In the same paper is a column by Robert Samuelson, discussing the proposed pipeline for oil extracted from sand deposits in northern Canada, south across both Canada and the United States, all the way to refineries on the gulf coast of Texas. Samuelson favors the project despite admitting there are serious environmental dangers. Samuelson says pipes do crack (or rupture) and mentions recent spills into the Kalamazoo and the Yellowstone Rivers. He also acknowledges that oil extraction from sands is "messy" and requires large amounts of water. Greenhouse gasses, he says, are two to three times as great as in standard oil production.
In spite of all this, Samuelson feels the pipeline is a swell idea. Two paragraphs after his comment about greenhouse gas, he says they would not be significant. Canada is determined to go ahead with this project, and if there is no American pipeline they'll just export their oil to China and India, and where will we be then? Twenty thousand jobs will be created building the pipeline, Samuelson says, and in a time of high unemployment this will be good, and American companies will sell large amounts of equipment to Canada. We can presume that advances in technology will reduce greenhouse emissions in the future.
Dipping his toes into foreign policy, Samuelson claims the pipeline will bring us into closer association with Canada. The Canadians will continue to do business with us, their largest customers.
When we consider all of this, he concludes, "we should just say yes," to the pipeline.
Here is what I think. If the Canadians must engage in this practice, and if they would sell their oil to China and India if we don't buy it, so what? The international supply of oil would remain about the same and the price of oil on international markets would reflect Canadian supplies, whether their oil goes to us or somewhere else. Why risk our own environment it that's the case?
Even if the Canadians build a pipeline down to the 49th parallel, I can't see the necessity of continuing to roll it along all the way to Texas. Why not build refineries in Montana or North Dakota and turn the oil into gasoline or electricity there? The gasoline could then be shipped by rail to wherever it's needed, reducing the potential for spills and creating jobs both in the construction of the refineries and the upgrading of railroads. The number of those jobs would, I think, be greater than Mr. Samuelson's 20,000 pipeline workers. They wouldn't all be temp jobs either. New refineries would not be as dirty as old ones.Whatever acid deposition the refineries create would be airmailed right back to Canada.
Some wattage is lost along electric transmission lines and there are two other objections to them: they're an eyesore, and they do kill migratory fowl and raptors. Still, as opposed to an oil spill onto our soils and rivers, the environmental cost is lower.
The idea of running the oil all the way to Texas gulf ports (read Houston) sounds to me as though they're contemplating shipping it further. If that's so, it negates the whole argument that we need the oil for domestic consumption.
What we really need is a program of conversion to a post-petroleum society on the order of the Marshall Plan of sixty years ago. Unfortunately, our hopes in President Obama and the Democrats in this regard have been disappointing.
By the way, isn't the very essence of the word "conservative" a reference to conserving, that is not using things all up? Shouldn't people who call themselves conservatives be in the forefront of the environmentalist movement? Instead, they are tripping all over themselves to sacrifice tomorrow for the sake of today.
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