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In Keystone XL Decision, Hillary Chooses Primary Votes over Science
Last week at a New Hampshire town hall, Hillary Clinton was asked her position on the long-delayed Keystone XL pipeline. Instead of offering a simple yes or no, the supposedly spontaneous candidate issued a warning to President Obama: “I’m putting the White House on notice, I’m going to tell you what I think — soon.”
That promise of steely-leadership-as-soon-as-the-polls-come-in was fulfilled today as Clinton publicly revealed her opinion on the seven-year-old controversy:
Hillary Clinton finally came out Tuesday against building the Keystone XL oil pipeline, ending her long refusal to take a stand on the most divisive environmental controversy of Barack Obama’s presidency — while thrilling greens and handing her potential GOP opponents a potentially powerful weapon.
Clinton’s rejection of Keystone as “a distraction from important work we have to do on climate change,” delivered at a campaign event in Iowa, comes a month after she took another left turn on the environment by opposing offshore drilling in the Arctic. Her move elated greens already preparing for Obama to reject the Canada-to-Texas heavy oil pipeline, more than seven years after its developer first applied for a permit.
As secretary of state, Clinton led the early chapters of the administration’s still-ongoing review of the pipeline proposal — and galvanized a nationwide activist campaign against Keystone with off-the-cuff remarks in 2010 that her department was “inclined” to approve the $8 billion-plus project. Republicans have since turned Keystone into a political symbol of their own, blasting Obama for repeatedly postponing the decision past the 2012 and 2014 elections. (Emphasis mine — Ed.)
Clinton’s GOP opponents leapt to slam her on Tuesday, a sign that her appeal to the Democratic base won’t come without a cost should she become the party’s nominee. Clinton “finally says what we already knew,” Jeb Bush tweeted after her Iowa remarks. “She favors environmental extremists over U.S. jobs.”
The Keystone pipeline isn’t the biggest issue facing the US, but what should have been a simple rubber stamp by the Obama administration has devolved into a tedious proxy war between common sense and green absolutism.
Here is a map showing the major oil pipelines that already criss-cross our nation:
The proposed pipeline would shorten the distance and widen the capacity of the already existing Keystone system that currently delivers oil sands from Hardisty, Alberta to the US Gulf Coast. Environmentalists are claiming this improvement is especially dangerous because it would pass through Midwestern aquifers. However, as you can see in the map, pipelines already cut through the same areas and have long operated without incident.
The real reason the green extremists oppose Keystone XL is because they oppose the increased distribution of fossil fuels. They wish to starve the market of the most efficient energy sources and replace them with incredibly inefficient ones like wind, solar, and unicorn treadmills. The fact this flies in the face of logic, physics, and science matters not a whit to enviros or to a cynical Hillary Clinton desperate for progressive votes.
This is one reason conservatives laugh when Democrats praise the FDR era’s bold engineering feats such as Hoover Dam. If a President Hillary is unwilling to approve a simple metal tube, don’t expect any visionary infrastructure over the next eight years.
Published in Science & Technology
It took her a long time to demonstrate that she’s a coward. Cowardice: Our new national norm in what passes for our doddering leadership.
Another nail in the coffin of this floundering bat-head’s campaign. She’s not going to lose someone who’s already for her, she’s not going to gain someone who’s already against her. What she’ll net are a few votes in the middle, maybe, and maybe that’s a slight net gain in some states that will help her.
But I can’t imagine being so empty inside that she couldn’t figure out her position on Keystone for several years, when it’s clear that it is purely a political thing. It’s not the environment or jobs. It’s her.
I would think even people mildly interested in politics can see this like a shining beacon of shame mounted permanently on her puzzled forehead.
Political science.
This places her to the left of Obama. I think he’s still waiting for some department or state lawsuit or something to weigh in on the matter before his decision. Officially.
“Bat’s head” campaign? That’s a new one to me.
Here in NW Iowa I’m starting to see ads in the local media against the Keystone XL pipeline. I don’t know how effective they are.
These Democrats will not be happy until we bitter clingers are beating our clothes against rocks by the river and driving Fred Flintstone’s car with the feet coming out of the bottom. The elites (Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio, et. al) will have carved themselves out an exception, of course.
I had no idea we had all these pipelines already. I learn so much from Ricochet.
You know what that map doesn’t show?
The other two pipelines that the Canuckistani government has approved in the meantime: one going over the Rockies to a new terminal in Prince Rupert, British Columbia, and another going east to refineries in Ontario and Quebec (not to mention ports on the Great Lakes and in Halifax).
Keystone would be great, but it’s no longer vital.
(Of course, if we lose this election, the other two parties have promised to cancel some or all of those pipeline projects. You should see all the pipe lying around in storage areas around Saskatchewan as the companies who make them wait for the results on October 19 before bothering to ship ’em to the job sites.)
She might change her mind after the primaries. As more evidence comes in, of course.
The last time, Hillary stated we would find out after she was elected.
Ponder why anyone would trust this driverless car, or trust entering same –
Misths post #8 nails it. The shale oil would be refined cleaner in the States. Now it will end up in China, meaning it will end up polluting the air. Myopic.
Meanwhile, what does this do to her Union support?
I prefer my unicorns free range.
You know what I’d like to see? a politician discussing this as “The Democrats want to Shut your Factory Down.”
We all know the left cares more about the environmentalist side of their coalition than their union members. We all know that working class whites have been getting the shaft from the leftist cultural shift these past several decades. So why don’t we try to pry them away from the Democratic party?
Only two ways to move large quantitites of crude oil overland: rail and pipeline. On a per barrel moved basis pipeline has a 25x better safety record than rail (my extrapolation of the original author’s words)..
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/ib_23.htm
As far as I know the only practicable way of moving large quantities of refined hydrocarbon large distances (gas, diesel, xylene) from the refinery to the terminal (where the tanker truck loads up) is pipeline (b/c it would be a very, very, very bad day for the neighborhood if a train carrying 75,000 bbl of gasoline derailed and caught fire). So in addition to pipelines carrying crude to refineries, there is a massive system of pipelines carrying refined product from refineries.
Product movement in pipelines is computer-controlled. The control center knows precisely where any given batch of product is at any given point in time. Instrumented leak detection shuts the pipeline down almost instantly if a leak is detected.
It’s all heavily regulated by the DOT. A technician can’t go out and turn a screw without completing an Operator Qualification assessment for the task he or she is about to perform.
Much safer than unicorn treadmills which are largely unregulated, small operator kinds of affairs.
KXL doesn’t even go through Iowa
http://keystone-xl.com/about/the-keystone-xl-oil-pipeline-project/
Well, unless the environmentalists protest/bomb the route over the Rockies.
The Energy East line to Ontario/Quebec/Halifax feels the most likely.
I don’t want to sound Santorum-ish, but HRC’s choice here betrays a snobbish preference for the white collar/public employee union donors over blue collar construction trades and the folks who would be able to construct the pipeline and make its materials.
Perhaps our candidates could pause picking through the skeletal remains of the Walker campaign to note that this choice fits perfectly with the other environmental choices of the current administration: increase electricity costs for normal families, decimate the coal industry and the railroads (and union labor) that depended on it, and designate every thimble of standing water on a farm or ranch as a protected wetland.
Oh, I know, but I think the folks behind the ad are blanketing the area to try to build up opposition. Plus, it’s big and scary and that oil might end up in your ice cream or something. OR SOMETHING! WHY DO HATE THE ENVIRONMENT?!?