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I got an e-mail from 350.org last night, warning that Republicans are currently working on new ways around President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline. Which is actually kind of surprising, if only for the timing; why not just wait until after the next election when President Romney can give it the green light? And if they’re actually worried that America will give that socialist atheist muslim Obama a second term, after all, why would they want to relinquish Keystone XL as a rallying cry for their campaign, and make it into a rallying cry for environmentalist Democrats instead?

Why are they so goddamn Hell-bent on approval for this thing, now now now? I suggest it’s probably a combination of reasons in these proportions:

I’ve already posted about one of these, earlier, and neither is really yet at the point of being anything like what you could call a real “mission accomplished,” and etc., etc., so-on so-forth.

But I think the combination of these two positive policy developments, on the same day, is enough to really demand a brief note. Not often do we get even one item of good news like these, however compromised, let alone both:

• Obama Administration Rejects Keystone Pipeline Proposal
• Sopa: US backers end support for anti-piracy bill

That’s not too bad. Both of these proposals epitomize the “migod can we just not do this completely stupid unhelpful horrible abomination” ideas that are all-too common in American politics. Yeah, sure, the list of reasons for restraining the urge to celebrate is long and familiar: Neither measure is really necessarily “dead” yet; industry-backed monstrosities like these are never really truly “dead” anyway. Even if stopped, for now, they’ll sneak back. Neither measure’s defeat really amounts to any kind of actual progress. Nor do these limited little “non-defeats” come close to being “enough” relative to the big-picture of the challenges we’re facing. Nothing ever seems like it is or will be enough.

All true, but, aside from the fact that if this is about as good as we ever actually do we might as well take the opportunity to celebrate when we can because otherwise we’ll eventually just die without ever having let ourselves enjoy the feeling of winning… (more…)

A few more notes on the now-postponed Keystone XL pipeline.

First, I love our neighbors to the north dearly, and would in fact like to go live among them. Nothing against Canada. But I do not love the international oil industry, and I certainly don’t love the revolting corner of it occupied with boiling tar sands into petroleum plus vast amounts of carbon pollution even before the resulting petroleum is burned. Oil is a bad choice of fuel source for a lot of reasons; oil from tar sands is even worse.

Which gets to a second point about this “ethical oil” concept that Canada, or at least its oil industry flacks, like to go tooting about. Canada is a peaceful, friendly democracy, unlike so many of the world’s other petrostates. So America should source as much of our energy from the Canucks as possible, they argue, given that we’ll presumably be sourcing it from repressive and/or anti-American regimes, otherwise. There are two problems with this.

One, of course, is that it presents a false choice, in a couple of ways. There’s the fact that oil supply and demand are, obviously, a global market; just as Canada threatens to send its oil to China if we don’t approve the Keystone pipeline, the “unethical” oil of other petrostates will be purchased by other economies if it isn’t purchased by us. It’s still in some sense nice to be able to say “well, at least it isn’t our money going to prop up a medieval theocracy, e.g.,” but if the end result of oil bought and sold is going to be about the same either way, the actual utility is minimal even from an “ethical” perspective. (more…)