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" You have to admire the sheer ballsiness of it. As part of the usual Friday news dump, on last Friday in particular, when the entire Beltway was sequestering itself until it went blind, the State Department released a report on our old friend, the Keystone XL pipeline, the proposal to bring the world&amp;#039;s dirtiest fossil fuel from a manmade ecological catastrophe in western Canada down the spine of the continent to depots in Texas, where it will be sold to China while everyone in this country wonders why the price of gas keeps going up. And, lo and behold, the State Department told us not to worry our silly little heads about the whole thing. A draft State Department report concludes that building the Keystone XL pipeline would not speed up development of Canada&amp;#039;s oil sands, dealing a blow to environmentalists who claim Keystone would worsen climate change. The report from the State Department says the Canada-to-Texas pipeline would have little impact on the environment. &amp;quot;Approval or denial of the proposed project is unlikely to have a substantial impact on the rate of development in the oil sands, or on the amount of heavy crude oil refined in the Gulf Coast area,&amp;quot; the report says. Jesus H. Christ on a respirator, they&amp;#039;re not even trying very hard any more. We need the pipeline to become more energy independent, but building it or not building it won&amp;#039;t have an impact on how much oil we refine. It won&amp;#039;t speed up the development of the tar sands \u2014 which, if we are taking the threat of climate change seriously, would be left in the damn ground where they belong \u2014 and that&amp;#039;s why the extraction industries and the politicians they&amp;#039;ve sublet are moving heaven and earth \u2014 in the latter case, quite literally \u2014 and taking people&amp;#039;s land in Nebraska, and screaming bloody murder at every delay. They don&amp;#039;t need the project, and that&amp;#039;s why they want the project built so badly. And the State Department is falling for this malarkey. This is about power. It always has been. This is about an industry that wants what it wants when it wants it, and to hell with self-government and the continued existence of the human race, for all that. This is about frustrated plutocracy, lashing out at what&amp;#039;s left of the people&amp;#039;s ability to command their own destinies. It wants what it wants when it wants it. It is possible that the State Department under Secretary John Kerry, who has been more of a hardbar on climate change in his days in the Senate, will take a different tack, but this is about the power of heedless appetite. And. so far, the wrong side is winning. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a17675/keystone-pipeline-state-department-report-030413/>