“A Loophole To Avoid Official Scrutiny”: No Keystone, No Problem; The Oil Industry Is Making Other Pipeline Plans
Environmentalists have been waiting since 2008 for President Barack Obama’s decision on whether to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. That decision may come any day now. But Canada’s tar sands industry hasn’t been waiting around.
Publicly, TransCanada, the company behind the embattled pipeline, insists it is still optimistic it will win the long-running standoff—not just over Keystone, but another pipeline project that has faced environmental opposition as well, Energy East. “We’re optimistic for both of our projects,” TransCanada spokesman Mark Cooper told the New Republic.
The speculation in private, however, is that the writing may be on the wall for Keystone at least. “The rumor is that the decision to deny has been made, and they’re just waiting for the right time and venue,” an unnamed source familiar with the company told The Canadian Press this month. Republican lawmakers in the U.S. have echoed the pessimism. “I don’t see a scenario where the president would sign off on Keystone,” Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chair Lisa Murkowski told Bloomberg recently. Then there are Obama’s own words over the last year, which suggest he’s leaning against the project.
This decision will be Obama’s final word on the Keystone XL pipeline. But for TransCanada, it won’t be the end of the story. Even if its permit is rejected, TransCanada has a few paths forward for keeping Keystone alive. The company may eye a NAFTA lawsuit arguing trade discrimination, or it may submit a new application under the next president—if it’s a Republican, the company would face a much easier time.
In the meantime, rail is the go-to substitute for missing infrastructure to ship oil from Canada to the U.S. Sixty percent of Alberta’s unprocessed oil already makes its way to American refineries by rail and pipelines. And in 2012, Canada exported 16,000 barrels of oil per day by rail to the U.S. In the first quarter of 2015, it exported 120,000 barrels per day, which might rise depending on whether global oil prices begin to increase again. As green organizing has focused on pipeline infrastructure, it’s done little to stop the explosion in tar sands shipments by rail and tanker.
But TransCanada’s main business is still in pipelines, not rail, giving it every incentive to plow forward with alternative options if Keystone gets axed. For a hint at how round two of this fight could play out, Energy East offers a few clues.
This project would run from Alberta eastward to the Atlantic coast, carrying even more oil (at 1.1 million barrels of crude oil per day) than Keystone. Just like Keystone, Energy East’s way forward hasn’t been easy. The project is facing its own political opposition from Canadian provinces that are concerned about the pipeline’s environmental impact.
The years of waiting for a decision on Keystone has made the company aware of what scrappy environmental organizing can do. “There’s a very loud and vocal minority that have been very effective in their messaging, and we have had over the years needed to adjust how we get out there,” Cooper said. And so, from the beginning, the Energy East project has included an aggressive public relations campaign, including paid media, monitoring of op-ed pages and letters to the editor, social media campaigns, meetings with landowners, politicians, and third parties. It officially filed its application with Canada’s Stephen Harper administration in October 2014, amid a publicity blitz.
In a further example of the company’s newfound savvy, TransCanada pulled plans in April to build a marine tanker terminal to Energy East along a river in Quebec, which had roused local and environmental concerns for the region’s beluga whales. As a result, there’s been a two-year delay to the pipeline, with an anticipated in-service date in 2020. Yet this concession was a deliberate move, one that fits in with TransCanada’s broader P.R. push. The terminal delay is inconsequential, considering the company’s long-term thinking: TransCanada builds good-will in Canadian provinces by caving on specific environmental concerns that don’t make or break the project, all in order to get the final OK from governments.
And as TransCanada faces obstacles on all fronts for its pipelines, other companies have taken measures to avoid similar struggles. One of these controversial projects is Enbridge’s Alberta Clipper or Line 67 pipeline, which crosses the U.S. border in North Dakota. The company wants to expand the pipeline’s capacity from 450,000 barrels per day to 800,000.
And in order to avoid the complications that have plagued Keystone, it found a way to ship oil across the border without needing a new permit from the State Department. Enbridge simply plans to connect two pipelines through an existing cross-border line, Line 3. By using the 1960s-era Line 3, which doesn’t require the same environmental assessment and public comment as Line 67, Enbridge can still ship 800,000 barrels of oil per day, as it originally planned.
According to environmentalists, this is a bait and switch, and 63 green groups urged Obama to reconsider in a June letter. “Rather than wait for this requisite environmental review and permitting process to run its due course, Enbridge decided it would immediately increase the flow of Alberta Clipper by diverting the oil onto an adjacent pipeline for the actual border-crossing, then diverting the oil back to Alberta Clipper just south of the U.S.-Canada border,” the letter said.
Enbridge critics insist the company needs to be held to the same environmental standards as Keystone, and that this work-around is nothing more than a loophole to avoid official scrutiny. The company did not return a request for comment.
For green activists, the most effective way to limit tar sands development has long been to block, delay, and frustrate attempts to build the infrastructure that will carry crude oil, which contributes roughly 17 percent more in greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil. The ideal form of transport for the industry is by pipeline, for the same reasons environmentalists oppose the new infrastructure. It is cheaper and more efficient, meaning the oil and gas industry can ship more at less cost. Or more accurately, it’s cheaper by pipeline if you don’t count the cost of potential oil spills, clean-up, and the overall impact on the climate.
Still, as long as economic conditions make oil extraction profitable in the medium- to long-term, TransCanada and other companies have every incentive to try new and ever shrewder ways to make a profit.
Rebecca Leber, The New Republic, August 18, 2015
“Jeb Bush, Like Many Republicans, Wants A War With Iran”: That’s The ‘Pretty Good Deal’ Republicans Have In Mind
Like all Republican presidential candidates, Jeb Bush is opposed to the world powers nuclear agreement with Iran, and has denounced it in withering terms as a “bad,” “horrific” deal. Late last week, he offered some valuable perspective on what counts in his mind as a “good deal” in global affairs, when, speaking at a foreign policy forum in Iowa, he argued, “I’ll tell you, taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal.”
Because almost nobody in America thinks the Iraq War was a particularly good deal, the political media is holding his comment up as a gaffe. But against the backdrop of GOP opposition to the Iran agreement, it’s much more revelatory than that. It crystallizes the increasingly open secret in the world of foreign affairs that the “pretty good deal” we got in Iraq and the “better deal” Iran foes allude to so frequently are actually the same deal. Not in every particular—nobody of any prominence on the right is currently arguing for a wholesale invasion and occupation of Iran. But forced regime change was what we got in Iraq, and it’s what the supporters of the war there ultimately want in Iran.
There’s a danger whenever Bush is asked to comment about national security or Middle East policy that his comments will stem less from any considered position than from the poisoned soils of family loyalty and legacy redemption. For precisely that reason, it took him a week this past spring to make the easy migration from outright support for the Iraq invasion to conditional opposition (“knowing what we know now”).
But Bush has now rolled out, and adhered to, a tangle of views that could be mistaken for his brother’s—void the Iran agreement and possibly attack Iran, rescind President Barack Obama’s 2009 executive order banning torture, and possibly send thousands of U.S. troops back into Iraq—and none of them is even remotely controversial among his co-partisans.
Republicans of a neoconservative bent grow prickly when accused of promising a “better deal” in bad faith, or of harboring ulterior motives, and they became especially prickly when Obama points it out, as he did in a resolute speech at American University earlier this month. What makes their thin skin so odd is that these motives aren’t even really ulterior. They’re articulated unabashedly by many, many conservatives all the time. Republican presidential candidates, including Bush, have expressed interest in military strikes to set back Iran’s nuclear activities. Conservative writer Norman Podhoretz has been arguing for them for years.
That this view is widely shared on the right emerges as well from the cold logic of the multilateral negotiations themselves, and from the growing consensus among Republicans that the next U.S. president should walk away from the agreement as a first order of business.
This matrix is slightly oversimplified, but only slightly. Thanks to the agreement, there’s a decent chance that Iran won’t produce a nuclear weapon for many years. If the agreement collapses, the diplomatic channel will essentially be closed, Iran will probably manufacture a weapon, and the drumbeat for airstrikes will intensify. That’s a cardinal truth, no matter who violates the agreement. The ancillary benefit for hawkish Iran foes is that if Iran breaches the deal, it will provide U.S. policymakers with a robust rhetorical foundation for demanding the reimposition of sanctions, and coordinated airstrikes. Republicans are effectively saying that this isn’t good enough, and that we should void the deal ourselves—sacrifice all of that good will—to precipitate the crisis more rapidly.
That’s what Jeb Bush meant, in his foreign policy address last week, when he said, “If the Congress does not reject this deal, then the damage must be undone by the next president—and it will be my intention to begin that process immediately.” Ripping up the global powers agreement is the predicate for the “pretty good deal” Republicans have in mind. It’s the whole show.
By: Brian Beutler, Senior Editor, The New Republic, August 17, 2015
“Party Loyalty Isn’t All That Important”: How Donald Trump Exposed The Limits Of Ideology In A Most Ideological Party
Donald Trump figured something out about the Republican Party. Maybe it was a flash of insight, or maybe he stumbled into it and doesn’t even realize what he found. But here it is: Even in this most ideological of parties, ideology has its limits.
This is a party, after all, that has spent the last few years on its own miniature version of the Cultural Revolution, a tireless search for ideological heretics who can be exposed, shamed, and banished. It has made compromise into something beneath contempt, and required all who would wear the name “Republican” to demonstrate that the hatred of Barack Obama and all he touches vibrates within every cell of their beings. When the party confronts a policy development it doesn’t like, it demands not just that the idea be opposed, but that it be opposed again and again and again, no matter how fruitless the blows battered against it (the number of votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act is well past 50, all failed).
Yet the party’s effort to find a leader is now led — by a wide margin — by a man who at best is a piecemeal conservative, taking a harshly right-wing stance here and an oddly liberal one there. This seems to be a result of the fact that Trump has never thought much about policy, and doesn’t really care.
If you want to understand Trump’s appeal in the primaries — both its power and its limits — there are two articles that came out in the last few days that you should read. The first, from The Washington Post‘s David Weigel, explains how Trump’s talk about foreign countries stealing American jobs is resonating with economically troubled voters, particularly in places where manufacturing has declined. Instead of talking about job retraining or anything else realistically modest, Trump all but promises that he’ll go to China and punch the commies in the face until they give us our jobs back.
The second, from Bloomberg‘s Melinda Henneberger, describes how Republican voters, besotted with Trump’s style, barely notice that his positions on issues are a hodgepodge of conservative and liberal ideas. “After he finished talking in New Hampshire on Friday night, I asked half a dozen Republicans who said they liked him what they had heard in his long, stream-of-consciousness oration that struck them as conservative,” she writes, “and none of them could point to anything in particular.” But it didn’t matter.
The approach Republican politicians have taken toward their voters in recent years is a combination of policy and posture. The policies are a version of what they’ve always offered, just a little bit more conservative and a lot more pure. The posture is one of opposition to Barack Obama — unyielding, inflexible, even petulant or downright angry. The easiest way to assure Republican voters you’re one of them is to show them how much you hate the guy in the White House.
Which may be understandable, since the president is the axis around which elite politics revolves. When your party is out of power, you’re inevitably going to define yourself in relation to him. But then along comes Trump, who has an entirely different posture.
Though it may be odd coming from a guy who waged a campaign to prove that Obama isn’t actually an American citizen (and apparently still believes it), Trump seems to barely have time to talk about this administration, except as the most recent example of larger problems he’s promising to fix with a sweep of his hand. His message isn’t, I’ll reverse everything that happened in the Obama years, it’s, Everyone else is a bunch of losers, and I’m a winner. That applies to Democrats, Republicans, everyone. The force of his persona is such that when he displays some lack of fealty to conservative ideals — like saying that single-payer health care “works well in Canada” — ideological conservatives may be horrified, but he just rolls right past it. And that tells us that ideological purity isn’t all that important to Republican voters, at least not all of them.
If it was, Trump would be pulling 5 percent in the primary polls, not 25 percent. His flirtation with a third-party run would also be bringing him down, but it isn’t, which suggests that there are lots of Republicans for whom party loyalty isn’t all that important.
Of course, 25 percent isn’t a majority, and it’s probably necessary to demonstrate both ideological fealty and a fundamental commitment to the GOP in order to get the nomination. But Trump has shown that there are other impulses within the Republican electorate, like resentment, dissatisfaction with targets bigger than Obama, and the desire for a confident leader who will promise the moon.
Even in a party now defined by its ideological extremism, it isn’t always about ideology. Whether any of the party creatures who make up the rest of the field can capture and exploit those impulses is something we’ll have to wait and see.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, August 18, 2015
“A Shock Endorsement”: How Desperate Is Rand Paul? He’s Calling In Daddy For Help
Look at all of you, thinking Rand Paul’s presidential campaign was going nowhere but downward, in both polling support and money. Quite a feint that Rand Paul put out there, getting you all clucking. But the last laugh will be his. Because on Friday, Rand Paul trotted out a shock endorsement that threatens to upend the state of the race, the future of the country, the alignment of the planets, the mysteries of God.
Ron Paul has endorsed Rand Paul.
The two have some connections, so perhaps we should have seen this coming. Ron Paul served in Congress for years, just as Rand Paul has. Each are Republicans but gravitate towards libertarianism. Each has run for president. It’s also the case that Rand Paul’s mother is literally married to Ron Paul and they have a son and that son is Rand Paul. Still: pretty big endorsement here.
“Endorsement” is at least how Reason magazine is putting it, which is an effective framing job although perhaps not the most accurate. Ron Paul has always supported his son’s campaign, because he is his son. He was there with Rand at the campaign launch, in a mostly silent role. His role has been nearly totally silent as the campaign has progressed, though. As the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel writes, it’s more accurate to call this Ron Paul’s first pitch on Rand’s behalf for donations, over four months into the process.
Here’s a sampling of some of the slick #content within this email:
Rand is the ONLY one in the race who is standing up for your Liberty, across the board….he is our best hope to restore liberty, limited government and the Bill of Rights and finally end the big spending status quo in Washington, D.C….
Remember, truth is treason in the empire of lies. And nowhere is that more true than when it comes to Washington, D.C. and their media mouthpieces.
Even where Rand and I do have minor differences of opinion, I would take Rand’s position over any of his opponents’ in both parties every time…
Rand must be heartened to have his father’s full-throated public support and fundraising prowess at his back. But it’s the best symbol yet of how Paul’s political career has come full-circle: from niche politician to breakout GOP star and back to niche politician — and one who has little hope of growing his support for the nomination much further.
Leading up to the presidential cycle, much of the chatter about Rand Paul surrounded how he would utilize his “wild card” father, if at all. It was Ron Paul’s noisy base of supporters who raised him an awful lot of money for his 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, and who boosted Rand Paul to his surprising Senate primary victory in 2010. As Rand’s ambitions went higher though — he wanted to run for president with a chance to win, and not as a niche candidate in the style of his father — he had to move towards the party mainstream without abandoning his libertarian base.
That didn’t work very well. The rise of ISIS closed off whatever interest Republicans might have had in a slightly less military interventionist foreign policy. Rand sensed the winds changing and has tried several times to appease the party’s hawks, who do not and will not ever trust him, in the meantime turning some of his libertarian base against them. He has tried to walk the narrow line between mainstream acceptability and libertarian fire and failed.
And now he doesn’t have much money, or anything to lose, so he might as well trot out his father despite all the risks that entails.
It will be something when Rand Paul fares much, much worse in the early states this time than his father did in the early states in 2012. That’s not the way it was supposed to be.
By: Jim Newell, Salon, August 17, 2015
“Rand Paul, Falling Flat”: The Candidate Everyone Thought Could Change The Republican Party Is Completely Collapsing
The moment one veteran Republican strategist realized Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) was flailing as a presidential candidate came when he suddenly decided to take on Donald Trump last week at the first presidential debate.
Challenging Trump’s refusal to pledge support for the eventual nominee should have been a moment that earned Paul some credibility among Republicans frustrated with Trump’s rise.
But it ended up falling flat.
“It just missed the mark,” the strategist said. “He didn’t give off a good vibe doing it.”
Last fall, Time magazine declared Paul the “most interesting man in politics” and stamped him on its cover. Paul launched his campaign earlier this year pledging that he was a “different kind of Republican.”
Four months later, though it’s still early in a crowded, fluid race, it’s clear that many Republicans want different — but not him.
His campaign is struggling to keep up with his rivals in fundraising. Two of his political allies running an outside super PAC supporting his candidacy were recently indicted on campaign-finance fraud charges. Significant plunges in polling are starting to correspond.
And Trump has an aggressive counterpunch. In a raging statement responding to Paul, the real-estate tycoon took him to task for running for reelection to the Senate at the same time he’s campaigning for president.
“I feel sorry for the great people of Kentucky who are being used as a back up to Senator Paul’s hopeless attempt to become President of the United States — weak on the military, Israel, the Vets and many other issues. Senator Paul has no chance of wining the nomination and the people of Kentucky should not allow him the privilege of remaining their Senator,” Trump said.
Trump further called Paul’s operation a “total mess” and said the senator should leave the race.
“Rand should save his lobbyist’s and special interest money and just go quietly home,” he declared. “Rand’s campaign is a total mess, and as a matter of fact, I didn’t know he had anybody left in his campaign to make commercials who are not currently under indictment!”
Polls trickling out after the debate have underscored the challenge ahead for Paul and have led to speculation that he could be one of a handful of GOP candidates who drops out before the Iowa caucuses next year.
Paul now sits just ninth in the first-caucus state of Iowa, according to an average of three polls of the state that have been released this week. One of those polls, from Suffolk University, showed his support plunging to just 2% of likely Republican caucus-goers in Iowa. That put him behind such candidates as Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R), who has been diverting most of his early-state resources to New Hampshire.
Iowa will be especially important for Paul, whose father, Ron, scored with its voters during his previous presidential runs. Matt Kibbe, the director of one super PAC supporting Rand Paul, told Politico in July that the group only had paid staff in Iowa because “it matters so much.”
But Paul hasn’t shown many signs that he will successfully hold onto his father’s voters, let alone significantly expand upon that base. And the indictment of the two allies, which stems from their work on Ron Paul’s campaign in 2012, revolves around an alleged money-for-endorsement scheme involving former Iowa State Sen. Kent Sorenson (R), who already pleaded guilty to concealing campaign expenditures.
A Public Policy Polling survey released this week showed Rand Paul with the worst net-favorability rating among all GOP candidates. His standing in Iowa has plunged from 10% in April to just 3% now.
“The biggest loser in the poll is Rand Paul,” PPP director Tom Jensen wrote. “Paul’s been foundering anyway, and his campaign’s ties to the Kent Sorenson mess are probably making things particularly bad for him in Iowa.”
Things aren’t looking much better in New Hampshire, where Paul was thought to potentially capitalize on its independent-leaning primary electorate, and where his father had two strong showings.
According to a Franklin Pierce University/Boston Herald poll released this week, Paul has seen his favorability rating dip from a positive 57-24 margin in March to a negative 44-45 margin in August. His support in the state also plunged from 13% in March to just 6% now. It put him behind better-funded candidates investing significant resources into the Granite State, like Kasich (12%) and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (13%).
During the Republican presidential debate last week, Paul used polls as a major selling point for why Republicans should support his candidacy.
“I’m the only one that leads Hillary Clinton in five states that were won by President Obama. I’m a different kind of Republican,” he said in his closing statement.
But the polls he’s referring to are from March and April. Perhaps in a sign of his diminished standing, the same polling outlet that found him leading Clinton narrowly in those states — Quinnipiac University — instead measured Clinton’s strength against Republican candidates Bush, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R), and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) in a poll conducted earlier this month.
“His campaign has been in free-fall,” said Greg Valliere, the chief political strategist at the Potomac Research Group, of Paul’s debate performance.
“Paul didn’t help himself much last night.”
By: Brett LoGiurato, Business Insider, August 15, 2015
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