Seeing yesterday's posts about mounting progressive efforts to try and block an environmentally questionable pipeline to transport tar-sands generated petroleum from Canada to the U.S., I was tempted to post a contrarian comment voicing my belief that such efforts were delusional. My reasoning....the economic and political forces behind a project of this magnitude are simply too large to halt and as with so many things, a timid Obama administration would not/could not risk handing the GOP blather machine another weapon with the Presidential campaign starting to ramp up.
My fears appear to have been proved true. The New York Times reports minutes ago that the U.S. State Department has given its OK to the project.
The Obama administration gave a crucial green light on Friday to a proposed 1,711-mile pipeline that would carry heavy oil from Canada across the Great Plains to terminals in Oklahoma and the Gulf Coast, saying the project would provide a secure source of energy without significant damage to the environment.
The State Department said in an environmental impact statement that the pipeline’s owner, TransCanada, had reduced the risks of an accident to an acceptable level and that the benefits of importing oil from a friendly neighbor outweighed the potential costs.
My reading of the opposition was less the risks of the pipeline itself, but that the generation of petroleum from tar sands is itself a highly polluting process which will require billions of gallons of water and other fuel byproducts needed to convert the tar-like sands to a transportable petroleum product suitable for further refining.
As numerous observers have noted, as we approach (or maybe already pass) peak petroleum output worldwide, the pressures to find new resources from such sources as deeper water drilling, Arctic extraction, more and more of it offshore, and schemes like tar sands, the environmental costs are going to be more and onerous, the costs ever steeper.
But weaning the U.S. from its reliance on petroleum based energy supplies and replacing it with green sources such as wind and solar, is going to be a nasty and brutal fight, and the ability of environmentalists to oppose such moves will always be an uphill struggle.
In the meantime, more and more GOP presidential candidates seem to believe that one of the biggest obstacles to American economic progress is the Environmental Protection Agency and its "strangling" regulations. Taking that approach now will throw the door open to even greater environmental risks in the years ahead.