Hi all, apologies for a brief diary and back to work. Yesterday at lunch, after a restless night thinking about climate change/Keystone, I decided to cobble some links together of what I considered worthy articles on Keystone, and put them in a WH.gov petition.
I dont' see any active Keystone petitions on there right now. I'm just hoping if it gets lucky and requires a response, that someone in the White House will read another perspective than the Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) from State Department, which was basically written from the usual, "this will all be fine" point of view. In the SEIS, the effects on climate are minimized (even though using their numbers is a strong case against it), and there's no real way they can take into account "knock on" effects on future development of other pipelines and projects (see the Bloomberg article for some developer statements).
And of course, the SEIS won't mention the effect on Obama's (and Kerry's) legacies of being on the wrong side of history in one of the first big battles on climate change, on one of the few issues where one person can make a huge difference with the stroke (or holding onto of) the pen.
Even if you don't sign the petition, you might find the links useful. In addition to signing the petition, even more importantly send an email to keystonecomments@state.gov to submit a public comment on the SEIS (I believe this can be done for at least a few more weeks). Other diaries have covered the problems with SEIS, but also the links below have info that could be relevant to addressing some of the problems in the SEIS in a public comment.
The link(please share if your'e inclined): http://wh.gov/...
The petition and its links:
Acknowledge the climate impacts, and historical impacts of the
upcoming Keystone XL decision, unmentioned in State's EIS
We the people request that President Obama and Secretary Kerry read the
following articles.
We request that "if congress doesn't act on climate change",
President Obama does.
If the "science is screaming at us", literally from outside the
White House gates, we ask that Secretary Kerry listen to it.
http://swampland.time.com/...
http://www.nytimes.com/...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
http://www.skepticalscience.com/...
http://www.bloomberg.com/...