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Obama Rejects Keystone XL Pipeline (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Keystone XL pipeline controversy is finally coming to a close. On Friday, President Obama denied a construction permit for the pipeline, ending a seven-year political fight. Obama said, "America's now a global leader when it comes to taking serious action to fight climate change. And frankly, approving this project would have undercut that global leadership. And that's the biggest risk we face — not acting." Secretary of State John Kerry added, "The reality is that this decision could not be made solely on the numbers — jobs that would be created, dirty fuel that would be transported here, or carbon pollution that would ultimately be unleashed. The United States cannot ask other nations to make tough choices to address climate change if we are unwilling to make them ourselves." The decision comes as no surprise to the oil industry, and they've been busily working on other ways to transport the oil. "U.S. imports of oil from Canada hit a record high of 3.4 million barrels a day in August, up from just under 2 million barrels a day in 2008, the year the pipeline was proposed."
Obama denys the permit a few days after transcanada requests to table the permit process (due to falling oil prices) and everyone cheers.
And what happens when that pipeline breaks and makes the water undrinkable and the farmland unusable? Canada and the oil companies made sure they would be exempt from liability so my taxes would go to foot the bill for clean up. Keep it in your backyard, not mine, if you want to drink your oil. You are the fucking retard here.
You're confused, if a pipeline breaks they turn the pumps off and fix it. Crude oil, being 100% natural, gets broken down by bacteria that eat it. We already have huge, huge volume of oil and petroleum products going through massive pipe system, look it up.
Blame about 3 Prime Ministers back who decided Canada will no longer build refineries in Canada and rely on sending our oil south.
With the lower cost of oil now it is pretty much approaching too expensive to suck it out of the oilsands in Canada.
You're all wrong and kind of stupid while you're at it.
This pipeline was going to a specific place for a specific reason, and that reason was not to benefit the American people. It is illegal to export US crude oil overseas. It is not illegal to export Canadian crude though. Additionally, Canada doesn't have a lot of the kinds of refineries that can handle that garbage tar sand stuff they dig up because that requires a level of environmental unfriendliness uncommon even for refineries. Of course the US deep south has those because God's will or something.
This pipeline was to terminate in one of those "foreign free trade zones" where companies don't pay taxes on exports. The entire purpose of it was to allow a Canadian company to export crude and/or products refined from that crude overseas through the US, with US citizens bearing the brunt of the environmental cost of dealing with the pipeline and taking the environmental risk processing what even for crude oil is a very dirty raw material. It would not have lowered gas prices in the US because the oil would not have stayed in the US. This was all about using ignorant people to fund a for-profit project essentially for free when all was said and done.
The only thing Obama screwed up is that he let it go on this long. Actually, forget about the environmental issues because nobody's ever going to convince some of you that it's ever a problem. Anybody responsibly running a country would have laughed this out of his office the day it came in there simply on economic terms. What kind of person in charge of anything would deliberately take on a bunch of risk for no reward? Cleanups cost money and something like this is pretty much guaranteed to need one at some point. Nobody who has any brains in business would take that on--of course that's exactly what business wanted the US government to do in this case. However, Obama had to pander to the ignorant masses, and unfortunately the facts of this story take longer to relay than the attention span of a toddler, which is what most Americans and especially most conservatives have these days.
"The decision comes as no surprise to the oil industry, and they've been busily working on other ways to transport the oil."
Like, for instance, the railroad that Obama's 1%'er buddy Warren Buffett owns. I'm sure there's no connection there, though.
Oh, and is it cleaner to transport by rail?
http://bigstory.ap.org/article...
Nope.
And is it going to cut carbon emissions? Are we pretending that Canada's just going to leave it in the ground if we don't buy it?
Do you have ESP?
A couple actual facts, and yes, to begin, this has nothing to do with the environment. Over the past few years US crude productions has risen sharply and imports have fallen dramatically. This has caused the price of crude to fall to level where exploration cannot be supported. All the oil companies are cutting back on exploration, some are exiting all together selling their leases. Politics, for instance, had nothing to do with shell pulling out of the arctic. It was that the arctic is still very expensive, and at $40 a barrel, no one is making money. Second, the pipeline is a conservative nightmare on many levels. Primarily it requires the US federal governement to take land from US citizens and give it to a foreign corporations. Many citizen land owners in Texas and other very conservative states have sued for their right to keep their land and not have it annexed to a foreign country, but the conservative courts have said that the landowners do not have the right. Finally there is the simple matter of production. The US has enough crude to refine. The pipeline made some sense when oil was high as there was going to be money to be made so investing in infrastructure made sense. Now, again, with crude at 40, there is no money to be made. However there is money to be lost. Oil refining has a lot of external costs in terms of health care costs, falling property values around the refinery, and yes, environmental destruction. The Canadians know this which is why they are outsourcing refining to their hick neighbors to the south instead of building infrastructure themselves and reaping the rewards of the alleged profit that comes with it.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
You're all wrong and kind of stupid while you're at it.
Yes, you are, we're about to see why in a second...
This pipeline was to terminate in one of those "foreign free trade zones" where companies don't pay taxes on exports.
Neither the US nor Canada tax exports. At all. The reason for the use of the foreign free trade zone is to REDUCE costs to the US Government, saving it money. The law says that if I import goods from a foreign country (say, oil) I pay an import tax on it. When I use that good to create a new good/product and export the resuts, I can claim back the import taxes I paid on the original imported goods. Meaning the US Government must inspect, assess, and then collect payment. And then must process a claim for tax return, process, and pay back out.
By using a foreign free trade zone, product is not taxed when it arrives - and it must be exported abroad. The net tax result is zero - same as in the original case. But CBP doesn't have to process each transaction twice - eliminating the expense/overhead related to a zero-gain transaction.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
When America quits importing oil from the world market, that drives down the demand, which with the current supply on the world market, with more coming, it would drive down prices. This is called the laws of supply and demand. .07/kwh, it would require oil to drop to less than 20/brl to equal that. IOW, electricity is DIRT cheap, compared to oil.
Secondly, the prices of oil in America are actually QUITE low. If you compare brent (roughly international) with WTI (west texas with better grade oil compared to brent), you will find that WTI is 10/brl LESS. Why less? Because our costs are pretty darn low as well as our supply is greater than our demand.
Now, if America quits importing oil, then you can bet that global prices will plummet even further. And with average nighttime electricity prices in America at
And If America is moving quickly to much lower costs electricity and nat gas on our vehicles, china will go ballistic and work hard to drop their imports of oil.
IOW, by focusing on our burning of oil, rather than one location of where it comes from, the dems COULD have caused the world wide drop of CO2 over the next 5 years. This is why dems are SOOO foolish.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I would rather we spent the money on useful construction jobs, like repairing our failing bridges
Since "the money" would have come from the oil industry, there is 0% chance of it being spent on repairing bridges. More likely, it will be spent on pipelines to carry Canadian oil to the Pacific coast, so it can be shipped to China.
This is a victory for political symbolism over reality.
I would rather we spent the money on useful construction jobs, like repairing our failing bridges (http://blogs.wsj.com/experts/2015/06/04/how-a-decaying-infrastructure-hurts-u-s-manufacturing/).
There is no "general fund" which includes both bridge repairs and pipelines. All the government was needed to do here was to approve the construction. It wasn't paying a cent for construction.
If there is no pipeline, there are zero pipeline jobs, and since the money for the pipeline comes 100% from the oil companies, the workers aren't "reassigned" to bridge work. They get to be unemployed.
You know how you get the most jobs? Approve both the pipeline and also ensure your representatives approve infrastructure spending. It's not like there is some sort of limited pool of workers to work on both, right? Then you have 2x the amount of workers working. Of course, it would have been nice to have 50% of them working, but I guess that's not going to happen either. So let's be happy that they can all remain unemployed.
See article 1, section, clause 5 of the US Constitution - "No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State." Thus there are zero export taxes in the US. It's not like it's hard to find the export tax rates for countries. And it's not hard to learn about foreign free trade zones in the US. But hey, I know it's just facts and reality - don't let that stop you from your little, delusional rant! Education is a terrible thing when you have an agenda to push...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!