What's Up With Keystone

I don’t understand all the fuss over the Keystone pipeline. It is not as if it is the first pipeline to ever to cross the United States. Right now there are over 2 million miles of pipeline criss-crossing the USA. Shipping oil to Texas refineries is not the problem. The US does that with Bakken oil now. Canada does it via rail.

Some people say we have an existential climate crisis on our hands and we need to reduce our emissions of CO2 so oil from the Alberta oil sands should not be burned. Some have threatened to disrupt the construction of the Keystone pipeline if it is given the go ahead.

Here’s what puzzles me. Oil from the Alberta oil sands is already being shipped via rail, a less safe method of transport when compared to pipeline, and no one is laying across the tracks to try and stop it. The Drama Greens are nowhere to be found. Does this mean that 700,000 barrels a day via pipeline from the Alberta oil sands is bad but 500,000 barrels of oil via rail is not dangerous to the climate?

Or is the hold up nothing more than the need of a POTUS to seem to be doing something about climate change to satisfy his party’s backers. Politicians not only have to cater to the public good they are also under pressure from the special interests brought to their attention by party hacks. Guess who wins?

Is US policy up for sale and Tom Steyer’s promise of $100 million to the Democrats for the November 2014 elections worth more to Obama than the jobs and oil supply that the pipeline would create for people? LIUNA loses and Steyer wins. Perhaps LIUNA should try outbidding Steyer to alter POTUS policy. Neither Obama nor Steyer will prevent the oil from the oil sands moving to market whether that market be in the US, Europe or Asia.

Recently, Canada has approved the Northern Gateway pipeline to its own west coast at Kitimat BC where it would be shipped to Asia. The extant Line 9 pipeline has been approved to deliver oil from Alberta to Ontario and Quebec refineries. Transcanada Pipeline wants to extend their eastern line to the east coast ending in St, John, N.B. Alberta oil will move.

Net CO2 reductions by killing Keystone: nil. And Tom Steyer and Obama ought to know that.

And yet the ‘existential crisis’ motivates no one to lie down on the tracks.

As blogger Instapundit has pointed out: When people who tell me there is a crisis start acting like there is a crisis I might believe there is a crisis.

The behaviour of rich elite Drama Greens announces what they really think of the seriousness of climate change. It is just weather folks. Same as we have always had. It cycles. Warm now, cool later. The climate changes continuously. And if there is going to be another ice age there is little that we can do about it except move. Tell us something we don’t know.

For most of the last 500 million years life has survived and evolved with levels of CO2 in the air that far exceed that which we currently enjoy. That fact alone ought to reassure you that a runaway global warming is someone’s scare tactic and has no basis in reality or it would have happened already and we wouldn’t be here to fret over it.