“The Pipeline From Hell”: There’s No Good Reason To Build Keystone XL
The Senate will vote Tuesday on whether to authorize the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline. The Republican-led House approved the initiative Friday by a wide margin. The Senate’s still-Democratic majority will bring the bill to the floor for the first time because of newfound support for the initiative within the party, mostly to boost Sen. Mary Landrieu’s bid for reelection in Louisiana as she heads into a runoff with Rep. Bill Cassidy, a Republican. Cassidy leads in every poll of likely voters in that race by an average of 5 percentage points.
Support for the pipeline has surged among Democratic legislators in the wake of the midterm elections, when Democratic senators in red states were swept out of office. Those that remain—among them Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, and Claire McCaskill of Missouri—are eager to boost their pro-energy, pro-business bona fides.
If Democratic support is new, Republicans’ enthusiasm for the project is not. Friday’s vote was the ninth time the House has approved the pipeline under a Republican majority. As soon as the midterm results had rolled in, the victorious party’s messaging shifted en masse. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus made the TV rounds on Election Night, and by the time he arrived on The Daily Show’s live edition, he had his message down to a T: “I think that what we’re going to see is that the president’s got to come to the table, and both parties are going to have to work together to get things done… It’s going to take the president saying ‘I want to work with you, I want to pass some of these jobs bills, I want to pass the Keystone Pipeline and get things done.”
It’s a well-worn, exceedingly vague message. From his phrasing, it seems that the pipeline is a no-brainer, a job-creation machine that enjoys support from Republicans and Democrats alike. Priebus mentioned it in seemingly every post-election appearance, references made their way into victory speeches from the GOP’s biggest power players, and they’ve since declared the project’s approval a top priority.
It seems America’s two major parties are finally coming together in favor of a significant legislative initiative. But should they be?
Keystone XL would be an addition to the existing Keystone Pipeline System. It would be built by TransCanada Corp. and would run from Alberta’s tar-sands fields through Montana and South Dakota to link up with the system in Steele City, Nebraska. It would transport bitumen and liquefied natural gas drawn from the tar sands to refineries on the Gulf Coast, mainly in Texas.
The XL addition was proposed in 2008, and studies on the project’s potential economic and environmental impact were commissioned in 2010 and 2011. President Obama rejected the project’s application in 2012 amid protests that it would hurt Nebraska’s Sand Hills region. An adjusted route through Nebraska has since been proposed, and a State Department report declared the project’s environmental effect was “not significant,” but the Obama administration announced in April 2014 that the review of the project has been extended indefinitely.
Why, if the project will create a lot of jobs and have little environmental impact, does it continue to be met with opposition? To begin with, it won’t actually create many jobs. According to a George Mason University study, via Bloomberg, the pipeline’s construction could create between 2,500 and 20,000 jobs. More likely (PDF), it’ll be between 2,500 and 4,650, assuming that a huge chunk (as much as 50 percent) of steel production will be outsourced to China, Canada, and India. Moreover, when construction ends, the number of permanent jobs could fall to 20. Yes, 20.
A rosier estimate, from the State Department’s report and Newsweek, puts the number of permanent jobs at 35. A study by Cornell’s Global Labor Institute claims that the project may actually kill more American jobs than it creates due to pipeline spills, additional fuel costs in the Midwest, and other factors. It also claims that 85-90 percent of people hired for the line’s construction will not be from the areas through which the pipeline is running.
So, it won’t create that many jobs. After all, it’s merely taking oil drilled in Canada to pre-existing refineries on the Gulf Coast. But it’s a $7 billion project, and the State Department has said it will have a minimal negative effect on the environment. Plus, it could increase America’s energy independence and strengthen our position in the Middle East and beyond. These are all good reasons to move ahead with the plan, but unfortunately, none of them are actually true.
The pipeline is a $7 billion project, but only $3 billion-$4 billion of that would be headed to the U.S. The rest is going to wherever that steel is getting outsourced. The claim of reduced dependence on foreign oil suppliers is also suspect. China has already invested billions in Canada’s oil sands, and Chinese corporations are upping their stakes all the time. Much of the oil transported by the pipeline will be refined in Port Arthur, Texas, where the main refinery is half-owned by the state-owned oil company of Saudi Arabia (PDF). The Keystone project is not an American one, but a global one, financed and favored by major multinational oil interests. Besides, real domestic oil production—oil drilled and refined in the U.S. by nominally American companies—has already increased 70 percent under the Obama administration.
All of this means that the pipeline’s approval would essentially be a continuation of the status quo, with a few billion dollars kicked the U.S. economy’s way. Except that the project would, in spite of the State Department’s claims, have drastic effects on the environment on both local and global levels. That study published by the State Department was conducted by Environmental Resources Management (ERM), a firm that listed TransCanada, the would-be pipeline builder, as a client in its marketing materials a year before it began the Keystone contract.
Both ERM and TransCanada told the State Department at the time that they had not worked together for at least five years, a term of the contract meant to limit conflict of interest. Of course, any doubts about a conflict of interest evaporated when it emerged that up until the summer of 2013, a division of ERM had been “working alongside TransCanada on the Alaska Pipeline Project.” These are two in a laundry list of troubling connections between the two companies.
Considering, then, that the State Department study was conducted by TransCanada’s business partner, it’s little surprise that it failed to find any environmental consequences for the project. The reality is far different. On a local level, pipeline leaks and spills could have a number of drastic effects. Recent leaks from similar lines have been bad. Really bad. A New York Times article cites a 2010 leak of 840,000 gallons of bitumen into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River. The cleanup has cost $1 billion so far, and continues today.
It also mentions an Arkansas leak that sent 210,000 gallons of bitumen running through the streets of small-town Mayflower and left local residents with respiratory problems, nausea, and headaches. The proposed Keystone route would see it “pass over the Ogallala Aquifer, the lifeblood of Great Plains agriculture,” where the water table is close to the surface. A major leak could poison the water supply of large swaths of the Midwest that add up to one quarter of the nation’s farmland.
The pipeline also has environmental consequences on a larger scale. The pipeline would encourage accelerated extraction of Canada’s tar sands, which have greenhouse gas emissions 81 percent greater than those of conventional oil. By most measures, it is the dirtiest fossil fuel on the planet. James Hansen, formerly of NASA, claimed in a 2012 op-ed that the tar sands contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If true, its exploitation along with our continued use of fossil fuels at present levels would bring carbon concentration in the atmosphere above the 500 parts per million threshold often discussed by climatologists as the point of no return. That would create an irreversible cycle wherein the climate is beyond our control. Hansen describes it as “game over for the environment.”
Even if that’s an alarmist prediction, and Canada will exploit their tar sands with or without the Keystone XL Pipeline, there is no question that its construction will not help with controlling emissions, boosting energy independence, or creating jobs. The only people it will benefit are TransCanada, the Canadian oil companies (many part-owned by Chinese and Mideast interests) working in the tar sands, the multinational oil companies who will refine what it brings to the Gulf Coast, and a few thousand workers. Temporarily.
So why, you might ask, are many of our leaders so eager to build it? The answer is straightforward: money and political gain. The Democrats, feeling vulnerable after a midterm rout, are eager to move to the pro-business center and push through a “jobs plan.” A Nov. 12 Pew Research poll shows 59 percent of Americans favor building the pipeline, which provides some political cover from the backlash Democrats will likely get from environmentalists and other sections of the party’s base.
It also conveniently caters to the interests of Big Energy, some of the biggest campaign donors to both parties. Republicans, in the House especially, have been pushing Keystone for some time and raking in donations in the process. Now, Blue Dog Democrats like Mary Landrieu are happy to hop on board. After all, some of the world’s biggest energy firms, like Exxon Mobil, have been paying her campaign bills for some time.
An initiative most thought would be pushed by the Republican majorities in the next Congress will come to the floor in the current lame-duck session. In a rather pathetic political maneuver, the Senate Democrats will try to force the president’s hand before the new Republican majority gets the chance, apparently to help in a single Senate runoff election that will not in any way alter the upper chamber’s political landscape. After all, the Democrats have no chance of keeping their majority even if Landrieu wins.
For his part, Obama has said he will veto the measure. Pundits widely expected that he would insist on the need to wait for the results of further studies and the Supreme Court ruling on land use in Nebraska. Instead, he came out Thursday with an unequivocal rejection of the premise on which the argument for the pipeline is built: “Understand what this project is: It is providing the ability of Canada to pump their oil, send it through our land, down to the Gulf, where it will be sold everywhere else. It doesn’t have an impact on U.S. gas prices. If my Republican friends really want to focus on what’s good for the American people in terms of job creation and lower energy costs, we should be engaging in a conversation about what we are doing to produce more homegrown energy.”
The president is right in his criticisms, but wrong to reserve them only for the Republican Party. Many from his side of the aisle are now just as wrong on this issue as his opponents are.
By: Jack Holmes, The Daily Beast, November 15, 2014
“A Tired, Old And Wrong Cliche”: President Obama Is No ‘Bystander’
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) delivered a widely noticed speech in September 2011, condemning President Obama, not just on policy grounds, but specifically on the issue of leadership. “We continue to wait and hope that our president will finally stop being a bystander in the Oval Office,” the governor said. “We hope that he will shake off the paralysis that has made it impossible for him to take on the really big things.”
Much of the political media agreed and echoed the assessment. Pundits crying, “Why won’t Obama lead?” became so common, a tired cliche was born. The president may have run as a young, ambitious leader, eager to change the world, but the Beltway was increasingly convinced: Obama is an overly cautious, overly cerebral president who would rather talk than act.
Two weeks ago, Dana Milbank went so far as to endorse Charles Krauthammer’s thesis of Obama as a “passive bystander.”
The real problem with Obama is not overreach but his tendency to be hands-off.
Since the second year of Obama’s presidency, I have been lamenting the lack of strong leadership coming from the White House, describing Obama in June, 2010, as a “hapless bystander … as the crises cancel his agenda and weaken his presidency.” I’ve since described him over the years as “oddly like a spectator” and as “President Passerby.”
Let’s put aside, for now, the fact that the bystander thesis completely contradicts the other common anti-Obama condemnation: he’s a tyrannical dictator whose radical agenda is destroying the very fabric of America.
Instead, let’s focus on why the bystander thesis appears to be outrageously wrong – especially today.
Faced with an intensifying climate crisis, a hapless bystander, content to watch challenges pass him by, might have decided to do nothing. Maybe he’d call for action in a State of the Union address or issue a white paper, but President Spectator would struggle to shake off the paralysis that makes it impossible to take on the really big things.
Except Obama’s done the opposite, unveiling an ambitious domestic agenda, striking a deal with China that few thought possible, and challenging the rest of the world to follow his lead. It’s an effort wrought with political and policy pitfalls, but Obama’s doing it anyway because he sees this as an effort worth making.
As we discussed back in February, there’s a group of pundits who’ve invested almost comical amounts of time urging Obama to “lead more.” It’s never been entirely clear what, specifically, these pundits expect the president to do, especially in the face of unyielding and reflexive opposition from Congress, but the complaints have been constant for years.
As the argument goes, if only the president were willing to lead – louder, harder, and bigger – he could somehow advance his agenda through sheer force of will, institutional constraints be damned. And if Congress resists, it’s necessarily evidence that Obama is leading poorly – after all, if only he were a more leading leader, Congress would … follow his lead. The line of criticism became so tiresome and so common that Greg Sargent began mocking it with a convenient label: the Green Lantern Theory of Presidential Power.
What seems obvious now, however, is the need for these pundits to reconsider the thesis.
Obama saw a worsening climate crisis, so he decided to take the lead. Obama is tired of waiting for a hapless Congress to act on immigration, so he’s leading here, too. Obama saw an Ebola threat, and he’s leading a global effort to save lives. Obama sees an ISIS threat, so he’s leading an international campaign to confront the militants.
The president showed leadership when disarming Syria of its chemical weapons. He’s showing leadership in trying to strike a nuclear deal with Iran. He showed leadership on the minimum wage, raising it for federal contractors while Congress sat on its hands. He’s showed leadership on health care, rescuing the auto industry, and advancing the cause of civil rights. [Update: several readers reminded me he’s leading on net neutrality, too.]
The policymaking process is filled with choke points, but when the president has his eyes on a priority, he doesn’t just throw up his arms in despair when one door closes; he looks for a new route to his destination.
Now, if Obama’s critics want to question whether he’s leading the country in the right direction, that’s obviously grounds for a spirited debate – each of the president’s decisions can and should be evaluated closely on the merits. “Leadership” is not an a priori good. Obama can take the lead on a given issue, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s right.
But if Obama’s detractors would have Americans believe he’s not leading at all, I haven’t the foggiest idea what they’re talking about.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 14, 2014
“Wrong Once Again”: Republicans Are Furious About Obama’s Climate Breakthrough With China
Republicans are furious that President Barack Obama has cut a historic deal with China to lower both countries’ greenhouse gas emissions. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell just spent his reelection campaign claiming that China would never curb its emissions, so the U.S. shouldn’t either. Many other Republicans have argued the same. And yet China just proved Republicans wrong by committing to reach a peak level of carbon pollution by 2030—the first time the world’s largest polluter has set a deadline for lowering emissions.
Republicans won’t admit they were wrong, of course. They’ve already moved on to their next talking point. Remarkably, the party that’s become synonymous with climate-change denial has avoided any mention of it this time. A statement from McConnell’s office stressed only that Environmental Protection Agency regulations hurt coal jobs:
Our economy can’t take the President’s ideological War on Coal that will increase the squeeze on middle-class families and struggling miners. This unrealistic plan, that the President would dump on his successor, would ensure higher utility rates and far fewer jobs. Easing the burden already created by EPA regulations will continue to be a priority for me in the new Congress.
House Speaker John Boehner stated:
This announcement is yet another sign that the president intends to double down on his job-crushing policies no matter how devastating the impact for America’s heartland and the country as a whole. And it is the latest example of the president’s crusade against affordable, reliable energy that is already hurting jobs and squeezing middle-class families. Republicans have consistently passed legislation to rein in the EPA and stop these harmful policies from taking effect, and we will continue to make this a priority in the new Congress.
Even Senator James Inhofe—Congress’ most vigilant climate-change denier—neglected to mention what he really thinks of global warming. He emphasized that this deal lets China get away with not making any real cuts, while the U.S. will have to cut up to 28 percent of its emissions by 2025:
In the President’s climate change deal, the United States will be required to more steeply reduce our carbon emissions while China won’t have to reduce anything. It’s hollow and not believable for China to claim it will shift 20 percent of its energy to non-fossil fuels by 2030, and a promise to peak its carbon emissions only allows the world’s largest economy to buy time. China builds a coal-fired power plant every 10 days, is the largest importer of coal in the world, and has no known reserves of natural gas. This deal is a non-binding charade. The American people spoke against the President’s climate policies in this last election. They want affordable energy and more economic opportunity, both which are being diminished by overbearing EPA mandates. As we enter a new Congress, I will do everything in my power to rein in and shed light on the EPA’s unchecked regulations.
That’s not true. This climate accord marks the first time that China has publicly committed to any limit on carbon, at all. As a developing and rapidly growing economy that bears little responsibility historically for climate change, China can rightly argue it won’t act unless the U.S. does. To discredit this deal as a “non-binding charade” is simply misleading; these commitments may be formalized next year at an international meeting in Paris. The announcement now is meant to build momentum for these talks, and convince other countries to put forward their own ambitious targets.
The hardest part—how to move both countries’ giant economies away from fossil fuel dependence—comes next. Republican opposition will be firm, even if their excuses shift away from climate-change denial.
By: Rebecca Leber, The New Republic, November 12, 2014
“The Fable Of Rand Paul”: Less Of A Thoroughbred With Stamina Than A One-Adjective Pony
“The most interesting man in politics” is what Politico Magazine crowned Rand Paul in September, when it placed him at the top of a list of 50 people to keep an eye on. And Time magazine used those exact six words, in that exact order, next to a photograph of Paul on its cover last month.
The adjective bears notice. Interesting. Not powerful. Not popular. Not even influential.
They’re saying that he’s a great character.
And that’s not the same as a great candidate.
You could easily lose sight of that, given the bonanza of media coverage that he has received, much of it over the past week and a half, as journalists eagerly slough off the midterms, exuberantly handicap the coming presidential race and no longer digress to apologize for getting into the game too soon. The game’s on, folks. From here forward, it’s all 2016 all the time.
And in order to keep the story varied and vivid, those of us chronicling it will insist on stocking it with players who break the rules and the mold, who present the possibility of twists and surprises, whose surnames aren’t Bush or Clinton, whose faces are somewhat fresh.
Cue Rand Paul. He gives good narrative.
He’s an ophthalmologist who never held office before his successful 2010 Senate race. He’s got that sporadically kooky dad. He’s a dove in a party aflutter with hawks. And he’s a gleeful nuisance, which he demonstrated when he commandeered the Senate floor for nearly 13 hours and filled Ted Cruz with filibuster envy.
All of that has made him a media sensation. But none of it would necessarily serve a quest for the Republican presidential nomination. At this point Paul is as much a political fable as a political reality, and his supposed strengths — a libertarian streak that appeals to some young people, an apparent comfort with reaching out to minorities and expanding the Republican base — pale beside his weaknesses. They’re many.
And they’re potentially ruinous.
The dovish statements and reputation are no small hurdle. No Republican nominee in recent decades has had a perspective on foreign policy and military intervention quite like Paul’s, and there’s little evidence that the party’s establishment or a majority of its voters would endorse it.
Nor is there any compelling sign that the party is moving in his direction. In the wake of Russia’s provocations and Islamic militants’ butchery, Americans just elected a raft of new Republican senators — including the military veterans Tom Cotton in Arkansas, Joni Ernst in Iowa and Dan Sullivan in Alaska — who are more aligned with John McCain’s worldview than with Paul’s, and that raises serious questions about the currency of his ideas and his ability to promote them. He gets attention. But does he have any real sway?
He himself seems to doubt some of his positions and has managed in his four short years in the Senate to flip and flop enough to give opponents a storehouse of ammunition.
Adopting a stark, absolutist stance, he initially said that he opposed all foreign aid. Then he carved out an exception for Israel.
First he expressed grave skepticism about taking on the Islamic State. Then he blasted President Obama for not taking it on forcefully enough.
His language about Russia went from pacific to truculent. His distaste for Medicare went from robust to tentative.
These adjustments suggest not just political calculation but, in some instances, amateurism. He’s a work in remarkably clumsy progress, with glimmers of recklessness and arrogance, and he often seems woefully unprepared for the national stage.
The most striking example was his assertion in an interview with Olivia Nuzzi of The Daily Beast in September that John McCain had met and been photographed with members of the Islamic State. Paul was parroting a patently suspicious story that had pinged around the Internet, and the problem wasn’t simply that he accepted it at face value. He failed to notice that it had been thoroughly debunked, including in The Times.
At best he looked foolish. At worst he looked like someone “too easily captivated by the kinds of outlandish conspiracy theories that excite many of his and his father’s supporters,” as Mark Salter, a longtime McCain aide, wrote on the Real Clear Politics website.
Paul can be prickly and defensive to an inappropriate, counterproductive degree, as he was when dealing with accusations last year that he had used plagiarized material in speeches, an opinion article and a book.
In a story in The Times by Jim Rutenberg and Ashley Parker, Paul conceded “mistakes” of inadequate attribution. But he hardly sounded contrite. He lashed out at the people who had exposed the problem, grousing, “This is coming from haters.” And in promising to have his aides use footnotes in future materials, he said, “What we are going to do from here forward, if it will make people leave me the hell alone, is we’re going to do them like college papers.”
People are not going to leave him the hell alone, not when he’s being tagged in some quarters as the Republican front-runner, and his struggle to make peace with that is another liability.
But why the front-runner designation in the first place?
In an ABC News/Washington Post poll last month, 21 percent of voters who lean Republican named Mitt Romney as their preferred candidate in a primary or caucus, while 11 percent named Jeb Bush, 9 percent Mike Huckabee and 9 percent Paul. Two other national polls don’t show any growth in support for Paul over the course of 2014, despite all the coverage of him.
In one survey of Iowa Republicans in October, he trailed not only Huckabee and Paul Ryan but also Ben Carson, the neurosurgeon. And in a survey of New Hampshire Republicans, he trailed not only Huckabee and Bush but also Chris Christie.
What really distinguishes him, apart from some contrarian positions that are red meat for ravenous journalists, is that he’s been so obvious and unabashed about his potential interest in the presidency. He’s taken more pains than perhaps anyone other than Ted Cruz to get publicity. He’s had less competition for the Republican spotlight than he’ll have in the months to come.
And that’s given him a stature disproportionate to his likely fate. It has made him, in the words of a Washington Post headline last June, “the most interesting man in the (political) world.” There it is again, that one overused superlative. Makes you wonder if he’s less a thoroughbred with stamina than a one-adjective pony.
By: Frank Bruni, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, November 15, 2014
“Routine Partisan Lip Service”: Immigration, Impeachment, And Insanity On The Republican Right
Obstructing, denouncing, and demonizing Barack Obama are so central to the existence of the Republican Party today that its leaders simply ignore the real purposes of the president’s proposed immigration orders. So someone should point out that his imminent decision will advance priorities to which the Republican right offers routine lip service: promoting family values, assisting law enforcement, ensuring efficient government, and guarding national security.
Much of the argument for immigration reform, and in particular the president’s proposed executive orders, revolves around the imperative of compassion for immigrant families. That is a powerful claim — or should be, at least, for the self-styled Christians of the Republican right. If they aren’t moved by empathy for struggling, aspiring, hard-working people, however, then maybe they should just consider the practicalities.
America is not going to deport millions upon millions of Latino immigrants and their families to satisfy Tea Party prejudices, even if that were possible. Attempting to do so would be a gigantic waste of taxpayers’ money, an unwelcome burden on thousands of major employers, and an inhumane disgrace with international consequences, none of them good. It might or might not be “legal,” but it would surely be stupid.
Instead the Obama administration aims to relieve the terrible pressure on immigrant laborers and their children, and to direct resources where they will best accomplish national objectives, by deporting serious felons and other illegal entrants who may endanger security. By insisting on those broad yet clear distinctions, the president will protect the innocent and prosecute the not-so-innocent – exactly what he should be doing with the support of Congress.
Those wise objectives don’t interest the congressional majority, compared with the chance to rile their base by muttering threats against Obama. Just the other day, a tweet appeared under the name of Chuck Grassley, long among the dimmer members of the Senate, warning that the president is “flagrantly violating his oath” and “getting dangerously close to assuming a Nixonian posture.” For the Iowa Republican, that’s subtlety. In case you missed it, he was blustering about impeachment, and he isn’t alone.
Like so many of the familiar accusations against the president, complaints that his executive orders on immigration are “Nixonian” or “lawless” lack merit. Such orders are well within the recognized authority of his office, and considerably more conservative than the official conduct of some of his predecessors, such as George W. Bush – who issued about a hundred more executive orders than Obama has done so far.
With respect to constitutional principle, the camouflage favored by Obama’s antagonists, their flexibility is telling. The separation of powers only matters when they say so. They say nothing when the president uses executive orders to tighten immigration and deport more people than all his predecessors combined. Indeed, when the outcome pleases Republicans, then nobody needs to worry about executive overreach, let alone high crimes and misdemeanors.
Nor does a presidential executive order – even one granting “amnesty” to immigrant children – trouble the Republicans when a Republican president implements that kind of reform. When Presidents Ronald Reagan and then George H.W. Bush took action to keep immigrant families together during their respective administrations, refusing to wait for Congress to move, there was no barking from the likes of Grassley. (According to The Hill, the two GOP presidents made those adjustments following the passage of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which created a “path to citizenship” for about 3 million undocumented workers. It was signed by the sainted Reagan.)
Republicans in the Senate and House have rejected every legislative opportunity on immigration, including measures to strengthen border security. That’s because they prefer partisan confrontation – and that is what they will get. The consequences for their party promise to be politically devastating – and still worse if they are foolish enough to believe their own rhetoric about impeachment.
By; Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, The National Memo, November 14, 2014
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