Obama and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Keystone XL pipeline decision.

The Obama administration announced Nov. 10 it would delay a politically explosive decision on the proposed Keystone XL oil sands pipeline until after the 2012 elections. Congress corrected this dithering by forcing Obama to make a decision one way or another. He chose not to build it.

This decision was bad on so many levels it is hard to count them all.Let’s try to look at the ways:

Canada has oil sands and is exploiting the resources. U.S. is dependent on importing a large share of its crude oil.

The cheapest and most efficient way to transport crude oil is through a pipe line. It is also the safest and most reliable way of getting crude oil from point A to point B. To not O.K. the pipeline increases the cost and makes us more dependent of crude oil from the Middle East and Nigeria, as well as Venezuela.

Canada really, really wanted this deal. It would help improve our relations. Now they are strained.

The unions really wanted the jobs. It would supply them with more than 20000 direct, well-paid jobs. In addition there is secondary business generated whenever a project of this magnitude is undertaken. Why not generate jobs?

The newly discovered oil fields in North Dakota and Montana could use the pipeline as well. Now they will have to go it alone or transport their oil on railroad or barge traffic instead, a more expensive and less safe option. So why did Obama delay the decision?

It was because of the environmentalists. Let us examine why this decision was equally horrible from an environmentalist’s perspective. Canada is a sovereign nation. They have the oil and will sell or use it one way or another. The most energy conserving way is to transport it through a pipeline. Transport via train, truck or barge uses more energy (read more CO2) and costs about $15 per barrel vs. $5 for a pipeline.

Canada will sell it’s oil to China if we don’t want it. China has a well deserved reputation for producing a lot of pollution. The best environmental solution is for us to import this oil.

Nebraska protested there was a danger to damage their aquifer. The Keystone XL management offered to reroute the pipeline away from this sensitive aquifer, thereby solving that objection. By not importing oil from Canada the total carbon footprint will increase. We lose, and Canada loses. (I am not concerned that the CO2 is increasing, but that a valuable natural resource is excessively depleted.) Now it turns out that Canada has left the Kyoto Protocol, thereby being free to burn as much of its carbon as they want. Was that really what the environmentalists wanted?

So why did Obama first delay the decision until after the 2012 election, and then when forced deny the permit? Here are five possibilities:

1. Obama is a true believer that ”this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”. As a true environmentalist his role can not be overestimated .

2. Obama is deliberately wrecking our economy, refuses to have an energy policy that will create jobs, but will support protest movements and foment unrest.

3. Obama is acting on orders from Global Governance people that do want U.S. to be totally dependent on international law and U.N. mandates.

4. Obama promised to be Brazil’s best customer from their deep sea oil drilling success, paid for by U.S. loan guarantees. He must be true to his promises.

5. Obama is half insane and surrounded by bad advisors.

This is the best I can do to explain the reasons for this decision.

Mitt Romney can’t go after Obama on Crony Capitalism, Sarah Palin can, A Limerick.

The croniest capitalism

Obama’s is sort of fascism.

But Romney can’t say

He is out of the fray.

So Run, Sarah Run, for we can’t have a schism.

Sarah Palin: Criminal penalty if vote traded for campaign contribution. [The Alaska Senate watered down the 2007 ethics bill] The Senate’s action was politics-as-usual. We were determined to keep the pressure on. That pressure paid off when legislators approved an omnibus ethics bill. It included my administration’s ethics proposal, as well as the House’s muscular amendment that imposed criminal penalties on lawmakers who traded votes for campaign contributions. Plus, any legislator convicted of a felony would forfeit his or her state pension. We were pleased that no one could claim pride of authorship on this. Finally the Capitol had pulled together and passed a strong bill. A Democrat lawmaker noted: “This is one of the best pieces of work I’ve seen come out of the legislature because it came out as a policy document and not a political document.” It was music to my ears: POLICY, not politics. From Going Rogue, by Sarah Palin, p.156

The Pope warns visiting U.S. bishops of Radical Secularism. A Limerick.

The Pope warned of Radical Secularism.

As bad as his youth was in Hitler’s Nazism.

Religious freedom

Gone from our czardom.

What remains is a Secular Humanism.

Pope Benedict XVI issued a solemn warning about the erosion of religious freedom in the United States, in a January 19 address to visiting American bishops. He told the bishops that “it is imperative that the entire Catholic community in the United States come to realize the grave threats to the Church’s public moral witness presented by a radical secularism which finds increasing expression in the political and cultural spheres.” He added: “The seriousness of these threats needs to be clearly appreciated at every level of ecclesial life.” The US should be a land thoroughly committed to religious freedom in light of its history and the fundamental principles of the nation’s founding, the Pope argued. He said: “At the heart of every culture, whether perceived or not, is a consensus about the nature of reality and the moral good, and thus about the conditions for human flourishing. In America, that consensus, as enshrined in your nation’s founding documents, was grounded in a worldview shaped not only by faith but a commitment to certain ethical principles deriving from nature and nature’s God. Today that consensus has eroded significantly in the face of powerful new cultural currents which are not only directly opposed to core moral teachings of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but increasingly hostile to Christianity as such.” The loss of religious freedom, the Pontiff warned, is “a threat not just to Christian faith, but also to humanity itself.” He explained: “When a culture attempts to suppress the dimension of ultimate mystery, and to close the doors to transcendent truth, it inevitably becomes impoverished and falls prey, as the late Pope John Paul II so clearly saw, to reductionist and totalitarian readings of the human person and the nature of society.”

Like this:

Yes, Stephen Hawking. There is a God.