Dissecting the anti-Keystone nonsense:
So what is going on here? Rich liberals hire kids–recent college graduates, or maybe college or high school students–to produce idiotic “research reports” that can be dismantled by anyone familiar with arithmetic, let alone the oil and gas industry, of which these kids obviously know nothing at all. The claims these reports make are completely divorced from reality, but liberals don’t seem to care. The Huffington Post headlines: “Keystone XL Pipeline Could Yield $100 Billion For Koch Brothers.” PolicyMic: “Actually, You Probably WILL Guess Who Stands to Make $100 Billion Off the Keystone XL Pipeline.” TruthDig: “Koch Brothers Stand to Make $100 Billion From Keystone Pipeline.” And, of course, the Kos Kidz are all over it.
Imbecility.
Guess who does stand to lose a lot of money if keystone is built: the guy who owns a lot of railroad tanker cars, Obama donor Warren Buffet.
The environmentalists have a saying, “Think globally, act locally.” If only they put that saying in practice. Regardless of whether the Keystone pipeline is built in the US, Canada is going to sell that oil. It’s foolish to think otherwise. If they don’t sell it to the US, they’ll sell it to other countries like China. Which country is more likely to have environmental controls in place to reduce the pollution produced by burning that oil, the US or China? If we think globally, using the oil in the US is going to produce less global pollution than using it in China. Likewise, domestic oil production has to follow US environmental laws. Is more or less global pollution produced by drilling for oil in the US or countries like Venezula or in the Middle East?
You can hope for all the windmills, solar panels and unicorn fart power you want, but you can’t power an airliner, heavy truck or most other vehicles with electricity. You need oil based products, now and for the foreseeable future. The country isn’t going to stop just because you want it to. People aren’t going to willingly swelter in the summer or freeze in the winter to make you feel good about yourself.
Well, it wouldn’t be the first time rational thought failed to rear its head in the environmentalist community. After all these are the same people who think setting Hummers on fire and covering millions of square miles with windmills are good for the environment.
You can’t produce plastics or pharmaceuticals or fertilizers without it, either. People in general have a very blinkered view of just how ubiquitous oil and oil based products are in our society.