Sierra Club sues US to stop new tar sands pipeline

A number of environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and the National Wildlife Federation, have sued the State Department over its failure to protect the US from Canadian tar sands oil. At issue is a pipeline, called the Alberta Clipper, currently bringing oil across the border at a rate of 450,000 barrels a day. Enbridge Energy wants to increase the volume of oil to 800,000 barrels per day.

The State Department has ruled that the new pipeline does not need its approval, despite nearly doubling the amount of tar sands oil entering the US. The Sierra Club suit disagrees with their assessment.

The State Department is clearly at odds with President Obama's public statements on this. Obama promised he would not permit more tar sands into the country if the project would increase greenhouse gas production. The State Department study claimed it would not. But practical considerations prove that it would.

The State Department study claimed that the tar sands oil could be transported by rail if the Keystone XL Pipeline is not built. But attempts to use railroads have proven costly. Instead of earning $40 per barrel of oil shipped by rail as it predicted, Southern Pacific Resources is earning less than one dollar per barrel. The failure of its oil-by-rail strategy has driven Southern Pacific to the edge of bankruptcy.

Since the State Department's study relied on the viability of the oil-by-rail strategy to reach its conclusion that Keystone XL would have no effect on greenhouse gas production, the entire study must now be rejected as false. Instead of proving that the Keystone XL pipeline would not harm the environment, the State Department has proved that it will. And President Obama has promised he would not approve the Keystone XL under these conditions.

Democratic Senators have completely caved in to Oil Industry demands. They are proposing to approve the Keystone XL despite the State Department's fiasco. The Senators say they are acting to save Senator Mary Landrieu's seat for the Democrats. What they are really doing is the bidding of the oil industry.

The oil industry is getting desperate. The tar sands in Alberta are the third largest proven oil deposit in the world. But tar sands are expensive to refine and destructive to the environment. The oil industry needs Keystone XL to extract this poisonous wealth. Right now they are losing their battle.

Chris Hayes survives beat-down from Jonathan Chait

Chris Hays appears in Years of Living Dangerously, Showtime's great series on Global Warming. Hayes has called Global Warming the most important issue of our time and has done a great deal of research on it, so he knows what he's talking about.

Jonathan Chait knows very little about Global Warming, which he appears to regard as about as important as a smudge on your newspaper. Nevertheless, he takes Hayes to task in a New York Magazine piece entitled, "Chris Hayes is not making sense on Keystone". Chait has two basic complaints to make about Hays's latest article in the Nation: Keystone's total load of carbon, he says, is only one-tenth as much as its opponents believe, and President Obama has comparable options for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Chait's problem is simple. He doesn't believe Global Warming is a crucial issue. For him, the Alberta tar sands become harmless if they release "only" 22 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Chait wants to support Obama's nonsensical, "all of the above" energy policy. But he and Obama somehow believe that increasing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is ok if it only increases "a little bit." This is nonsense.

The president should be fighting against every gram of carbon injected into the already dangerously loaded atmosphere. "All of the above" is a great energy policy if it means stopping tar-sand development, imposing a carbon tax, raising emission standards, and making polluters pay for the damage they are doing to the environment instead of forcing our children and grandchildren to pay for it.

I said Chait knows very little about Global Warming because he takes his 22 billion tons figure from an article in Scientific American that he has clearly not read. Taking only the parts of scientific studies that support your viewpoint is called cherry-picking. That's obviously what Chait has done, because that same article includes a quote from James Hansen (a scientist, not a journalist) who says:

Moving to tar sands, one of the dirtiest, most carbon-intensive fuels on the planet, is a step in exactly the opposite direction, indicating either that governments don't understand the situation or that they just don't give a damn.

Read the article, Jonathan, don't just steal favorable statistics from it.

Chait is generally considered a liberal, but in this article he adopts the tactics favored by the extreme right: denial, cherry-picking data, and attacking the messenger. He wants the reader to believe that Global Warming isn't as bad as we thought it was, writing:

First, the environmental impact of Keystone is far smaller than Hayes implies...And second, the practical alternative, far from being nonexistent, is actually quite potent.

Chait needs to do a bit more reading in the literature before he sets himself up as an expert. The opinion among scientists is that the situation is worse, not better, because the US and other governments are dragging their feet and failing to take the drastic measures necessary to avert catastrophe. The steps that Obama is taking are fine, and he deserves our gratitude for taking them, but they fall far short of what the world needs, not in the distant future, but right now.

Obama's actions come after two decades of inaction on climate change, and time is our enemy. His two predecessors did almost nothing to combat the problem. The Bush administration and his cronies assured us that the problem was not real, that scientists were lying to us, and anyway global warming was good for business. In other words, they intentionally made the problem worse for their own private gain. So Obama needs to see this as an issue on which compromise has already been tried with terrible results. The free market has had its chance and failed utterly.

Obama needs to take the same stance he did on raising the debt limit: no debate, no compromise, no games. Chait, as Obama's media surrogate, needs to urge Obama to heed the warnings of reputable scientists. Instead, he attacks Hayes, a journalist like himself, for faulty reasoning.

Do not attack journalists, Jonathan. Attack the scientists who are pimping themselves to the energy industry. Attack the Kochs, who are saturating the media with misleading advertisements using the same arguments that you are using. You have a platform. Use it for the good of humankind.

Give a damn.

Chris Hayes understands the threat of global warming; Tim Cavanaugh understands nothing

Chris Hayes must be used to this by now. Whenever Hayes--or anyone else, for that matter--mentions the catastrophe of global warming, he gets smacked down by someone. There are usual suspects in this game of whack-a-mole. The criticisms usually come from right-wing sources that are heavily financed by the energy industry.

One of the usual suspects is National Review. National Review Online published a critique of Hayes's latest essay in the Nation, headlined "Chris Hayes Wants to Kill About 5.7 Billion People." The headline has nothing to do with the article, but it sure catches your eye. The author, Tim Cavanaugh, presents no evidence that Hayes wants to kill anyone. There are no meaningful statistics presented, nor are there quotes from Hayes's article indicating how many people he wants to kill and why.

Cavanaugh's article is typical anti-science blather. He is no scientist. He does post the International Energy Agency's graph showing how much energy the world generates and how little of it comes from renewable or non-polluting sources. The graph is meaningless in itself because it does not predict how fast or at what cost polluting sources of energy can be replaced by non-polluting ones. It's possible they could all be replaced in 50 years, but Cavanaugh doesn't go into this because it would destroy his entire argument, or even his entire reason for living.

Since Cavanaugh doesn't explain how he arrives at the 5.7 billion killings figure, I will give it a shot. The total number of people on the planet in 2011 was about 8 billion, so Cavanaugh's estimate would be about 2/3 of that. Cavanaugh is simply stating that we can't possibly replace polluting energy sources with non-polluting ones and that therefore 2/3 of the people on the planet will die. A daunting thought, even though most of the energy we use does not go directly toward keeping us alive. Most of the energy we use is wasted on unnecessary items like NASCAR, barbecues and airplane flights to Bermuda. So we could probably cut 2/3 of it without killing anyone.

On the other hand, 40 percent of the energy we consume is used by industrialized countries, whose total population is about 1.2 billion. Therefore, we could easily reach a 40 percent reduction in energy use in industrialized countries without killing more that 1 billion people. Cavanaugh's prediction of mass extinction could only be true is each person on the planet used approximately the same amount of energy. But they don't.

Cavanaugh argues that the use of fossil fuels made rapid population growth possible. He calls this growth "progress". It follows from this assumption (implicitly) that stopping fossil fuel use would reverse "progress", resulting in the predicted number (5.7 billion) of deaths.

Cavanaugh uses some of his article to attack Hayes's writing style, calling it "tricked out with quasi-erudition and broad claims". He charges that Hayes uses "overflowing adjectives", "lethal compound modifiers", and "cascades of adverbs." Cavanaugh does not explain how this style negates the logic of Hays's article. I suspect he was just having fun with words. But his description of common compound modifiers like "heart-stopping" and "full-throated" as lethal is perhaps over the top.

I've spent far too much time dissecting Cavanaugh's article, but I was having too much fun. I'll discuss Jonathan Chait's more important critique in New York Magazine tomorrow.

Why the Keystone XL Pipeline is (still) a bad idea

The main talking points of Keystone advocates are that it's a big project, ready to go, and it will create jobs.

The main replies by Keystone opponents are that being a big project has nothing to do with being a good project; it may be ready, but we, as a country, are not ready for its consequences; it may create jobs, but they are not permanent jobs or green, sustainable jobs.

Keystone XL will produce more greenhouse gases because tar-sands gas consumes more energy than it delivers, tar-sands gas has byproducts so dirty that they must be shipped to China to burn, and much of the profit will go to Koch Industries, a company that has consistently tried to undermine our democratic institutions. We may not be able to stop the Koch brothers from spending vast sums of money to influence public opinion, but we should be able to stop allowing their egoistic schemes.

President Obama should look Keystone advocates in the eye and say, "You have opposed every single project I proposed to create jobs. You have given me nothing in return for this project. I can't stop the federal government from giving you tax breaks and subsidies, but I can sure stop you from building this pipeline."

Take a stand, President Obama. You speak for all of us.

Tim Kaine advocates fracking and Keystone XL—Why is the Sierra Club supporting this man?

Tim Kaine in 2010 (By Cliff from Arlington, Virginia, USA - DNC Chair Tim Kaine, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21010207)

The most vital issue facing the world today is the rising level of greenhouse gases in the environment, which leads to climate change. The response of the U.S. government has been to promote the use of natural gas instead of oil or coal for the production of electricity.

I recently received a letter from Tim Kaine, U.S. Senator from Virginia, reiterating in detail the talking points of the energy lobby. In his letter, Kaine ignores the one salient fact about natural gas that the energy lobby would like us to forget: Burning natural gas in the atmosphere increases the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Instead, Kaine, and his energy producing allies, states another fact, equally true but completely irrelevant:

“Recent innovation in the production of natural gas has dramatically changed our nation's energy portfolio...[and results in] lower prices, cleaner American electricity, and job growth in our nation's manufacturing sector.”

This is not an argument for permitting greater production and exportation of natural gas. It is simply and blatantly and appeal to permit the energy companies to use these new procedures to make more money.

Senator Kaine, it is not the responsibility of the federal government to assure that energy companies make a profit. It is your responsibility to do everything possible to promote the well-being of the American people. You take an oath of office to preserve, protect, and defend the U.S. Constitution. The U.S. Constitution protects the American people, not the profits of corporations.

In his letter, Kaine suggests that we should permit export of natural gas to foreign countries when it is in the interest of the U.S. to do so. In particular, he suggests that exporting U.S. natural gas to Europe will keep European countries from relying on Russia and Iran for their energy needs. This is an indirect approach that has the result of increasing world production of greenhouse gases. Any such policy should be abandoned immediately.

We cannot directly determine what Russia and Iran do, nor can we determine what Europe will do. We can only determine what the U.S. does. We must oppose any policy that results in the U.S. producing more greenhouse gases or enabling other countries to do so.

In regard to other environmental concerns, Kaine states that we should “always ensure that environmental safeguards in the gas production process are rigorously followed to avoid harm to drinking water sources.” Fracking is a “recent innovation”. It has not been proven safe for the environment. It has only been proven profitable for the energy companies. The history of energy companies shows that it make take years or even decades before the harm caused by new technologies is known. During that time, energy companies have proven again and again that they will lie to us about the harmfulness of their products.

The EPA is currently investigating the problems caused by fracking. It could take years to discover just how badly this new technology is degrading our environment. In the meantime, the U.S. must use every means possible to stop fracking. Kaine suggests that we do the exact opposite, that we trust the energy companies when they claim their extraction procedures are safe.

We now know for certain that no product that injects greenhouse gases into the environment is safe to use. We also know for certain that no product that pollutes ground water is safe to use.

Tim Kaine is not a friend to the environment, as he would have us believe. Instead, he is a friend to the energy moguls, like David Koch, who are using their profits from oil to buy the U.S. Congress. Kaine's opinions expressed in this letter suggest that he has already been bought.

A true friend of the environment would be proposing bills that increase use of renewable resources. He would propose increased spending on clean energy research and development. He would be decrying the actions of bought and paid for politicians who today are voting to stop any federal research into global warming.

We, the people, are not gullible, Senator Kaine. We see exactly which side of the issue you are on. Please start respecting our intelligence by making proposals that will save the environment, not destroy it.

Keystone XL Hangs by a thread of lies

The State Department recently issued another "final" report ("Report") on Keystone XL. The report supports construction of the pipeline, but State Department support was a foregone conclusion, because State has based its support on politics, not science. A small number of people will profit from the construction. Most of the oil and byproducts will be burned in other countries.

State bases its analysis of environmental impact on one simple conclusion: The tar sands oil will be extracted and burned whether or not the Keystone Pipeline is constructed. This conclusion is simply not true. We can stop what has been started by calling out the stupidity of the project and convincing the people of Canada and the U.S of its dangers. This argument is equivalent to saying that there will always be wars, so why shouldn't we start more of them.

The airwaves have been flooded by slick ads paid for by the American Petroleum Institute (API). API is the lobbyist for the oil industry. These ads announce that Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Warren Buffet all support the pipeline. These people have 2 things in common: (1) They are wealthy and stand to profit from continued reliance on fossil fuels; and (2) they are not experts in tar sands oil.

The API ads call the Pipeline a jobs bill. The Report says it will create 42,100 jobs. These jobs will last only one year, however. Communities in the region, many of them poor, will not receive any lasting benefit from these short-term jobs. Instead, the pipeline will contribute to the perpetuation of a rootless work force that has no stake in the community. Crime rates will rise precipitately as young men flood into small towns. In one town in North Dakota, the number of arrests is five times as high as it was in 2005.

The kind of employment that helps build communities and creates a steady benefit is long-term employment. After the pipeline is finished, according to the Report, such jobs will be created in the 5-state region through which the pipeline will run. Fifty of them. Three billion dollars invested in the pipeline will result in just 50 permanent jobs. By way of contrast, each $10 million (not billion) invested in public transit creates 314 new jobs and a $30 million gain in private business sales. As a jobs project, Keystone is an enormous waste of time and resources that should be going toward protecting the poor and disadvantaged from the consequences of climate change.

Capitalist groupies will argue that the free market, not the needs of the people, should determine how money is spent and on what. We are moving into an era of scarce resources. Money should be spent to improve our roads, bridges, and public utilities, not to provide more oil to people who are currently wasting what they have. What is more, profits from the oil will go back to the same wastrels and environmental hogs that brought us the Keystone Pipeline in the first place.

We need to stop the chain of stupidity that is making climate change worse by the moment. Stopping the Keystone Pipeline is a good place to start.

More information on Keystone and oil tar profiteering is available here, and here, and here.

Keystone Pipeline XL: Costs rise, questions proliferate

The Keystone Pipeline XL is not dead yet, but it's on life support. Last year, the State Department released an environmental impact statement prepared by Energy Resource Management (ERM) that was criticized by environmentalists. Mother Jones Magazine published information that the State Department had removed from the report that revealed possible conflicts of interest within ERM. But the project appears to have grave flaws that go beyond the discovered discrepancies in ERM's Environmental Report, which are only procedural mistakes (whether intentional or not) and hence do not affect the basic value of the project.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sent a letter, dated April 22, 2013, to State Department. EPA agreed with the report that oil produced from tar sands is dirtier than comparable oil from the US. State thanked ERM for some of the findings published in their report, including the attempt to quantify the amount of green house gases that would be produced by the Keystone Pipeline XL project. But Neither State nor ERM explained what these figures mean.

In the letter, State quotes the report as estimating that the oil from tar sands well-to-tank contributes 81% more to global warming than oil from other sources. This means that oil from tar sands has 81% more capability of producing green-house gases when it arrives in the refinery tanks, prior to being refined into gasoline. But the letter goes on to say that the oil from well-to-wheels has only 17% more green-house gases than conventional oil. This means that when your car burns the gas, it produces only 64% less green-house gases than it had before it was refined. Neither ERM nor State explains what happened to 64% of the green-house gases between the tank and the wheels. This is a critical question because President Obama made it clear that he would not approve the project if it contributed “significantly” to global warming. While 81% is significant, 17% may not be.

The difference between the two figures is due to one of the peculiarities of oil from tar sands. The chemical process (“cracking”) of turning tar oil into usable oil results in a byproduct, called petroleum coke. This coke contains most of the 64% of green-house gases lost before the refining in complete. Oil companies argue, and State tacitly agrees, that this coke will never be used for energy production.

This argument is not believable. Oil companies are in the business of selling hydrocarbons for money. That is their business model. It is unlikely that oil companies will let such a large amount of salable merchandise go to waste. In fact the Koch brothers' company, Koch Carbon, collects this coke and sells it overseas as a lower quality, dirtier form of coal. This fact became public knowledge recently when a huge cloud of coke dust, illegally stored by Koch Carbon in Detroit, blew over the Detroit River into Windsor, Canada.

Job loss from Keystone XL

President Obama recently noted that as few as 50 permanent jobs may be produced by the pipeline. The Washington Post Fact Checker awarded him two pinocchios for lowballing the jobs figure. The Post criticized Obama was using a jobs figure from an organization that opposed the pipeline instead of his own State Department.

The State Department is ill-equipped to prepare a report about oil pipelines. They found it necessary to hire outside consultants because they have no one on staff who is qualified to do the job. State could not find a consultant with no ties to the oil industry because any outside consultant qualified to evaluate an oil pipeline must necessarily have ties to the oil industry.

The accusation that Obama is “lowballing” the number of jobs to be created by Keystone XL is false. As usual, Obama is using a moderate estimate. The Cornell report the Post refers to in its criticism of Obama makes some persuasive arguments that Keystone will actually raise unemployment, not lower it:

1. TransCanada, the oil company responsible for Keystone XL, predicted that completion of the pipeline will end the glut of oil in the Midwest and raise the price of gasoline 10-20 cents a gallon for several years.¹ This will have a ripple effect throughout the entire economy and result in the loss of thousands of jobs. The profits will go to the oil companies, which will ship the oil to China.
2. Keystone XL will likely leak, causing oil spills, although it is hard to predict how often and how severe these leaks will be. Since the publication of the Cornell report, TransCanada has rerouted the pipeline away from sensitive watersheds in eastern Nebraska, so the Cornell report is out of date. A major leak, such as the one in Kalamazoo, costs millions to clean up. This will cut into the company's profit and decrease the number of permanent jobs it creates.
3. Keystone XL will contribute to global warming, which is responsible for ecocatastrophes costing billions of dollars. One study places the global warming potential of the Keystone tar sands oil deposits at 0.42 degrees centigrade. We can't predict how many jobs this will cost. We will only know that after global warming has occurred, but we can predict that the cost will be huge.
4. Operation of Keystone XL will impede progress in creating a green-jobs economy. Green companies that are just starting up will have trouble finding sources of capital if the financial interests believe they can make more money investing in new energy extraction projects.

President Obama has proposed an “all of the above” strategy that includes both increased fossil fuel production and subsidies for green industries. Politicians who support the oil companies have adopted this phrase, saying they support an all-of-the-above strategy when in reality they only support more fossil fuel production. There is no all-of-the-above strategy. Oil interests and green interests are competing for the same market, a market in which the well-entrenched and extremely profitable oil industry has an immense advantage.

Keystone XL is looking more dubious all the time.

1Cornell university Global Labor Institute, Pipe dreams: Jobs Gained, Jobs Lost by the Construction of Keystone XL, 27, http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/globallaborinstitute/research/upload/GLI_KeystoneXL_012312_FIN.pdf. Note that this prediction comes from TransCanada itself, not a source opposed to the pipeline, as claimed in the Post.

Keep Keystone XL on the Drawing Board

On Sunday, May 19, an OpEd appeared in the Washington Post on the subject of the Keystone Pipeline. Lamar Smith, a Republican and chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology submitted the article, but it was most likely written by a lobbyist for the oil industry. It presents the industry's best arguments for constructing the Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline. These arguments should convince no one.

Smith makes the argument that KXL will create 40,000 jobs, but previous estimates have yielded a figure of 20,000 jobs. The project will cost $7 billion. This means each job will cost about $350 thousand. These are only temporary jobs. The 20,000 figure is the total number of jobs created in one year. The pipeline will actually take 4 years and the jobs will be spread out over that time period, so a more accurate estimate would be 5,000 jobs for 4 years. After four years, the pipeline will be maintained and operated by 35 people, so 35 permanent jobs will be created by $7 billion.

The figure of $350 thousand per job may seem high, but that figure is the same as was calculated by a 2009 University of Massachusetts study for oil and gas industry job creation. The study projected that $1 million spent in the oil and gas industry creates less than 3 jobs.

There are better ways to create jobs. The U Mass study compares jobs in the oil and gas industry to jobs in clean energy industries. The same $7 billion, if invested in wind production would create 66,000 jobs. Similar results, yielding many more jobs, hold true for investments in solar and biomass industries. The best way to create jobs in clean industries is by investing in mass transit rail. The same amount of money invested in rapid transit would yield 111,000 jobs. Small wonder that pro-oil industry politicians like Rick Scott of Florida have cancelled rapid transit projects. The results of rapid transit take profits from the oil industry and create thousands of new jobs as well.

The oil companies could better spend their money in numerous other ways if they truly want to create jobs. But the oil companies do not want to create jobs. They want to create profits for themselves. So any talk of job creation is pure propaganda for public consumption. If the oil companies actually wanted to create jobs, they would spend their money elsewhere.

Smith's article claims that the environmental effects of KXL would be minimal. He bases his estimates on a flawed State Department study. This study discounts any environmental damage from the pipeline itself because the study assumes the oil from the tar sands will get into the environment anyway, through some other means of transportation. This logic is flawed because KXL can be stopped and the other means of transportation can also be stopped. Furthermore, a similar investment in wind, solar, or biomass projects would help clean up the environment instead of worsening it.

The State Department study also discounts pollution effects on communities where this tar sands oil will be refined. The study says that those pollution effects shouldn't be considered because those communities are already polluted, so, in effect, a little more pollution won't hurt. This theory assumes the health of the people in these communities doesn't matter. Their health will get worse after KXL is complete, but it's already bad, so that won't matter.

Investment in clean energy technology would improve the health of communities that are currently suffering the ill effects of fossil-fuel pollution. The State department argues that KXL would make them only a little worse. That cannot be considered an argument for the project. It must be considered a strong argument against it.

Perhaps the strongest argument against KXL is that it absolutely will cause severe environmental damage in the areas it passes through. Serious oil spills from pipeline are inevitable. Small spills happen nearly every day. Tar sands oil is heavier than other oils. It is more difficult and costly to clean up. In 2010, for example, 20,000 gallons of tar sands oil spilled into the Kalamazoo river system in Michigan. As of this date, 3 years later, the cleanup is not finished and the total cost of cleanup can only be estimated at between $175 and $800 million. The potential cost of cleanups like this one has not been factored into the cost of KXL. The cost is now estimated at $7 billion, but a single spill could make the cost $8 billion or more. The number of jobs created should include those jobs necessary for cleaning up large oil spills that will inevitably occur. The oil industry would not like to see those figures published, however.

Smith's article argues that global warming has stopped. Nearly every climate scientist in the world agrees with this statement, and the scientists are the people who have gathered the data that Smith cites. It makes no sense to take data from these scientists while at the same time denying the interpretation of the data that these scientists have made. These scientists have dedicated their whole lives to studying our climate. Their opinions should not be discarded without direct proof, which can only be provided by the climate scientists themselves, because no one else in the world is qualified to evaluate their data.

Smith has argued both ways on this issue. He argues that the damage to global warming by increased CO2 concentration will be small. He also argues that there is no global warming. This paradox occurs because the State Department report is aimed at an educated audience that understands the dangers of global, while Smith's supporters have been so overwhelmed by fossil-fuel industry propaganda that they don't believe the scientists we employ to protect us. 

Smith contends that U.S. emissions contribute very little to global greenhouse gas concentrations. He says that the U.S. cut CO2 emissions by 12 percent between 2005 and 2012. This is not an argument for KXL, however, which will supply the rest of the world with oil to keep on increasing their omissions. If the rest of the world is increasing CO2 emissions, that is a good argument for the U.S. to stop selling them gasoline.

There is no valid argument for building the KXL pipeline, other than giving profits to oil companies. KXL will create new jobs, but not as many as similar projects in other, clean energy projects. It will pump greenhouse gases into the environment. It will pollute rivers and ground water in the communities through which it passes.

The oil and gas companies are profiting hugely from activities that are harmful to the entire planet. They cannot argue that their profits are good for the economy if those same profits damage the environment. Their argument, taken to its ultimate conclusion, is that we will all die with our pockets stuffed with money. But we will all be dead.

Nature has found the best place to store fossil fuels. It is in the ground now and it should remain there.

Sources: Lamar Smith's OpEd: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/lamar-smith-overheated-rhetoric-on-climate-change-hurts-the-economy/2013/05/19/32cb6d94-bda4-11e2-97d4-a479289a31f9_story.html; Anna Eshoo's OpEd: http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_23258287/anna-g-eshoo-keystone-xl-pipeline-wont-live; Center for American Progress study on the Economic Benefits of Investing in Clean Energy: http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/other_publication_types/green_economics/economic_benefits/economic_benefits.PDF.