Friends, Neighbours and Countrymen...

The environmental lobby anxiously awaits President Obama's decision on the Keystone XL pipeline. The level of their anxiety is met by that teasing the aspirational plans of Canada, concerned to move its oil expeditiously to American coastal oil refineries. The environmental studies, as required by law and by lobbyists certain that their version of climate degradation caused by manmade energy usage will carry the day eventually, have given the green light, and the result of the most current of those studies has now been published.
 
The U.S. State department has released its latest environmental impact statement with the message that neither approval nor denial of the pipeline meant to carry 830,000 barrels of oil daily from Alberta to the Gulf Coast would have any impact on oil companies' extraction of bitumen from the Alberta oil sands. Irrespective of the fact that the oil will produce more planet-warming carbon to pollute the environment, its extraction will proceed.

During his re-election, Mr. Obama stated his intention was to protect the environment; he would approve the pipeline only if it could be seen not to "significantly exacerbate" carbon pollution.  Critical to his decision would be the pipeline's net effects. As such the newly released findings should clear the way for the project to be passed. The environmental lobby will be beyond furious if their champion does agree that the pipeline project should proceed.

Since the oil is being extracted and moved to refineries in any event, it simply makes good sense that the oil be transferred via pipeline, a proven, more efficienht, infinitely safer method than by rail. That dirty and troublesome oil is being extracted in the United States in the Bakken oil fields doesn't raise the ire of the environmental lobby in anything to the same degree that dirty oil from a foreign country does. American funding by default of fanatical Islam through accessing Gulf oil seems no issue at all.

About 400,000 carloads of crude oil was shipped by rail last year to America's refineries, up from 9,500 in 2008. "Thanks to the pipeline shortage, more than ten percent of U.S. oil supplies now go by rail", according to an editorial in The New York Times. "While the safety record of railroads has improved in recent years, the surge in oil transportation has meant a spike in spill rates." The U.S. oil boom with new discoveries and new extraction methods has swamped current rail technology.

Old tankers are being used for the transport of that oil, and although they will be replaced by newer, safer tankers eventually, the transition will be years in the making. Small town America is seeing mile-long trains loaded with oil from the new oilfields in Colorado, Wyoming and North Dakota threaten their safety and security as train derailments become increasingly more frequeht and potentially dangerous. Reflecting what is happening in Canada.

The type of oil, furthermore, produced in the U.S. Midwest is more volatile than other types, it produces more intense, larger explosions. And it was just that type of Bakken oil that exploded last summer in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, catastrophically killing 47 people, and burning much of the downtown area, transforming the lives of the residents of that old rail town in ways they could never have imagined, and never want to see repeated.

Thousands of well-paid jobs are being given to Americans, along with added energy security, coming up against a country struggling to put the miserable years of recession behind them. Rail shipments of oil will simply continue to multiply, and with that, ongoing and growing issues of public safety, with 100-car tanker trains rumbling through towns unaccustomed to flirting with potential danger. Hapless and helpless to insist their safety should come first, when the entire economy runs on oil production.

Environmentalists decry the shipping of oil by tanker car. They despise the very thought of a pipeline running through the country carrying the detested fuel that they claim with good enough reason, is helping to alter the climate we all fundamentally depend upon. Wind and solar energy originally seemed so promising, yet the area where it was most strenuously promoted, Europe, is cutting back on its alternate energy systems. And nuclear, the most efficient method of all, is viewed as a horror.

It's time that President Obama face the inevitable, that as commander in chief of all that occurs in America, he must make a decision. A decision that will benefit his country. Anything that is of benefit to the United States invariably touches on American relations with the rest of the world. In this particular instance, it is Canada waiting on tenterhooks of suspense. This is no way to treat a friend.