AS IT STANDS: A Clear Look at the Controversial Keystone XL Pipeline Project

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

A Clear Look at the Controversial Keystone XL Pipeline Project

Good Day World!

It helps to have a good overview of things.

In an age of sound bytes it’s not always easy to understand the entirety of an issue. Regardless of the subject – from immigration to constitutional rights – we often only hear one side of a story.

Sometimes we hear both sides of a story, but the bias on each side still obscures the truth.

Let’s take the Keystone XL Pipeline project as an example:

First and foremost; this controversial project is providing Canada with the ability to pump their oil, send it through our land, down to the Gulf, where it will be sold everywhere else.

Now a look – from every angle – at the proposed project that was approved in the GOP controlled House. The lame duck Senate rejected the pipeline bid today, however.

I suspect it’ll be back though.

There’s misinformation about the project coming from at least three different interest groups.

“The first interest group is a profit-driven energy industry that sometimes seems incapable of telling the truth and regularly subverts representative democracy via legalized political bribery.

The ridiculous job creation and national security claims emanating from energy trade groups, like the American Petroleum Institute and the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, are meant to mislead the public about Keystone. Not to educate.

The struggles this worthwhile project is experiencing are a perfect illustration of the downside of the energy industry's heavy-handed political ways, its penchant for half-truths and sins of omission, its alliance with the Republican Party, and its cavalier attitude toward the suffering its quest for profit growth creates among the 99%.

The second interest group is comprised of environmental organizations advancing the fiction that energy without risk is possible in the near term. They routinely hold energy projects hostage to sometimes impossible environmental standards and their opposition to Keystone is really about their opposition to global warming and the Canadian tar sands.

Environmental groups have a vested interest in waging this battle because of past environmental damage, because the American public doesn't trust its own energy industry, and because the attendant media attention boosts donations from a population that doesn't fully appreciate what fuels its laptops, cars, lights and hot water heaters.

The third interest group is an ethanol farm lobby that is getting rich by diverting corn from food production to fuel production. Less Canadian oil increases ethanol demand. The problem with ethanol farmers is that they're also cavalier about the suffering created among the 99% by the higher fuel and corn prices they favor.

Meanwhile, political hookers and pimps are profiting from both sides as they work our pay-to-play government for legalized bribes. They've squeezed more than $1.65 billion from the energy sector and more than $80 million from environmental groups since 2008, according to the Open Secrets website.

The vast majority of those political donations has been slipped into Republican G-strings. The lobbyists and their politicians are also cavalier about the disproportionate burdens they place on the 99%”