Tar Sands Oil for the Big Oil Companies or an Extension of the Payroll Tax Cut?

According to Wikipedia, ”Bituminous sands, colloquially known as oil sands or tar sands, are a type of unconventional petroleum deposit. The sands contain naturally occurring mixtures of sand, clay, water, and a dense and extremely viscous form of petroleum technically referred to as bitumen (or colloquially "tar" due to its similar appearance, odor, and color).” At the moment, a Republican Congress is holding the payroll tax cut for millions of Americans hostage in order to hand yet again, another windfall for the American oil industry.

Americans should stand steadfastly against any attempts by Republicans in Congress to force President Obama to expedite the review of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. The President has stated that it would take at least a year to conduct a proper review of the route and the broader impact of the pipeline on the health and safety of the American people. We all need to make our feelings known as part of an effort to keep President Obama from being strong-armed into a decision being forced upon him and the rest of us by big oil interests. Any Keystone XL rider should be summarily rejected and not be allowed into the legislation it seeks to corrupt. If the House is successful in its stupidity to force passage of this oil industry initiative, then the administration should reject it by exercising its right to veto. This pipeline is not in the national interest and will hurt jobs, security, health and the environment.

This nefarious pipeline deal currently proposed for inclusion in the payroll tax-cut legislation would force the President to make an uninformed decision on the pipeline within just 60 days, pre-approving a route through Nebraska before it has even been proposed. This would then short-circuit the environmental review process for the pipeline and that is exactly why the Administration made the determination last month that an additional year of environmental review, especially of alternative routes, was necessary before any final decision could be reached.

At a time when our country is attempting to do everything it can to move forward against the headwinds of economic disaster, this pipeline deal will take us backwards. America needs clean energy policies that simultaneously create permanent jobs in manufacturing fuel efficient autos, weatherizing our homes and building solar panels and wind turbines. These policies would create hundreds of thousands of new jobs.

Instead the GOP in the House is doing everything it can to force the Obama Administration into making a premature decision regarding this pipeline. The GOP extremists in the House of Representatives are deaf and blind to the widespread opposition to this initiative, so if they manage to pass it and if somehow the U.S. Senate goes along, then Congress will leave the President with no choice but to veto the entire bill since there is no line item veto available to him.

On December 12th the U.S. State Department said that if the bill passes. It would reject the pipeline, “Should Congress impose an arbitrary deadline for the permit decision, its actions would not only compromise the process, it would prohibit the Department from acting consistently with National Environmental Policy Act requirements by not allowing sufficient time for the development of this information. In the absence of properly completing the process, the Department would be unable to make a determination to issue a permit for this project.” The White House needs to live up to and support this commitment.

Myths and scary stories have been circulated repeatedly by the oil industry and Republicans and it is up to us to debunk these weary myths once again. Despite the hype, the pipeline is not a jobs plan waiting to happen. According to the pipeline company itself, the pipeline would create only a few hundred permanent jobs and the State Department estimates no more than 6,500 temporary jobs. The only independent study conducted thus far concluded that it would in fact kill more jobs than it would create by suppressing clean-energy jobs. It is a sham and the hundreds of thousands of jobs the oil industry is dangling on a stick before a weary American public nearly beaten down by persistent unemployment is criminal.

Furthermore, the pipeline will not create energy security. Instead, it will perpetuate our addiction to oil and open up a global market for tar sands oil through the Gulf of Mexico. Brigadier General Steven Anderson, former Chief Logistician in Iraq and Afghanistan serving under General Petraeus, made the following statement: “My experiences in Iraq convinced me that the greatest threat to our security is our over-reliance on oil and that Americans must immediately take steps to cut our petro-addiction before it’s too late. The Keystone XL pipeline doesn’t help. This pipeline would move dirty oil from Canada to refineries in Texas and would set back our renewable energy efforts for at least two decades, and do absolutely nothing to move us off Middle East oil, to our enemies’ delight. It would ensure we maintain our oil addiction and delay making the tough decisions regarding energy production, management and conservation that we need to start making today.”

The new “creep” is political creep and the latest manifestation of that is the huge oil-sucking Chinese bogeyman. The threat that a pipeline to Canada’s west coast will be built if Keystone XL is delayed or cancelled is simply another effort to make China and Asia’s emerging markets something to be feared.
Make no mistake however, Big Oil wants access to those markets—and this, my friends is the real motivation behind the desire on their part for Keystone XL.

The reality is that a Canada west coast pipeline is both physically and politically impossible at the moment. The only-in-your-dreams oil pipeline to the Canadian west coast has been delayed for a year by Canadian regulators while they sort out a massive wave of public outrage expressing identical climate and safety concerns that have plagued the U.S. Project. It is becoming more apparent at this point, the Canadian project will never be built.

As American carbon emissions have increased to their highest recorded levels, this pipeline would add nearly one million additional barrels of the dirtiest oil on the planet into the mix. Canadian Association of Petroleum’s own numbers on tar sands greenhouse gas emissions are on the rise and tar sands is getting dirtier, not cleaner.

The ridiculous charge that this is just some kind of pet issue for environmentalists is just false. Major companies, mayors, farmers, religious leaders, business leaders, scientists, veterans and workers across North America are saying “No” to tar sands.

As usual however, Republicans are more interested in handing Big Oil a freebie than in taking care of the interests of the American people. Write your Congress People and Senators, there should be no deal on the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.