Obama’s energy March madness (from the Ex. Dir. of the Sierra Club)
Barack Obama paid his first-ever presidential visit to Oklahoma this past week to make a speech announcing that his administration would “fast-track” a TransCanada pipeline from Cushing, OK, to the Gulf Coast. Although he said the purpose was to reduce an oil “glut” in the Midwest, it’s no secret this is the southern portion of the Keystone XL pipeline that TransCanada wants to build so it can transport tar-sands oil to Gulf refineries.
The president also touted his “all of the above” energy strategy, leading off with statistics that should have been enough to make the American Petroleum Institute swoon: millions of acres opened for gas and oil exploration, 75 percent of our potential offshore resources opened to drilling, quadruple the number of operating rigs in the U.S. — “enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth.”
Spring is in the air — but has the president really fallen madly in love with dirty energy? As usual, the answer is complicated.
(snip)
The president, though, is supposed to lead. At several times, both as a candidate and as president, Obama has been able to transcend partisan bickering and gamesmanship and unite Americans around a higher purpose. Whether it was his race relations speech in Philadelphia, his moving remarks after the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords and 18 others in Arizona, or even his more recent proposal last fall of a commonsense jobs package, the president has shown a unique gift for capturing what’s important, for showing that Americans of all political persuasions share common values, and for inspiring people to work together to solve complex problems. On his best days, the president can do this better than anyone in public life. But at the moment, when it comes to oil drilling and gas prices, it feels like we’ve got more of a politician than a leader.
http://blog.sfgate.com/mbrune/2012/03/25/obamas-energy-march-madness/
