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."

Comments

Re:fighting carbon pollution?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Political bullshit that has nothing to do with

[fermion]

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.