I meant to post this yesterday, but it slipped my mind. Anyway, the pipeline has been delayed for now:
The Obama administration rejected the Canada-to-Texas pipeline because there was not enough time to complete a review of TransCanada’s $7 billion project, which included finding a new route around the sensitive region in Nebraska.
TransCanada said it would reapply for a permit and would continue to work with the state.
What we have is two sets of politics. One is stupid and the other makes sense/was forced. First off, the Republicans pushed for this issue to go ahead without proper reviews, without full input from the affected states, and they did so because their constituency likes to pollute stuff. The Obama Administration, on the other hand, denied this in part to appease environmentalists ahead of the election, but also because there wasn’t really much of a choice here.
So now TransCanada has reapplied for its permit. It will probably get approved in 2013 or shortly thereafter, but this could have all occurred even earlier if the Republicans didn’t shoot themselves in the foot. If they really cared about getting this thing built, they would have given time to let it be studied as to how to best go through Nebraska and other states. As it stands, they were just looking to make the President look bad; they were not concerned with getting anything done.
The Republicans only have themselves to blame for this one.
Filed under: News, Politics and Social | Tagged: Keystone Pipeline, Republicans are assholes, Transcanada |
For the Sake of Science 
I know there’s nothing I love more than deliberately polluting drinking water and national parks, often while cackling like a maniac.
The Republican party is the party of science denial. As such, they don’t tend to have an issue with dirtying things up a bit.
Members of all big-name political organizations are against facts and due process when it suits them, Michael. It’s what happens when you get enough fallible human beings together in one group.
Surely you’ve encountered enough postmodernist fools in your time to know that being anti-reality is hardly a partisan issue.
Being against science seems to suit the Republicans pretty consistently.
I think Mr. H is right that some far right loons are anti science and proud of it. You don’t hear people on the left proud to question science outside of the rare postmodernist, but that doesn’t mean the left is actually tuned in to what science says. The left is often the case of bad science.
People love to claim their view is backed by science even when it isn’t. How often have we heard alt med claim their in-house crap research is good science.
I clearly spend too much time around people who ‘study’ critical discourse theory, because I was unaware that postmodernists were becoming rare. (Though by definition, any time spent around critical discourse theorists is too much.)
I wasn’t particularly interested in making a contrast between being anti-science and being pseudo-scientific, but if you want to make the distinction then it is plain that the GOP has a large subculture of anti-science wackos. The biblical literalists are the only significant group who actively mock the scientific process; postmodernists are only a problem if you hang around academics for too long.
If you take away that distinction, the split becomes much less impressive; with large majorities of people believing in some form of woo it is impossible for any political side to be without kooks.