President Obama has said the Keystone XL pipeline can only go ahead if it doesn't "significantly increase" U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. There's enough wiggle room in there to delight almost everybody.
Define "significantly." There you go. What does it mean if you export the really filthy petroleum coke or petcoke bitumen refining by-product to Asia and let them burn it? Is that okay? Does that just go on someone else's carbon books and off America's?
And in a country with the rapacious energy consumption of the United States anything "significant" would be huge almost anywhere else.
Sadly, it looks like the Obama regime is preparing the ground for pipeline approval.
ReplyDeleteThat is a reasonable conclusion, Anon.
ReplyDeleteI'm almost certain Obama will approve it Mound, but I took slight encouragement in the fact that he referred to Alberta's prized resource as 'the tarsands'.
ReplyDeleteCould just be my own wishful thinking, but it sounded like he was signalling to turn it down and focus on domestic fracking, which, on the books has less CO2 emissions per unit of energy than tar sands.
ReplyDeleteI got the feeling the kxl was going to go ahead, and that he gave fracking a big thumbs up, ground water be damned.
ReplyDelete