Dear America,
This fixation on the Keystone XL pipeline mystifies me. I guess for the Republicans it is natural since the oil business wants it, but for everyone else, there is really nothing to commend it to us as a nation. If you start with the fundamentals of the oil industry it becomes clear almost immediately that outside of the creation of, at best, thirty or forty thousand temporary jobs building it for about two years, and possibly as few as only 2,000, it has no function but to add to pollution of the environment and raise oil company profits. It will not increase the American oil supply or reduce the cost of gasoline, though that erroneous presumption on the part of the public at large is what the Republicans and the oil industries in Canada and the United States are relying on.
The first fact necessary for reaching a sound conclusion on the pipeline is that it is illegal to export oil from the United States. So, none of the oil itself will leave the country as oil per se. That much of what the president of TransCanada Corporation said was true, though it was a prevarication since it won't be staying here either. That is because it isn't illegal to export gasoline and other refined fuels, which we already do to the tune of over a hundred twenty million gallons per day from the refineries on the Gulf Coast. Thus, what TransCanada's oil sands oil will provide is more petroleum for refining into gasoline and export, not more gasoline for us, and refining is a dirty business itself. Then there is the fact that we already import more oil from Canada than we do from any other country, so the pipelines necessary for consuming the current imports are already sufficient. So, why do we need the Keystone XL if the oil is just going to be refined and exported; why can't they do it in Canada? The oil sands from which that particular crude oil will come are in Alberta, Canada, half the distance from the ocean as the gulf coast is from Alberta. It would be safer and more direct to build a refinery in British Columbia, the Canadian province that lays between Alberta and the Pacific, so that the countries of the pacific rim could be supplied, and with only half the transport across land and with half the ocean transport as well. Of course then, American oil companies would be cut out of the profit except for the extent to which they have interests in Canadian enterprises. So, outside of a few temporary jobs that would put us right back where we are now in terms of unemployment in two years, what's in it for us except more pollution and higher corporate oil company profits?
Well, I know what's in it for the Republicans. They have been trying to hang this thing around President Obama's neck since it was proposed a couple of years ago. And that's an effort that pays Republican dividends, as it did during the recent elections, because President Obama doesn't explain anything to anyone, and thus all these factors that are inimical to the pipeline will never come to light for most people because he won't make the essential effort to point them out. And for the most part, no one else has a sufficient platform from which to do so without so much conservative static that the American people won't hear and understand, which is now important. On Tuesday the bill, having been passed in the conservative House, was defeated in The Senate by a vote of 59-41. It was democratically passed, but the Republicans were hoist by their own petard as the vote was a failure to pass the cloture motion that every important bill goes through now instead of a straight up or down vote. The Keystone XL pipeline was killed in The Senate by a filibuster, and that seems like just deserts for the Republicans, but the word still didn't get out as to why Keystone is a bad idea. However, I did hear sound bites on NPR from two senators that made the point. The independent senator from Maine, Angus King, was especially persuasive in that he is a genuine independent in his thinking, which he made clear during the entire interview, but when it came to the Keystone pipeline he said the same things that Senator Ed Markey from Massachusetts said: there's nothing in it for us. While Markey pointed out that the oil flowing through the pipeline would be sold abroad--though he didn't mention the fact that it would have to be refined in Texas and Louisiana refineries first--King said it all more tersely, and thus more effectively. He also said that the oil would be refined into fuels and exported and that he didn't see how this country would benefit, but then he hung a label on it that, if he is smart, President Obama will use. He said that America was just "a weigh station" on the pipeline project, and that is it in a nutshell. Of course, the American people love nutshells; that's why the bills that run through congress all have names that include words like "American" and "patriot" in them. So, if President Obama gets on television during prime time the next time John Boehner pules the Republican Party line to the effect that the project means thousands of jobs for the American people, and he hangs the "weigh station" label on the project--if he points out that the number of jobs involved is anything between the 42,000 the Republicans claim and the 2,000 claimed elsewhere, all of either total being for only the two years during which the pipeline is being built--the Keystone XL pipeline might turn out to be the albatross hanging around the Republicans' neck instead of the Democrats'. But as I've said before, what are the odds.
In the final analysis, the pipeline goes hand in hand with the rest of the Republican strategy, which oddly enough follows the Obama model: explain nothing. But there is an effective response to be made, and it involves communication with the mass of American voters. The Republicans are focusing on the notion that President Obama is poisoning the relationship between The White House and Congress, which will in turn result in nothing being passable in Congress. But that translates to, "if you make us mad, we won't do anything for the country," and the Democrats, President Obama in particular, must do the translating for the American people. That's how the debacle of the 2014 election will be reversed...by making it clear that the Republicans have but one objective and that is thwarting President Obama and the Democrats, and that they will do it, and have been doing it, by denying the American people what they need and claiming that it is someone else's fault. It will be interesting to see what happens in terms of politicians' public standing in consequence of the defeat of the Keystone pipeline because the debate over it is what all of the issues come down to politically: the facts. And since the Democrats got 'em this time, they should be flaunting them.
Your friend,
Mike
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