Keystone Pipeline Myopia

Senior energy analyst Glenn Doty makes this point regarding the Keystone Pipeline:

We won’t have one drop of oil less being sold in the global market because the Keystone was rejected… we’ll just have a lot more oil in the groundwater from spills along the train tracks rather than a more efficient and safer pipeline.  If it were I, I’d pressure the Republicans to pass a measure stipulating that 1/2 of the projected tax revenue from the pipeline be directed to go to renewable energy. That would have been funny because they’d either have to come clean and acknowledge that it would have only resulted in a few billion dollars per year, or they would have had to pass a measure actually putting another ~30 billion dollars per year towards renewable infrastructure just to keep up the lie that the Keystone was a major economic engine.

But no-one on the left thought of that. They pushed for rejection – which just means we’ll get more waste and more emissions… and a pointless sacrifice of political capital. So we can say we took a stand?

Wow, that’s brilliant; I certainly don’t disagree with that at all.

I’m reminded of an old friend, the brilliant physicist Bruce Allen, who, until his passing last year, fought hard for a project out here called “SOS (Stop Oil Seeps) California”.   He explained that:

• The #1 contributor to pollution in the state is natural seepage of oil and methane from the enormous, high-pressure deposits just off the coast

• Oil and gas that seeps naturally is just as carcinogenic as that which is spilled from tankers or pipelines

• These deposits can be accessed very safely with slant-drilling

• The revenue will help the region tremendously, and the tax can and should be applied to the development of renewable energy

Of course, all this is terribly ironic.  Off-shore drilling is a solution to an environmental problem??  Sadly, he could never get people to deal with this; it short-circuited people’s brains.