Report May Ease Way to Approval of Keystone Pipeline
Source: New York Times
WASHINGTON — The State Department released a report on Friday that could pave the way toward President Obama’s approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline.
The long-awaited environmental impact statement on the project concludes that approval or denial of the pipeline, which would carry 830,000 barrels of oil a day from Alberta to the Gulf Coast, is unlikely to prompt oil companies to change the rate of their extraction of carbon-heavy tar sands oil, a State Department official said. Either way, the tar sands oil, which produces significantly more planet-warming carbon pollution than standard methods of drilling, is coming out of the ground, the report says.
In his second term, Mr. Obama has sought to make his fight against climate change a cornerstone of his legacy. In a major speech on the environment last summer, Mr. Obama said that he would approve the pipeline only if it would not “significantly exacerbate” the problem of carbon pollution. He said the pipeline’s net effects on the climate would be “absolutely critical” to his decision.
The conclusions of the report appear to indicate that the project has passed Mr. Obama’s climate criteria, an outcome expected to outrage environmentalists, who have rallied, protested, marched and been arrested in demonstrations around the country against the pipeline.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/01/us/politics/report-may-ease-way-to-approval-of-keystone-pipeline.html
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Who wrote that fucking report, anyway, Koch Industries?
Mother Flubber, I can't believe the crock of shit & the accompanying disaster is actually going to pass.
How can those assholes in DC look themselves in the mirror?
NAFTA arrested the free fall manufacturing wages were in:
Manufacturing wages went up. Manufacturing output went up. Manufacturing jobs continued to decline as a percentage of the economy at exactly the same rate they have been since the 1950s (though since that was a rapidly growing economy, thanks largely to trade, that drop doesn't always represent an absolute decrease in jobs, though it often does):
US manufacturing output has been going up, but never as fast as it was right after NAFTA passed.
This also led to higher median wages overall, until W's disastrous and destructive tax cuts:
Trade + redistributive taxes/spending + strong labor laws is a good way to a prosperous society -- look at Western Europe.
Overall employment rate? Check it out:
Again: things got better after NAFTA until the disastrous Bush tax cuts.
More to the point: stopping or rolling back trade doesn't solve the problems of not having high enough revenues or high enough social spending. In some ways it makes them worse, since the "pie" gets smaller.
