Bloomberg reports:
A decision on whether to approve the Keystone XL oil pipeline may slip into next year, giving opponents time to marshal efforts against it while offering President Barack Obama a chance to wring concessions from Canada.
The U.S. State Department is reviewing TransCanada Corp. (TRP)’s request to build the $5.3 billion link from Alberta’s oil sands to U.S. refineries in the Gulf Coast. The department said it won’t complete its environmental-impact review of the pipeline until after reviewing and publishing 1.5 million public comments it received, a months-long process that could be completed as soon as this week…
Obama may be trying to “extract the maximum leverage” in discussions with Canada on reducing emissions from oil sands production, which tend to be higher than other forms of conventional drilling, said David Victor, an international relations professor at the University of California, San Diego, who has written a book on climate change.
Commitments from Canada to reduce the carbon emissions associated with mining the heavy crude from oil sands could help Obama reduce some of the outrage over an approval of Keystone, Victor said.
That’s important for Democrats in upcoming elections because of the money and mobilization the environmental community offers, he said.
It makes me wonder which way the overall migration vector is now headed between the U.S. and Canada. The last time I checked (about 15 years ago), life in Canada appeared to be mostly concentrated along the U.S. border, and many Canadians moved to the States for work or desired to do so. I knew only one man who went in the opposite direction: he sold his shabby home in CA and settled in a mansion in Canada with some pocket change left.
Now, with the government in DC growing oppressive by the day, surely there must be people who’ve come to their conclusions?
This bogus hokus pokus is not winning friends in Canada. Nor are the imperialist US environmental groups who are trying to tell Canadians what they can and can’t do.
I checked the docket and there are not 1.5 million comments. Many of them are form letters from the NRDC or WWF with a list of names attached. From what I saw, even the individual names wouldn’t add up to 1.5 million.
Tee hee hee hee hee. If the pipeline winds up going West, our tankers can queue up in Vancouver and make the short run down the coast to supply California refineries if California’s people wake up, or Oregon or Washington may want in on it.
If the pipeline goes West, though, we’ll be more directly competing with Asian markets for that oil.
Or Canada could build the refineries and the tankers can queue up for the refined products.
Why in heaven’s name would we try to wring concessions from our best trading partner and firmest ally?
This is called racketeering and people engaging in such activities are awarded with long prison terms.