Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper would much rather trade oil for US dollars rather than yaun from a country much more likely to be a competitor than a partner.
The Harper government has pressed Obama to approve the 1,700-mile (2,700-kilometer) pipeline extension, which would stretch through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma before ending up in Texas.
Canada, the pipeline's lead company TransCanada, and Obama's Republican opponents say the $7 billion project would provide the United States with a stable source of energy from an ally and create thousands of jobs.
"I remain optimistic that the project will eventually go ahead because it makes eminent sense," Harper said.
"This project is obviously what's in the best interest not just of the Canadian economy but also of the American economy," he said.
But with the 2012 election around the corner Obama can't afford to piss off the environmentalists who would rather we all stop using oil and all fossil fuels. They say they are concerned with contamination of aquifers in Nebraska and that burning tar sands oil will release more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Guess they'd rather see the oil shipped via tanker over the Pacific (nope, no chance of spills there!) to be refined/burned in China. I'm sure the Chinese equivalent of the EPA has even stricter monitoring regulations than the USEPA so all those nasty, dirty pollutants and greenhouse gases will be scrubbed from the smokestacks of the Chinese factories.
Representatives of the Sierra Club were super pleased with the delay and are still calling for a complete abandonment of the Keystone XL pipeline project. They and their World Wildlife Federation and Green Peace friends are idiots.
The many thousands of US pipeline workers, refinery workers support personnel, etc.--some say upwards of 20,000--who now will have to wait until at least 2013 to find out whether the pipeline gets built and they get a paycheck for their labors, were not available fro comment.
2 comments:
When you witness the proposed new regs on outdoor wood boilers, you can see that they don't want us to stay warm at all. No fossil fuels, no renewable fuels either.
"...Sierra Club ... and their World Wildlife Federation and Green Peace friends are idiots."
That's an understatement, but I acknowledge your self-restraint. :)
If the secessionist movement here gains any more traction, those same idiots will find themselves without a legal foot to stand on (no U.S. laws to enforce or file suit about, in that case).
Some of us would like to see these things happen, just to see their enviro-weenie heads explode.
Post a Comment