The Obama administration is rapidly running out of wiggle room on the Keystone pipeline:
The State Department’s long-awaited environmental report on the Keystone XL pipeline leaves President Barack Obama with no real scientific reason to reject the nation’s most fiercely debated energy project.
The sprawling 2,000-page report, released late Friday afternoon, doesn’t issue a clear yea or nay on a sprawling section of pipeline that would traverse from western Canada to Oklahoma. But the report’s key takeaways — including a conclusion that the project would have “no significant impacts to most resources along the proposed Project route” — Obama may have been hemmed in by his own State Department experts.
Politico went on to say “Environmentalists were left sputtering Friday…” over the decision, as if there was or is ever a moment when environmentalists are not sputtering, on Pavlovian cue. Although I’ll concede that they’d have their reasons to sputter, here: the best that the State Department could do to scuttle the project is to conclude that it’d have no real impact on the environment, one way or the other. Which makes perfect sense. Canada will be developing its oil sands, because Canada likes money and oil sands can be turned into lots of money without too much fuss and bother. We’ve known for quite some time how to move large amounts of liquids from Point A to Point B without spilling too much of it. Contra the Greenies, we’re not going to stop using hydrocarbons any time soon. The only question is: How much money is it going to cost American taxpayers to do all of this?
Continue reading State Department: sorry, Mr. President. The Keystone Pipeline can go ahead.
