The Anger Blog-Anger over the Keystone Pipeline
Published on the date shown and kept as written. This is opinion about politics and public life, not clinical guidance.
Since when did the Keystone XL Pipeline become the answer to reducing dependency on foreign oil while creating 100,000-200,000 jobs? Republican presidential hopefuls and conservative pundits, as well as TV ads run by Big Oil, certainly are touting this pipeline as a "no brainer" for solving our country's energy and unemployment problems. However, if you dig a little deeper (no pun intended), you may see things from a somewhat different perspective.
First of all, do the pro-pipeline estimates represent permanent jobs? I don't think so. There are accounts that report the number of permanent jobs to be created (i.e., after construction) as low as 4,000.
Second, how environmentally safe is it? The existing Keystone Pipeline has leaked many times this past year, and the mining of these tar sands will likely intensify the effects of global warming. The cost of the mining of tar sands and the building of the pipeline would probably increase the cost of domestic oil. And last (the most misunderstood piece of this whole issue), development of this resource would not lower our dependence upon foreign oil, because most of what the new pipeline supplied would be sold on the global market.
How convenient that the pipeline ends near the Gulf of Mexico, where the oil produced can be readily shipped to other nations around the world!