Christie Aschwanden — Keystone XL Wasn’t About Jobs Or The Climate — It Was All Politics

Parses the BS.

Five Thirty Eight
Keystone XL Wasn’t About Jobs Or The Climate — It Was All Politics
Christie Aschwanden

Am I dreaming? What's behind Obama's rejection of Keystone? Has he gorged the corporate interests enough? (TPP)

Obama just came out and rejcted Keystone XL pipeline. Amazing. What is behind this? Does he feel he has already gorged big corporate interests enough with trillions to the banks, military spending, war, Obamacare and of course, TPP? Does he feel that it's okay to take a break?

President Barack Obama has decided to reject TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL pipeline, ending seven years of debate over an infrastructure project that swelled into one of the most contentious environmental issues of his presidency, according to a people familiar with action. Read more.

And all the Obama lovers will be cheering their great leader, acting in the interests of the earth and the environment. Meanhwile, TPP alone makes a mockery of this. Building it now after his awful trade deal would have been literally meaningless.

Hey, but don't worry...our next president, Hillary Rodham Clinton, will surely resurrect this and get it passed. You can thank the women of America.

Justin Trudeau...with liberals like these who needs Conservatives?

Canada's newly elected supposedly "liberal" Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, is apparently a big fan of the Keystone Pipeline and the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement.

However, Trudeau supports the Keystone XL pipeline—Canada's bid to find new markets for its vast carbon reserves in the Alberta tar sands—a position that puts the Liberal leader at odds with campaigners and with Barack Obama.

Trudeau has close ties to Keystone. David Gagnier, his campaign co-chair, was forced to step down last week after it emerged he had written a memo to TransCanada, the company building the pipeline, offering lobbying advice.

And this...

During the campaign, Trudeau came under attack by the Conservatives and the New Democrats for declining to make up his mind on the TPP.

Day 9... did Trudeau take a position on TPP yesterday? No... will he today?... #elxn42

— Trudeau TPP Watch (@TrudeauTPPWatch) October 14, 2015

The Liberals’ leader has criticized the secrecy surrounding the pact and said he would have to read the text of the agreement before making up his mind. His party, however, endorsed the TPP on principle when it was announced October 5, saying it “strongly supports free trade.”

Sounds like a "Hillary Clinton" type of liberal to me.

Robin Broad — Governments and Activists are Fighting the Corporate “Right” to Sue Governments

This post is drawn from a new article regular TCB contributor Robin Broad wrote with John Cavanagh, “A Strategic Fight Against Corporate Rule,” The Nation, February 3, 2014.

TripleCrisis
Governments and Activists are Fighting the Corporate “Right” to Sue Governments
Robin Broad

Republican hostage taking options on the debt ceiling said to be blowing up

According to Brett Logiurotto over at Business Insider, the Republicans don't have enough votes to go with debt ceiling hostage taking options like Keystone Pipeline and "risk corridors." So there's talk of actually passing a "clean raise." That would be nice for a change.

Peter Z. Scheer — Koch Brothers Stand to Make $100 Million From Keystone Pipeline

Activists succeeded in getting the Obama administration to delay a Keystone decision, but many rich and influential people, beyond the Koch brothers, stand to benefit from the pipeline’s construction and it will take a huge effort from environmentalists to counter their sway in Washington.

truthdig
Koch Brothers Stand to Make $100 Million From Keystone Pipeline
Peter Z. Scheer

Correction: That's 100 BILLION not 100 million.


The Huffington Post
Keystone XL Pipeline Could Yield $100 Billion For Koch Brothers
Jared Gilmour
(h/t Mike Norman in the commets)

Fascism Alert — Police Trained to Treat Keystone XL Protesters as 'Terrorists'

Bold Nebraska, a grassroots landowner advocacy group, obtained TransCanada's presentation slides (below) via a Freedom of Information Act request to the Nebraska State Patrol. These slides revealed that TransCanada provided training to both federal and local police forces on how to crack down on environmental activists, even going so far as to train them to arrest the activists under anti-terrorism statutes.

Lauren Regan, legal coordinator for Tar Sands Blockade and executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center said, “This is clear evidence of the collusion between TransCanada and the federal government assisting local police to unlawfully monitor and harass political protestors.”

AlterNet
Police Trained to Treat Keystone XL Protesters as 'Terrorists'
Alyssa Figueroa

Greg Palast, The Koch Brothers, Hugo Chavez and the XL Pipeline

Why in the world would America pistol-whip Mother Nature to bring oil to Texas? I mean, it’s just plain weird to suck heavy tar oil out of Canada, drag it across the entire middle of the USA to import it into the oil-exporting Lone Star State.

Here’s where a little lesson in oil chemistry comes in. You can’t just throw any old crude oil into an oil refinery. These giant filth factories are actually quite sensitive. The refineries of the Texas Gulf Coast are optimized for heavy crude.

It would cost billions of dollars to rebuild the giant Flint Hills Corpus Christi Refinery, owned by Koch Industries, to use the less-polluting Texas oil drilled nearby.

The Kochs need heavy crude. But the Brothers Koch have a problem. Heavy crude is controlled by a heavy dude – President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

In case you haven’t heard, the US Department of Energy now says Venezuela, not Saudi Arabia, has the world’s largest petroleum reserve--including the overwhelming majority of the planet’s heavy crude.

And Chavez is not giving it away. “We are no longer an oil colony, Mr. Palast,” Chavez told me in one of our meet-ups in Caracas.

GregPalast.com
The Koch Brothers, Hugo Chavez 
and the XL Pipeline
Greg Palast

The scoop on the Keystone XL pipeline

The Oil Goes to China, the Permanent Jobs Go to Canada, We Get the Spills, and the World Gets Warmer

You’ll hear the GOP, the American Petroleum Institute, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce make wild claims about the job creation potential of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. Don’t be fooled. The pipeline company itself admits only “a few hundred permanent jobs” are created by Keystone XL.

The debate over whether Keystone XL creates jobs is a convenient diversion from something oil company backers don’t want you to know: this is an export pipeline to help them access foreign markets and bypass the United States. Oil companies will make bigger profits and oil prices for Americans will increase. That’s not a project that helps Americans. It’s a project that helps Big Oil.

Read it at Climate Progress
Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline is Not a Jobs Plan, But an Oil Export Plan
by Danielle Droitsch

In the end, real job creation won’t come from approving a foreign pipeline.  The evidence shows the future of job creation is in global clean energy markets.  And that the real purpose of this pipeline is to give tar sands producers access to international markets.

Such a deal.

Occupy by another name — grassroots opposition to Keystone XL

Connie and Leon Weichman had just finished branding some calves Monday when Connie's niece texted her the news: TransCanada, the Alberta-based company that wants to build an oil pipeline through the middle of the United States, had finally agreed to reroute it away from the Nebraska Sandhills where the Weichmans live and ranch.

The couple had been looking forward to this moment for almost four years, but the victory was less than they'd hoped for.TransCanada's agreement with the Nebraska state legislature would keep the pipeline out of the Sandhills, an ecologically sensitive prairie that overlies the Ogallala aquifer. But it wouldn't do anything to prevent the next route from swinging close enough to the Weichmans' property to endanger their land. And it wouldn't protect Nebraska ranchers outside the Sandhills, who are equally dependent on regional groundwater.

Connie Weichman, a middle-aged woman with graying hair and silver-rimmed glasses, doesn't consider herself an environmentalist and had never before participated in local politics. But along with a steadily growing group of Nebraskans—most of them also first-time activists—she and her husband played a key role in moving the pipeline route out of the Sandhills. Last week the State Department extended the pipeline review process by a year to study alternative routes through Nebraska. Four days later, TransCanada announced it would forgo the Sandhills route.

Environmental groups throughout the nation have celebrated these events as a significant achievement in their battle to stop the pipeline, which would funnel up to 830,000 barrels of tar sands oil per day from Alberta to the Gulf Coast. But they also agree that the unlikely activists from Nebraska helped turn the tide.

Ken Winston, a policy advocate in Nebraska's chapter of the Sierra Club, said the Nebraska coalition included concerned citizens from throughout the state.

"This is a movement that has come from Nebraskans, and it's large spread," Winston said. "Their involvement cut across the political spectrum…. Even if they reject the label, they are truly environmentalists in the best sense of the word."

The Weichmans' entry to activism began in 2008, when TransCanada offered to pay them for a two-mile easement on their property. At first they said no, fearing that diluted bitumen—a special kind of heavy crude produced from tar sands oil—might leak from the pipeline into their groundwater. When the company threatened to take their land using eminent domain, they finally accepted the offer. But by then they also were ready to join the fight against the Sandhills route.... (emphasis added)

Read the rest at Inside Climate News

Nebraska Ranchers Who Turned the Tide in Pipeline Fight Say They're Not Done Yet: Landowners explain why—and how—they became activists.

by Lisa Song

Radicalizing Nebraska?