{"id":11048,"date":"2015-08-15T06:41:24","date_gmt":"2015-08-15T11:41:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=11048"},"modified":"2015-08-15T06:41:24","modified_gmt":"2015-08-15T11:41:24","slug":"big-oil-in-retreat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=11048","title":{"rendered":"Big Oil in Retreat"},"content":{"rendered":"

Big Oil in Retreat<\/a><\/h3>\n

On July 14, 2011, at\u00a0TomDispatch<\/em>, Bill McKibben\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0that he and a few other \u201cveteran environmentalists\u201d had issued a call for activists to descend on the White House and \u201crisk arrest to demand something simple and concrete from President Obama: that he refuse to grant a license for Keystone XL, a new pipeline from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico that would vastly increase the flow of tar sands oil through the U.S., ensuring that the exploitation of Alberta\u2019s tar sands will only increase.\u201d It must have seemed like a long shot at the time, but McKibben urged the prospective demonstrators on, pointing out that \u201cAlberta\u2019s tar sands are the continent\u2019s biggest carbon bomb,\u201d especially \u201cdirty\u201d to produce and burn in terms of the release of carbon dioxide and so the heating of the planet.<\/p>\n

Just over four years later, the president, whose administration recently\u00a0green-lighted<\/a>\u00a0Shell to do test-drilling in the\u00a0dangerous waters<\/a>\u00a0of the American Arctic,\u00a0opened<\/a>\u00a0the South Atlantic to new energy exploration and drilling earlier this year, and oversaw the expansion of the fracking fields of the American West, has yet to make, or at least announce, a final decision on that pipeline. Can anyone doubt that, if there had been no\u00a0demonstrations<\/a>\u00a0against it, if it hadn\u2019t become a major issue for his \u201cenvironmental base,\u201d the Keystone XL would have been approved without a second thought years ago? Now, it may be too late for a variety of reasons.<\/p>\n

The company that plans to build the pipeline, TransCanada Corporation, already\u00a0fears the worst<\/a>\u00a0— a presidential rejection that indeed may soon be in the cards. After all, we\u2019ve finally hit the \u201clegacy\u201d part of the Obama era. In the case of war, the president oversaw the\u00a0escalation<\/a>\u00a0of the conflict in Afghanistan soon after taking office, sent in the bombers and\u00a0drones<\/a>, and a year ago plunged the country back into its\u00a0third war<\/a>\u00a0in Iraq and first in Syria.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

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Big Oil in Retreat On July 14, 2011, at\u00a0TomDispatch, Bill McKibben\u00a0wrote\u00a0that he and a few other \u201cveteran environmentalists\u201d had issued a call for activists to descend on the White House and \u201crisk arrest to demand something simple and concrete from President Obama: that he refuse to grant a license for Keystone XL, a new pipeline […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1082,2688,7013,468,8103,584,588,1775,600,7413,1350,1358],"class_list":["post-11048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-alberta","tag-big-oil","tag-bill-mckibben","tag-keystone-xl","tag-michael-klare","tag-obama","tag-oil","tag-oil-price-collapse","tag-opec","tag-tomdispatch","tag-transcanada","tag-us-shale"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11048"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11048\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11049,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11048\/revisions\/11049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}