Quote:
Originally Posted by CaptainMidnight
Nevergaveitathought is exactly right. Oil (at least oil of similar qualities/grades) is a fungible commodity, and since the Canadians are going to produce the tar sands oil whether we buy it or not, the global supply/demand balance will not be significantly altered by our Keystone Pipleline decision.
But this is about far more than price. In a world where unstable areas supply so much of our energy, and since the Iranians continually threaten to stop the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, we need to secure all the steady supply potentially available.
I might also point out that we have a number of very valuable trade and other relationships with Canada. It's a significant export market, and that's critically important in these days of huge U.S. balance-of-payments deficits.
Sticking it to the Canadians for no good reason is ridiculously stupid.
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Everybody is a lil right and a lil wrong.
Muchado about very little.
http://www.chron.com/business/steffy...of-2642909.php
The greatest spill threat from the Keystone XL wasn't oil, it was hyperbole.
After the Obama administration's decision to deny a permit for TransCanada to build the cross-border pipeline, the Internet and the airwaves were awash in exaggerated claims. Some lawmakers blasted the president as a job-killer, saying the loss of the pipeline meant the loss of a quarter-million prospective jobs.
Meanwhile, the actor
Robert Redford wrote on his Huffington Post blog that the decision is a victory of "historic proportions for people from throughout the pipeline path and all across America who have waged an uphill, years-long fight against one of the most nightmarish fossil fuel projects of our time."
Imagine: a pipeline that doesn't even exist is more "nightmarish" than, say, the Deepwater Horizon accident in which 11 men died and almost 5 million barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico, or the Exxon Valdez accident that dumped 257,000 barrels into Alaska's Prince William Sound.
The Keystone showdown was a battle of phantom horrors. It might have shipped heavy crude through a pipeline for which there were no guarantees that an accident wouldn't happen. Some of the oil might have been refined in Texas and exported. (Exporting, as I wrote last week, really
does create, or at least sustain, thousands of permanent jobs.)
There were so many things the Keystone line might or might not have done, and the claims escalated daily as the rhetoric built to a crescendo of what can only be described as historic proportions.
The real cost of the battle, though, was in the loss of perspective. Wishful thinking, obstinacy and inflammatory rhetoric - whether from the oil industry or environmental groups - isn't the basis for a national energy strategy. That requires reasoned debate.
Permit was real object
From the beginning, the fight wasn't about a pipeline; it was about a permit. Even if the State Department granted the permission for the line to cross the U.S.-Canadian border, it didn't mean the pipeline would be built.
As I wrote last year, an influx of Canadian crude into the northern U.S. has caused the flow of oil from the Gulf Coast to the Midwest to slow to a trickle.
Owners of those pipelines have yet to reverse their flows, but it's a safe bet that if TransCanada announced it was going forward with the Keystone line, at least some of them would.
That's what happened when Houston-based Enterprise Product Partners said it would move forward with the Wrangler pipeline from Cushing, Okla., to Houston. ConocoPhillips sold to Enbridge its stake in the Seaway pipeline, which follows a similar route but flowed north from the Gulf. Enbridge and Enterprise, which also owned part of the line, said they would reverse the flow.
If other pipeline operators follow Seaway's lead, the economic rationale for Keystone may disappear.
Yes was correct answer
In making its decision, the administration was supposed to determine whether the pipeline was in the national interest. From that standpoint, the permit should have been approved. As I've argued before, while the U.S. may not immediately need the Keystone line, a strategy of securing energy supplies as crude becomes constrained in the global market makes sense.
When and if it should be built, though, should be left to the companies that have to put their capital at risk.
Redford seems to believe that by blocking the Keystone permit, at least until TransCanada reapplies for it, environmentalists scored a victory for "clean" energy. They did nothing of the sort. They have not made clean energy more affordable, more reliable or more available.
Nor would the Keystone pipeline by itself have made us more secure, had a meaningful effect on world oil prices or been a magic bullet for high unemployment.
So Keystone is dead, at least for now. We need to bury the rhetoric along with it.
