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" Something very interesting happened up in the Commonwealth (God Save It!) on Monday, where we are having a right nice little election to replace John Kerry in the U.S. Senate. The Democratic primary \u2014 from whom the eventual senator likely will emerge \u2014 between congresscritters Ed Markey and Steve Lynch is something of a throwback to the old Democratic party split that eventually sank the Roosevelt coalition, and a real Hibernian slugfest besides. Enter Steve Steyer, who is that most rara of avis \u2014 a highly motivated liberal gozillionnaire willing to toss his money around in things like state primary campaigns. Steyer wrote an open letter to Lynch, who&amp;#039;s depending vitally on union support in the primary, challenging Lynch to oppose the construction of our old friend, the Keystone XL pipeline, which has considerable labor support, despite the fact that it will provide very few jobs, even if you count the strippers. And Steyer&amp;#039;s not afraid to play hardball. Keystone might not run through Massachusetts, but its construction would be the decidedly wrong energy option for the Commonwealth and America. This isn&amp;#039;t just another pipeline. It&amp;#039;s a 40-year financial commitment to extract tar sands (amongst the dirtiest forms of oil), which will drive up the pollution that is contributing to extreme weather, hurting our economy and threatening our children&amp;#039;s health. Saying you&amp;#039;re for solving climate change while supporting Keystone is like claiming to be a Red Sox fan - except when they play the Yankees. Ruh-roh. That&amp;#039;s a low blow. Because climate change is such a serious issue, and because it is on the ballot as never before, we are asking you, Congressman Lynch, today to do one of two things by high noon on Friday, March 22. Either act like a real Democrat and oppose Keystone&amp;#039;s dirty energy. Or, get a sworn, binding statement - with securities law enforcement - from TransCanada and the refiners that all of the Keystone-shipped oil will stay here. If you can&amp;#039;t or won&amp;#039;t do either, then you&amp;#039;ll be showing us that you stand with Republicans and a wealthy foreign oil company and against solving the climate crisis. You&amp;#039;ll be standing for the wrong energy future for America. We will then immediately launch an aggressive public education campaign, including: investigative reports about your record, public events targeting interested Democratic voters, a college-based get-out-the-vote effort, community-to-community activity in cities and towns with the worst childhood asthma rates, and a robust social media effort to help voters understand that their climate interest is on the ballot. The nicest thing about having fck-you money is that you get to say fk-you to people. That a pipeline that doesn&amp;#039;t run anywhere near Massachusetts could be in play as an issue in a Massachusetts primary is a good indicator of the success that its opponents have had in nationalizing that particular issue, and the general issue of climate change, in which Massachusetts does have some skin in the game, since we keep losing chunks of our coastlines to our new biweekly nor&amp;#039;easters. I could be wrong, but I don&amp;#039;t think Wellesley&amp;#039;s ready to be a beach community yet. On the other side, we have Jonah Goldberg, who believes Canada is stealing our nation&amp;#039;s rightful place as the leader of the movement to burn down the planet, and is embarrassed by this. Opponents of the pipeline want America to lead by example, and the pipeline is a step in the wrong direction. &amp;quot;Who wants the U.S. to facilitate the dirtiest extraction of the dirtiest crude from tar sands in Canada&amp;#039;s far north?&amp;quot; asks New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Well, first of all, the Canadians do! Second, if we won&amp;#039;t, the Chinese would be happy to facilitate (a point Friedman ignores). Canada and China have made it clear that if the U.S. doesn&amp;#039;t allow the pipeline to go south, they&amp;#039;ll make one that goes west to the Canadian coast. In other words, the oil is going to be pumped out no matter what. Moreover, the risks of a bad spill increase if we don&amp;#039;t build the pipeline. Oil tankers heading to China are a bigger threat to the environment than a pipe over or through dry land to American refineries. But my aim isn&amp;#039;t to defend the pipeline, which strikes me as a no-brainer in every way. It&amp;#039;s to make a larger point. If the idea is that America is somehow &amp;quot;leading by example&amp;quot; when it kills projects like Keystone, or cracks down on oil drilling on federal lands, as Obama has done, then we&amp;#039;re not fooling anyone - not even the Canadians!  Not even the Canadians! They&amp;#039;re not fooled. They know a country full of dumb suckers when they see it. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a17871/massachusetts-senate-race-keystone-xl-031913/>