A Message To Obama – Just Say No To The Keystone Pipe

A Commentary by Doug Draper

When I picked up The Globe and Mail this past February 3^rd and saw the headline at the top of the front page reading; ‘Obama won’t speed Keystone decision’, the first word that crossed my mind was ‘good’.

Canada’s Tar Sands atrocity. Let’s hope Obama has the fortitude to say No to it

“Barack Obama is refusing to give Ottawa the quick answer it wants on the Keystone XL pipeline,” the Globe story goes on to say. And that’s Obama’s continued stance on it despite a report, released by the U.S. State Department this January31st, that appears to conclude that piping diluted bitumen from Canada’s tar sands to refineries in Texas would have little or no net impact on the environment.

The report is fanning the hopes of Keystone supporters with its ranking of the pipeline as a less risky way of transporting tar sands goo from Alberta to Texas than trucks or trains. That’s assuming that Obama says yes to his country having anything more to do with the outfall from these filthy tar sands operations in the first place.

Ah, but the report appears to have an answer for that too. It concludes that if the U.S. refuses to import any more of this stuff for refining into a salable petroleum product, some other country (most likely China) will.

Therefore, the impact gases from the tar sands will continue to have on the planet’s atmosphere and climate may grow, but won’t change if the U.S. decides to trash this pipeline proposal. And if that’s the case, the U.S. might just as well be the benefactor of any and all jobs – however temporary most of them may be – that the Keystone pipeline delivers.

That’s akin to saying to Obama that if he doesn’t agree to engage in this particular raping of Mother Nature, someone else will. Either way, the good old mother is going to get raped. So why not go for the fast money and cash in on the spoils. 

This U.S. State Department report is a study in perverse logic and false choices, and it is disturbing to see the degree to which supporters of the pipeline and mainstream media operations in Canada and the U.S., including major Canadian papers like the Globe and National Post, view it as a source for optimism that Obama will cave in favour to this pipeline to ecological disaster. 

Sadly, some political pundits in the U.S. are surmising that the only reason Obama is still holding out on a final decision on Keystone is he wants to use it as a bargaining card with Republic and more conservative members of U.S. Congress to get other programs, like immigration reform and an increase in the minimum wage, approved.

Let’s hope that isn’t true.

Let’s hope that Obama says ‘no’ to this pipeline and says, you know what, let’s go for more renewable energy alternatives in spite of Harper’s lure to the U.S. to go for more dirty oil.

In the meantime, why aren’t more Canadians, including those who support Harper and, at the same time, pretend to be more business heads, asking the Harper government why, in the meantime, we are piping off this tar sands crude to other countries to be refined and sold. Why aren’t we – for the time we are still shifting from petroleum to other sources of energy – not at least refining this crud in Canada, and keep all of the thousands of jobs piping and refining it here.

Why is Stephen Harper less interested in refining this resource here than he is in selling the raw crud off to other countries to create what he and his government claims would amount to up to 40,000 jobs in the United States? 

In the long run, why is Harper, who claims to be such a champion for Canadian jobs and business, not working with private industry to refine this stuff in Canada and to keep the jobs here in this country, where we sure do need them? 

Why is Harper not moving forward with efforts that even China is reportedly making these days to develop renewable energy sources. Those include developing better solar panels and batteries for fueling homes and cars that can, more and more, get by without oil. 

Obama declared in his book, ‘The Audacity of Hope’, published before he was elected president more than five years ago, that the country that opens the door to renewable energy alternatives to petroleum will lead the 21^st century.

It is becoming abundantly clear, thanks to a Harper government that is in bed with petro corporations mining the tar sands, that Canada will not be that country. Canada will be the country remembered for scorched earth, strip mining for tar oil.

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