Dear America,
One of the major political problems in this country is the media, television news in particular. I have complained about this before, but it has come up again, and once again I feel compelled to talk about it. The Keystone pipeline is a network of oil pipelines that run generally from Hardisty, Alberta, Canada down to the Houston storage terminal in Texas. It doesn't run in a straight line, but as of this summer when the last segment running from Port Arthur, Texas to Houston was finished, it is a complete and uninterrupted system. The only part of the Keystone system that is still un-built is the XL segment, which would run from Hardisty to Steele City, Nebraska, a route already covered by phase 1 of the system...completed several years ago and operational ever since. As you probably saw on the news, the issue of the Keystone XL has reemerged in our political discourse by virtue primarily of Bernie Sanders calling Hillary Clinton out on her refusal to take a position on it, which she now has done; both she and Bernie are against it. Of course, the Republicans, McBoehnell--John Boehner, now former Speaker of The House and Mitch McConnell, unfortunately still Majority leader of The Senate--in particular, have seized on it, albeit only briefly, in an issue to resurrect it as an electoral propaganda piece. That is why I am bringing it up again. It is important to get it right when discussing it because some people will vote, at least in part, based on candidates' positions on the XL
Last week on the day when the flap was raised, Lester Holt's evening broadcast on NBC included a piece not just on the controversy but on the details of the pipeline as well. And during that piece they showed an animation of the pipeline's current configuration and what they purported to be the placement of the XL portion of it. To some extent, they got it right. They showed a broken line directly between Hardisty and Steele City, which is really where the XL is intended to run. But then they flashed a red solid line on and off where phase 3 of the pipeline has already been built to link the facilities in Steele City and Cushing, Oklahoma to Port Arthur, Texas, where the last link to Houston was finished this year. That is not the XL pipeline, but many viewers, given the flashing red line, will have assumed that it is, and that segment could be deemed crucial for supplying Canadian crude to our Gulf Coast refineries...at least to the extent that it isn't duplicated by extant pipelines in the area, which it may well be though that doesn't seem terribly important for this discussion. This discussion is about misrepresenting facts that are critical for candidates for the presidency of the United States in such a way as to make their positions on the related issues appear unreasonable. That was the effect of NBC's mistake. Let me point out again that the XL section of the Keystone pipeline runs between terminals in Canada and Steele City, Nebraska...a route already linked by other segments of the Keystone pipeline. All the XL does is increase the volume that can be transported from Canada to Nebraska. It doesn't increase the volume of the rest of the system, which I assume will be the next quest of the petroleum industry. If the XL had linked Hardisty with the terminals and refineries in Illinois, which is where most of what is used in the mid-west and the east is distilled and distributed from, that might have some utility for the United States, but that isn't what it's for. It really can serve only one purpose, which is to bring more crude oil to Gulf Coast refineries, which already export over 40 million gallons of gasoline and 60 million gallons of other petroleum distillates to foreign consumers every day. That is the only legal way to export petroleum from the United States...as distillates. Raw crude cannot be exported. So in the end, this is a symbiosis between TransCanada and American refiners, including Exxon-Mobil, for the sole purpose of increasing profits by transporting Canadian crude across this country--with all the hazards and environmental consequences entailed in doing so--to the facilities of American petroleum industry companies so that they can export more gasoline and other distillates to other countries.
If the people whose votes are going to be influenced by candidates' positions on the XL pipeline knew all this, it might change their party and candidate affiliations and it might not, but at least they would be basing their decisions as to for whom they should vote on reality. But very few voters will go to TransCanada's own website to confirm what I just said, and virtually none went to that website to fact-check NBC and Lester Holt the night they got it wrong. So now, I've tried to do my part to set the record straight, and I talk about this whenever I get the chance. What are you going to do?
Your friend,
Mike
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