Start planning your next vacation, kids.
PROBLEM SOLVED FOREVER:
The debate over the Keystone XL pipeline has gotten pretty heated and Kinder Baumgardner has an idea to cool the emotions: a really long bike path.
The creative director for the SWA Group, an Houston-based architectural firm that designed Google Inc.’s corporate campus, says building the lane along Keystone’s path through the country’s mid-section could turn what is now a source of rancor into a tourist attraction.
SWA is a serious group; alas, their proposal to create a 1,300 mile bike path so that you may accompany Canadian tar slurry on its way to the ports of the Gulf Coast is not being taken very seriously at all. Environmentalists are unimpressed with the compromise of helping destroy the planet's atmosphere in exchange for a "interpretive display"-studded path celebrating the effort; TransCanada says they won't be able to build permanent structures in the pipeline easement, just the pipeline part of it, because rules and such.
Perhaps the biggest flaw in the plan, however, is that everyone knows bike paths are a secret plot by the United Nations to make us subservient to lesser animals like cows and alpacas and whatnot. If you think the Keystone expansion is controversial now, just wait until the conservative right got hold of the idea that the pipeline would be bicycle friendly. Come to think of it, that could be a fine plan: If Obama mandated a bicycle lane next to the pipeline, conservative opinion on the project would reverse itself overnight. Rand Paul would give a speech. Ted Cruz would give a speech. You'd see the entire conservative establishment lying down in front of the bulldozers to stop Keystone XL from ever being built.