The proposed pipeline has been a political hot topic, and both political parties may be stretching the truth. Republicans, along with TransCanada, continue to overstate the amount of jobs we’re talking about with this project. On the other side, Democrats have been citing safety and the environment as reasons this project should not move forward. Americans are caught in the middle, with various media outlets providing various numbers surrounding pros and cons to this project. As we see, the center of this debate gravitates around the potential economic benefits that can be added by the pipeline against its likely adverse effects on the climate.
According to congressman Fred Upton, there’s really no downside to constructing the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, the Keystone pipeline would create 20,000 American jobs and nearly 120,000 indirect jobs as well as increase revenues for state and local governments along its route. Sure, Keystone will add many construction jobs but most of them will constitute only temporary construction jobs. According to TransCanada, the amount of permanent jobs will lay in the hundreds. This is a huge area of misinformation. With November elections less than a year away, some politicians wants to demonstrate the amount of jobs that they have helped to add into the economy by inflating potential jobs added and advertising it.
Well obviously getting more Canadian oil into the United States helps solve the most important energy security problem in the country, and that is 250 million cars and trucks that need oil every day, and much of that oil is coming in from the Middle East, Nigeria, and Venezuela. Canada is a friendly democracy that has good environmental laws and a very stellar human rights record and based on the specifics of the Keystone, this is no different than any other mining operation.
To alleviate some of the concerns of the activists, all of this land where the oil sand is mined will be re-vegetated after the mining. According to Greenpeace international, the area will completely recover afterwards. Extracting companies will use the process of basically steam cleaning the oil to get the oil off the sand, and then putting the sand back, and then eventually putting vegetation on it. In the case of Keystone, a recent analysis by the State Department said it is unlikely that construction of the pipeline would alter global greenhouse gas emissions.
For many activists, the opposition to Keystone isn’t really about the pipeline; some have admitted that no single project will tip the balance on climate change. It seems that they want Obama to use the Keystone as a symbolic opportunity to move America away from fossil fuels. So the fight over Keystone is largely about ideology, and it makes me wonder if Keystone is to environmentalists what Obamacare is to many conservatives – an unfortunate line in the sand that ignores nuance and overturns a rationale debate over finding solutions to very intricate societal issues.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/19/us/politics/what-does-the-proposed-keystone-xl-pipeline-entail.html
http://www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2014/02/protestors_march_in_kalamazoo.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/state-to-release-keystones-final-environmental-impact-statement-friday/2014/01/31/3a9bb25c-8a83-11e3-a5bd-844629433ba3_story.html
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/09/16/the-president-and-the-pipeline?currentPage=all