How convenient.

The Obama administration has repeatedly assured the public that they were just a hop, skip, and a jump away from making a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline, seeing as how its gone through years of environmental impact reviews from various sources and gotten a green light every time (which should hardly come as a [...]

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Uhm...?

I have every suspicion that the Obama administration’s continued dilly-dallying has pretty much nothing to do with those stubbornly lingering and entirely ginned-up environmental concerns and everything to do with the symbolic importance wrongly placed upon the pipeline’s construction by certain deep-pocketed and powerful eco-radical groups. The green lobby has managed to turn an otherwise [...]

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Why does he make it so easy?

Planet earth’s noble knight never seems to tire of surpassing himself in brazen displays of sanctimoniousness, but it feels like every time he opens his mouth he’s simply offering everyone another opportunity to take him still less seriously. Via The Hill: “There’s no such thing as ethical oil. There’s only dirty oil and dirtier oil,” [...]

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Adding fuel to the fire.

Presumably hoping to light a fire underneath the Obama administration’s fully political dilly-dallying on the issue, the Senate went on record in support of the Keystone XL pipeline with a (frankly symbolic) 62-37 vote on an amendment in March — and now the House is getting ready to move on the (not just symbolic) Northern [...]

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Irregularities.

Environmentalists went into fits of delight when the EPA left some critical comments on the State Department’s draft environmental impact review of the Keystone XL pipeline on Monday (apparently, “the State Department is incapable of doing a proper analysis of the climate, wildlife, clean water, safety and other impacts of this disastrous and unneeded project” [...]

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Excuses, excuses.

You must be joking. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) objected Monday to the State Department’s draft review of the proposed Keystone XL oil sands pipeline route, saying it included “insufficient information” on environmental issues. In a comment on the State Department’s draft environmental impact statement for the project, EPA said Foggy Bottom failed to fully [...]

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Grasping at straws.

The White House’s predicted date for when the president will finally approve (or disapprove, as the case may be) the Keystone XL pipeline has been steadily creepin’ back to later and later dates — by the latest count, we’re looking at the end of this summer/early fall — for no sincerely good reason whatsoever, given [...]

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Show him the money!

At this point it’s feels as if we’ve been debating and fighting and waiting for some sort of resolution to the Keystone XL pipeline question since roughly around the beginning of Eisenhower’s third State of the Union address. Are we at least close to the point where President Obama is going to finally make a [...]

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Geniuses.

Do you suppose the eco-trendy crowd really, carefully thought this one through before jumping on the self-righteously outraged bandwagon? I have some pretty severe doubts on the matter, but they’re in this thing, and they’re certainly not going to back down now that they’ve invested so much time, money, and media coverage to the issue [...]

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Taking their sweet time.

Just FYI, President Obama is officially the last man standing in the trumped-up battle over the Keystone XL pipeline’s construction; the state of Nebraska, the State Department, the House, and now even the Democrat-controlled Senate have all given the project very much on-the-record green lights. As fond as the president is of intoning on the [...]

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Walking away?

House Republicans’ big meeting with President Obama on the Hill yesterday didn’t yield any sudden changes of heart on reaching some kind of big deficit bargain (shocking, considering how pure and straightforward I’m sure the president’s motives were, hem hem), but the president also kept his cards close to the vest on energy and how [...]

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Unlike these guys.

Just in case the Obama administration had any doubt as to whether or not the general American public is supportive of the Keystone XL pipeline’s construction while they continue to bend over backwards catering to well-monied, radical environmentalist interests, a new Fox News poll confirms that, why yes — the overwhelming majority of Americans are [...]

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Let's Make a (rotten) Deal

There must be some fans of The Walking Dead at the White House and the DNC these days, because there are apparently some bad ideas which never die, no matter how many stakes you drive through them. One of these is the carbon tax, not so subtly invoked during the State of the Union address, [...]

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Friday afternoon news dump.

TransCanada has only been waiting for the go-ahead for the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline for, oh, four or so years now, and the State Department has now several times concluded that the pipeline poses no real reason for environmental alarm — despite the vociferous protestations of its eco-critics. After having released an environmental impact review [...]

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Truth.

Like Ed noted after Sunday’s rather underwhelming anti-Keystone XL pipeline protest in DC, the project really is a no-brainer across all imaginable fronts — and the Obama administration’s continue stalling is getting politically incorrigible. It’s completely understandable that the president would want to wait to make such a controversial high-profile decision until after the election, [...]

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Ho ho ho.

As protests go, the anti-Keystone XL Pipeline march doesn’t seem terribly effective.  First, organizers scheduled it during a vacation weekend for Barack Obama, when the President hit the links with Tiger Woods and left the White House press corps steaming over a lack of photo ops.  Its turnout failed to get even 10% of the [...]

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The Keystone vise.

With Ken Salazar stepping down as Interior Secretary, politicians of both parties in Southern states see an opportunity to get more cooperation from Washington in unlocking energy reserves off their coast.  Governors in three states signed a letter asking Sally Jewell, nominated to replace Salazar, to allow them to open oil and natural gas reserves [...]

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Mum's the word.

This entire time, I thought that there was hardly a real chance that the Obama administration would ultimately reject the Keystone XL pipeline when it really came down to it. Sure, they’ve been stalling out the wazoo — presumably hoping the PR furor over the proposal would die down a bit, and/or to think up [...]

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Stall tactics.

A couple weeks back, Nebraska Governor Heineman approved the portion of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would run through his state, obliterating the Obama administration’s last, best excuse for continuing to delay on what has become a politically explosive project. After what have already amounted to years of various reviews with positive results, the [...]

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What's the holdup, people?

Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman signed off on TransCanada’s revised route through his state earlier this week, effectively clearing what the Obama administration has cited as a major hurdle to green-lighting the entire Keystone XL pipeline. Having already been through years of multiple State Department reviews, and with the southern portion of the project already under [...]

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Moment of truth.

Well, now — President Obama’s several eminent statements about his revived commitment to really do something about climate change during his inaugural speech on Monday are about to be put to the immediate test. As expected, Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman has approved the revised Keystone XL pipeline proposal through his state after a positive environmental [...]

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It's back, baby

We spent almost all of last year peering at the Swing States… so much so that some of us will be quite happy to not hear about them again for a long time. (Unless, of course, the Cleveland Indians make the playoffs, in which case we’ll make an exception for Ohio.) But with the election [...]

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High dudgeon?

The eventual completion of the full-length Keystone XL pipeline seems more and more like an inevitability for the Obama administration, as it continues to clear bureaucratic hurdles and TransCanada proposes new routes to work with and not against the greenie-grain — not to mention the clamorous pressure to finally allow all of the undeniable economic [...]

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TBD.

During his first term, the Obama administration managed to rather successfully punt on , er, ‘defer for further review processes’ the full authorization of TransCanada Corp.’s proposal to build a 1,700-mile pipeline that would transfer Canadian oil sands to Gulf Coast refineries. The Keystone XL pipeline has been an apt demonstration of some of Democratic [...]

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