influence Communication that found the Keystone pipeline was the most talked about Canadian story in the American news media this year.
The Wall Street Journal reported recently that Republicans are “likely to easily pass… legislation next year” that could get the Keystone pipeline flowing. (Here’s where I should note that the Koch Brothers, who heavily finance Republican campaigns, are the biggest foreign leaseholder in the tar sands.) Given that oil prices are likely to remain low “for the indefinite future,” some experts suggest the price of extracting oil from the tar sands isn’t going to be overly profitable for Canada—not that that will quench people’s seemingly inexhaustible thirst for gooey black stuff.
Flashpoint Issue 2015: Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline | Environment News Service
Flashpoint Issue 2015: Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline | Environment News Service.
WASHINGTON, DC, December 29, 2014 (ENS) – A renewed battle over the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline is shaping up for the new year in North America.
The Republicans, who favor the Alberta-Gulf Coast pipeline because of the jobs and energy security they say it will create, will have a majority in both houses of Congress for the first time since TransCanada Corp. filed an application for the pipeline six years ago.
They plan to bring up legislation early in January to force President Barack Obama to sign the required Presidential Permit for the pipeline that declares it to be in the national interest. The Permit is needed because Keystone XL would cross an international border.
The proposed 1,179-mile (1,897 km), 36-inch-diameter pipeline would carry diluted bitumen from Hardisty, Alberta, and extend south to Steele City, Nebraska, where it would join existing pipelines to carry the dilbit to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. The refined product is planned largely for export.
Obama says he is waiting for a lawsuit over the pipeline route in Nebraska to be settled, but has signaled that he views Keystone XL as a threat to international efforts to limit climate change.
Letter from a petro-state | openDemocracy
Letter from a petro-state | openDemocracy.
Over a year ago, a colleague at the University of Waterloo, Thomas Homer-Dixon, penned a compelling opinion piece for the New York Times in which he addressed, from a Canadian perspective, the debate surrounding the future of the planned Keystone XL Pipeline. If built, this pipeline would transport unprocessed, environmentally toxic Alberta tar sands bitumen to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico, Illinois and Oklahoma. Given the fact that Keystone has recently just failed, again, to pass the House, it is worth returning to the question raised by Homer-Dixon: is Canada becoming a ‘petro-state’? For Homer-Dixon, a state could be defined as a petro-state if virtually all of its main features could be ever more narrowly geared to the development of this single sector: non-renewal energy. This narrowing has deleterious implications for innovation, economy and democracy. Let us address each of these in turn.
If we understand basic research in science to be directly related to innovation insofar as many forms of technology and their application stem not from research in applied science per se but from basic research, then in Canada we have seen specifically a drastic diminution in a substantive commitment to technical innovation. Two years ago, Stephen Harper’s Conservative government announced that it would only fund science with determinant applicability, which is to say, those forms of sciences that could be directly marketable. Moreover, it has actively muzzled government scientists and librarians, severely limiting what they can and cannot say in public. For Karl Popper, the “open society” was a society in which there existed a robust culture of “conjecture and refutation” which constituted the very condition for the possibility of scientific innovation. That is, scientific truth-claims are those claims that can stand the open test of evidence-based falsifiability by other scientists and the public at large.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Canadians, Stay Strong Against the TransCanada Pipeline | Ben Gostschall
Canadians, Stay Strong Against the TransCanada Pipeline | Ben Gostschall.
I am first and foremost a rancher. I am now also an anti-pipeline activist.
I was 10 years old when I started my own herd of cattle on my family’s ranch in Nebraska. I learned early on from our 75-year history of ranching about the value of hard work. I learned the value of our land and water that sustains our herd and our family.
You may ask, how does a rancher become an activist?.
I was at a State Department hearing in 2010 when I first saw the names of my friends, family and neighbours on TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline map for Nebraska.
The pipeline was proposed to pass right through the Sandhills, a unique and fragile ecosystem that overlies the Ogallala, a critically important aquifer, at a vulnerable shallow recharge zone.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Canadian Oil Likely an Early Item on the Agenda for the New US Congress – The Epoch Times
Canadian Oil Likely an Early Item on the Agenda for the New US Congress – The Epoch Times.
WASHINGTON—Canada’s stalled Keystone XL pipeline project is poised to become one of the first orders of business in the new U.S. Congress, where Tuesday’s Republican romp could end up impacting several cross-border industries.
There are hopes in Ottawa that the midterm results could spur movement on the controversial Canada-U.S. bitumen pipeline, as well as major free-trade negotiations and perhaps even meat-labelling rules that have hurt Canada.
Virtually every Republican asked about post-election plans has already mentioned Keystone XL as a top priority for the next Congress, a development that would be as detested by the environmental movement as it would be celebrated by oil industry supporters.
One of the biggest pipeline-boosters is Mitch McConnell—the next Senate majority leader and, arguably, now the most powerful member of the U.S. Congress.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
