A Birds Eye View by Jimmy Cardinal Nothing stops elected officials from doing their jobs quite like an election year. A great example of this is the Keystone XL Pipeline. President Obama continues to delay making a decision on the pipeline because for him and his party it could be a lose-lose situation. While there are Democrats who support building the pipeline because of the jobs that its construction will bring to the Midwest, the party as a whole remains divided on the issue. With a divided party, the president has decided that he will not pick a side until after the mid-term elections in November. The president is putting politics ahead of actually governing and we’re paying the price. The pipeline would provide a much more environmentally safe option to transport oil from the tar sands of Canada down to the refineries of Texas. The other option for transporting that oil is by rail, which is a much less safe alternative. It is time for the president to put politics aside and start governing. He should approve the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline now, not wait until after this fall’s elec-tions. The State Department has already said that building the pipeline will not have any major effect on carbon pollution because tar sands oil is going to be extracted regardless of whether the pipeline is or isn’t built. So this isn’t a question of whether tar sands oil should be extracted or not, it’s a question of how that oil will be transported. And on that question, the environmentally responsible answer is to build the pipeline. The pipeline would take 830,000 barrels of oil a day off of the rails, where it would be much more vulnerable to spills and accidents. I have advocated for alternative energy develop-ment in this column countless times. Whether or not the United States builds this pipeline doesn’t change that. The government should be investing in developing alternative energy as well as funding research that will move us towards sustainability in the future. In addition, the United States needs to recognize that global climate change is both a real phenomenon and that it is anthropogenic (man-made). But moving the United States from its current dependency on fossil fuels to a more sustainable model cannot happen overnight. We need to make the transition as smooth as possible. One thing that we can do to make that transition smooth is to focus on buying oil from allies like Canada and becoming less dependent on oil from the volatile Middle East. All of these factors should be combined into a large-scale, comprehensive energy policy. Along that line of thinking, building this pipeline not only creates much-needed jobs here in the Midwest as well as providing for safe transport of oil from Canada to Texas, but it also makes the United States safer by making us less dependent on nations in the Middle East that do not always have the United States’ best interests in mind. By developing energy resources here in North Ameri-ca, we create a more secure nation. The more reliable energy resources we have here, on our own continent, the less vulnerable we become to instability in other parts of the world. So as much as the Keystone XL Pipeline is an economic and an energy issue, it is also an issue of national security. In foreign policy, presidents often have a grand strategy. This grand strategy is an overarching vision of what the president wants to accomplish during their administration in terms of interna-tional relations and global politics. What we need now is an energy grand strategy—a vision that sets a clean, sustainable future as the final destination but recognizes the realities of the present. This grand strategy would ensure that everyone, including the dozens of federal agencies that deal with energy policy, would be on the same page, moving in the same direction. This is something that cannot be said for the current state of affairs in regard to energy policy. Right now, there are moments where the dozens of agencies are all moving in different directions. It’s time for Presi-dent Obama to bring those agencies together under one uniting vision and stop putting party politics ahead of good government. A good place to start would be the building of the Keystone XL Pipeline.
Posted on: Wed, 07 May 2014 14:58:24 +0000
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