So, yeah, fuck the Keystone XL pipeline.
And fuck any politician who tries to fob this disaster off on us.
Fuck you and your re-election hopes. The Senate is already gone. Lose like a winner, and go home without "Judas" hanging around your neck on oiled chains for all of history to see.
Fuck every single politician and the petro-donations given to your campaign and your party. You're already dead to me for touching that filthy money in the first place.
Charlie Pierce:
Our old friend, the Keystone XL pipeline, the continent-spanning death-funnel that would bring the world's dirtiest fossil fuel down through the most arable farmland in the hemisphere and to the refineries along the Gulf Coast, and thence to the world, has revealed in itself an incredible capacity to make people act stupidly. It has moved beyond being a public policy issue among the ascendant Republican party, and within the movement conservatism which is that party's only remaining animating force. It has moved beyond being a financial windfall for the plutocrats whose money has been rendered the lifeblood of our politics, on both sides, but especially among the Republicans, who share a few more of the plutocracy's ultimate goals than do the Democrats. Among the Republicans, and among their most fervent political zealots, the pipeline has become an ideological fetish object, something to which fealty must be paid, a measure of loyalty and devotion to every other part of the political faith, a lasting symbol of triumph over the other side, like the steles erected in Mesopotamia or the pyramids.
Its essential utility, its negligible economic impact, the environmental peril presented by the toxic goo it will carry through the fragile breadbasket of the country, the demonstrable bad-faith and neglect of the foreign corporation that will benefit from it, the blatant disregard of all potential (and, I would argue, inevitable) catastrophes inherent in the project -- all of these are beside the point. The Keystone XL pipeline must be built because it is the Keystone XL pipeline. The Keystone XL pipeline must be built only so that the people who oppose it are defeated. The Keystone XL pipeline must be built because it is no longer a construction project, it is an article of the conservative faith.
Actually, science says that the stuff that the pipeline will carry is best left in the ground. Journalism says that the State Department report was put together by a firm with close business ties to TransCanada, the Canadian corporation that is the only entity in the world that actually will profit from the project. And, when I first heard about the project, at that 2011 tent revival down in Florida, there was talk of thousands and thousands of good-paying jobs and gas prices down into the double-digits again. Now, thanks to the delay, and to the laudable agitation by the likes of Bill McKibben and the Bold Nebraska crew, even TransCanada admits that it's the permanent jobs that will total in the double digits, and Brooks can only meep about an economic impact that "isn't huge," and that the pipeline is merely a "modest-to-good" idea.
Yeah, we can't get a highway bill passed, and our bridges are falling down, and the entire rest of the world is leaving us behind on high-speed rail, but we should put in a pipeline as an "infrastructure project," and that's not even to mention the well-paying clean-up jobs that will appear as soon as the thing leaks and poisons the Ogallala Aquifer. But Brooks's muted assessment of the pipeline's benefits are not his real reason why it should be built. According to him, the pipeline should be built as a demonstration that the president "gets" the message sent a couple of weeks ago by 52 percent of the 38 percent of eligible voters who bothered to get off the couch. The pipeline should be built as a symbol of a new commitment to "governing." It should be built as the ultimate hippie punch. It should be built simply because it...is. Throw the bone into the air, David. Maybe it will turn into a spaceship.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_GOP_Must_be_Crazy
President Lincoln used to tell an amusing anecdote about a little girl who ate too much, beginning with a bunch of raisins. She got stomach-sick and began vomiting, and kept at it and at it, and her parents asked after a fashion if she was OK, and she surveyed the damage and said, "Well, I'm down to raisins."
We are down to raisins.
They're about to start fracking the largest national forest on the East coast. They're planning a new fracked-gas pipeline through my very own back yard. Billions of gallons of fracking wastewater wound up in California's aquifers, and California has very very very very little water to spare right now.
Oh, and tar sands oil is poison. Dead-bang no-bullshit poison...and pipelines leak. All of them, every time.
So.
Where do you stand?
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