Crossposted from BuffaloRidgeBlog.wordpress.com :
Having given the teabaggers some heat, equal time for the loonie left...
If you follow the discussion over at dailykos.com at all you've noticed that this has been "stop the Keystone XL pipeline" week. Every day there's been a series of anti-pipeline posts, warning us of all kinds of horrible things if the dreaded pipeline is built.
I'm not a great fan of pipelines, they're dreadfully boring. But every year DOT comes out with their annual summary statistics of mayhem and misery upon our nation's transportation "system", and they always report that pipeline is the safest form of transportation available. So while I fail to get excited by pipelines, I can see their place in the greater scheme of things transportation.
So I am somewhat bemused by the environmental left's strident opposition to an otherwise largely innocent pipeline. Well, their is a madness to their method- at the north end of said Keystone XL pipeline is the tar sands oil project up in the land of the Canucks, western prairie provinces. Now this is a truly stupid scheme to use a ton (well, actually thousands of tons) of energy to heat up oil sodden dirt to get the oil to run out of it. If you think ethanol is a net energy loser, you're wrong on that one but you might very well be right about tar sands. But their is a madness to the method of the tar sands project's oil comapany backers too... It ain't rocket science that there's a bunch of cheap coal in those western prairie provinces too. And when dyno-derived oil reaches $10 a gallon or so, their scheme might even be profitable. Of course, It'll be probably the dirtiest rot gut dead dyno oil on the planet derived from the dirt by the dirtiest means possible, which gives the environmental movement good reason to shoot down this stupid project, being the capital markets haven't had the wisdom too.
But then things get weird... The lefties have decided to kill this tar sands "oil" stupidity by stupidly plugging the supply of heavy processing machinery to the project and the potential flow of oil out. In Montana, they're in court blocking overdimension permits to haul said machinery. And to an even greater degree, they're trying to block the Keystone XL pipeline that might bring oil from the tar sands to U.S. markets via the high plains states.
Methinks the lefties need a map- The tar sands oil, if it ever becomes viable, can be exported east, west, and even north as well as south through the U.S. Same with the heavy machinery coming in- if they can't get it through Montana they can bring it by ship to B.C. or Thunder Bay ports and inland by truck and/or rail- CN, CP, and the Trans-Canada highway have some pretty impressive clearances. The oil coming out? They can pipe it to Thunder Bay and build a fleet of "SooMax" tankers to haul it out via the Seaway, or maybe pipe it to Churchill and the supertankers. And that pipeline might come in handy to transport fuel from the Bakken Formation in North Dakota or maybe even ethanol- fuel that is now moving by less safe truck and train due to lack of pipeline capacity.
Better to take on the tar sands "oil" developers directly instead of ticking off a lot of pipeline construction workers, farmers, and truckers that we may need as allies later. But hey- who am I to argue with a horde of lefties in full righteous rant?