Thoughts on the Keystone Pipeline, John Boehner’s responses on Twitter, and Bernie Sander’s response on Google+
Speaker Boehner has been all over Twitter today, saying Obama is destroying American jobs and shipping them overseas. Well, excuse me, but it’s the multinational energy corporations that are shipping jobs overseas. I’m sure Obama would prefer the jobs to stay here at home.
And Senator Sanders is correct, we need to help lead the world in generating green technologies and green energy. Yes, it’ll help with global warming, but at the same time it’s plain to see fossil-fuels are a dying breed. If we have to extract from tar sands and resort to fracking mountain sides, then clearly we’ve reached the point where costs are marginally rising. There’s no real escape from that unless there’s drastic change in technology.
So we either have to drastically change our technology to increase fossil-fuel extraction and refinement efficiency. Or, we have to drastically change our technology to make alternative, renewable fuels more cost efficient. Either way, it’s a question of cost efficiency.
Sure, there’s already infrastructure in place for fossil-fuel production, refinement, and distribution. But we already know these fuels are not-renewable and will eventually run out. At that point, all the infrastructure that we continued to fix and “update” becomes pointless. Roman aqueducts.
So much of the energy industry’s cost is in research, exploration, and development. Why not have a concerted effort by these already established corporations to really make a push to change their product mixture? Who else would be in a better position — money and intellectual capital — that the large energy corporations. They could be leading America (and the world) to a much better place employment wise, climate wise, and cost wise.
If they choose.
Sanders Statement on Keystone XL Pipeline:
The United States must help lead the world in combating global warming and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It would be incomprehensible to give approval to a tar sands oil project when producing tar sands oil creates 82 percent more carbon emissions than conventional oil, and when it poses the risk of extremely damaging oil spills. I agree with NASA scientist James Hansen who has stated that fully exploiting the tar sands would mean ‘game over’ for our efforts to reverse global warming.
