So Obama is going to kill the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada, pending apparently another route being drawn up. Which means that he has killed it dead, because any route is going to be met with objection and delay.
Instead, let’s build more of the bird blenders.
Hey union guys hoping for some jobs, smoke on this.
Update: In response to a commenter who lamented the lack of shovel ready jobs, here’s where they went:
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
Now lets see if the Republicans in the House put their collective foot down and attach a rider (especially to the payroll tax bill) that auto-approves the pipeline and make Obama veto it. Something … politically untenable for the Democrat Senators to vote against.
Dingy Harry can only provide so much cover for President Obama’s foolishness. Eventually it WILL catch up to him, and something is going to come into the Senate that Reid politically CAN’T stall, lest the Democrat Senators get trounced even harder than they are already going to this November just due to the election math.
Look for a gift to the unions elsewhere to make up for this.
Good Prof…you saw this. An issue that really gets all of us “regular folks” I have several irritations with this. 1. Our Republican congressman suggesting back in December that they had somehow “won” something by the Keystone Provision being included in the Payroll tax bill.
Note to Congressman: You won nothing. By my count its Obama +2 and 0 for republican congressman.
2. What is it the State Department wants? Seems to me the company jumped the hurdles.
Sad deal really. If I owned the company Id change my mind.
Obama talks job creation…so long as the jobs are busy work or temporary deals working for failing green tech.
Obama economic policy in 2 minutes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnzzWGcdMqY&feature=player_embedded
Why I thought the route problem was solved
http://www.transcanada.com/keystone.html
The Governor of Montana (a Democrat who favors the pipeline) said on Fox yesterday that Nebraska has not finalized its decision and won’t for another 6 to 9 months. He blamed the holdup totally on Nebraska. Another commentator noted that the sand hills that are of so much concern have multiple pipelines cris-crossing them. The original route crossed the sand hills, but a new one avoids them.
Just a little info on the “bird blenders.”
T. Boone Pickens, a corporate raider after Romney’s own heart, was building a wind farm in west Texas. Now, he managed to get a five member panel in Austin (all Democrats, btw) to approve a $5 billion grid upgrade to the Texas grid so that Pickens could sell HIS electricity to Dallas, where he had already secured a contract. The $5 billion would not be paid back by the users in Dallas, but by ALL Texans through a surcharge on their ulitity bills. Dallas gets more electricity, Pickens gets wealthier and Texans get the shaft.
But it seems that it was more expensive that T. Boone thought to build these giant whirlligigs. So he applied for a federal money to build them (which would have lined his pockets even more). What a deal, American taxpayers pay to have the whirlligigs built, Dallas gets the electricity through a new grid section and Texans get to pay for the grid, meanwhile, T. Boone is amassing the money of a large nation’s GDP.
But the federal deal fell through, and Pickens admitted that while natural gas had a better return, and a quicker return, it would take him well over 20 years to recoup his money on the wind farm, that is providing there were no serious maintainence problems, which there would be. So he scraped it.
The Pickens Wind Farm now lays in disrepair, abandoned, never having generated one kw of power.
But never being one to give up on bilking the American taxpayer out of money, Pickens has gone a different route. He is now lobbying for all commercial trucks to go propane, and is quickly leasing up every acre and back yard in Texas to provide him with that gas. He even has managed to get some Congress critters on board with a bill that would force the trucking industry to virtually bankrupct itself.
Mu understanding about the T. Boone Pickens wind-farm was that he had a certain vision that oil usage could be reduced if certain actions were taken, and some of those actions build upon each other.
The wind farms and nuclear plants would be built to free up natural gas that would otherwise be used in natural gas power plants.
The Natural Gas saved would be shunted to a Natural Gas / Liquid Propane run trucking fleet (as older equipment was retired and newer equipment was brought online.
The oil reduction would then reduce the amount of foreign oil imports, and doing it this way would fix the dependency problem, reduces the cost of oil by effectively reducing demand, while at the same time deprive the Eco-nuts of one of their best-polling arguments about “dirty oil drilling” being one of the worst pollution causes.
That vision made sense when gasoline was $4.00 a gallon. It doesn’t make sense when gasoline is cheaper than that, so he shifted his focus.
I may be being overly charitable. I actually thought that this was a decent idea. I’ve seen some of the other Texas wind-farms which have become operational, and they seem to create a reasonable amount of electricity. I wish we could build a mid-grade windfarm out here in El Paso. We have a pretty predominant 15 to 20 mile-per-hour wind on the Westside near the Franklin Mountains. That might break the local electric company which has been badly mismanaged, and is now over the barrel because they can’t raise their rates, nor can they reduce demand on the system.
Pickens has got a vulture-capitalist streak to him, but he gets some credit in my book for sheer vision. One of these days I’ll get around to writing my thoughts on Vulture-Capitalism on my blog.
Sorry. Should read “My understanding ….”
You are WAY too charitable to Mr. Pickens. The only vision I see that he has is how to get more money into his pocket, and he is not too particular about how that happens. Using propane or natural gas in vehicles has some major drawbacks that he ignores.
First, the infrastructure would be very expensive to build, even where natural gas is readily available through pipelines. Second, the tanks would have to be enormous because gas doesn’t contain as much energy as diesel fuel. Third, safety would be a problem because the tanks would have to be highly pressurized; that would be akin to a bomb hurtling down the highway at 70 mph or so.
I see no future for wind electricity, either. It has to have 100% backup capacity for those times when the wind doesn’t blow, an expensive proposition. The windmills are proving to be more expensive to build and maintain than first thought. And, the power grid must be extended to where the windmills can be built. Then there are the bird blender, noise, and unsightliness problems.
These are good examples of what happens when government tries to make decisions that should be left to free markets. Government sponsored research is fine. Government funding or forcing of production is a big problem.
Hi JayDick,
I thought it would be a bad idea too until I actually looked at the numbers and thought about it as a cascading economic change rather than a single industry change.
You’re shortchanging Liquid Propane a bit (if it was Natural Gas only, I’d agree with you). Liquid propane is only about 30% less efficient than Diesel Fuel (Liquid Propane 1 gallon = 91,500 BTU to 1 gallon #2 diesel = 139,200 BTU), but is concurrently about 30% cheaper (average $2.846 to $3.964 Diesel).
That the infrastructure would be expensive is a fair criticism, but changing from anything other than Gasoline will always be, because that’s what we’ve got. There’s always an opportunity cost.
The pressurization of the tanks really isn’t that big of a deal from a safety standpoint, especially if you’re only doing it on the commercial trucking fleet. The tanks need to be probably 50% heavier than they are now (and 30% larger, as noted, to accommodate the lesser energy). At the proper tensile strength, it won’t matter what you hit those tanks with, they’re never, ever going to break open (which really isn’t that expensive). In a collision, there just isn’t enough force involved (the mass of a vehicle hitting the truck would be too small; even another truck hitting the truck head on).
As for Wind Power, I think there’s some future for it. Keeping a LP or Nat. Gas. plant idling burns very little energy and it can be brought up to accommodate fluctuations in the system very quickly.
Extending the power grid is needed anyway (modern transmission lines to replace the prior lines).
All tech initially is less reliable and more expensive than what came before. It’s the continued use and refinement that brings the cost down (which sometimes requires a nudge, but not a requirement of use).
Keeping a gas plant idling may not use much energy, but it costs a lot of money to build it and at least some money to maintain it.
It’s time to end the government subsidies to “green” energy and let the market sort it out. In the meantime, drill baby drill, for oil as well as gas.
I saw the photos of the dead birds. Funny how the environmental whackos don’t care about endangered birds being killed by windmills.
Always something deeper going on…
Oh, they care, Karen. But just not enough to allow us to drill on our own soil for what some thing IS a renewable source of energy, oil. The process by which the earth creates oil did not end a couple of million years ago, it continues to this day. Mother Nature is, if anything, consistant in what she does.
But let me tell you about the birds: there is a huge wind farm up around Abiline. The blades are much larger than most, consequently they turn slower. The hawks love to play in them and once in a while one gets clipped. But slowing down the blades by making them larger, allows the birds to get out of the way.
Airplanes kill birds as well. Maybe that is why the TSA is trying to discourage all of us from flying.
The Abiline wind farm is the one I was thinking of.
Meanwhile, Canada is now in talks with China to provide them with the oil that the pipeline would have provided to us.
Couldn’t we get the enviro-weenies on board if we built it first and foremost as a pop-art statement about our naughty dependence on fossil fuels … maybe with some NEA grants thrown in?
The oil we’d receive would be secondary.
All the lefties would be encouraged to adorn the pipeline with their protest-graffiti art … like the Berlin Wall.
I haven’t met many lefties who would turn down the chance at making a pop-art statement.
LukeHandCool (bringing the left and right together through pop-art statements since 1989).
I just talked to the left – all of them – and they said they were all in with your plan….. until they saw you had referred to them as “enviro-weenies”.
You were thisclose man!
sigh
the best laid plans of coolhands and mice …..
well back to the easel…I mean drawing board LHC 🙂
My old friend … Rejection.
I feel like Jonathan Livingston Seagull … thinking he’s finally made it after 18 rejections … spreading his wings in glorious flight … right into the bird blender.
Hello darkness my old friend…
I’ve come to talk with you again…
Chin up, Bunky!!
Nice effort, Luke!
But the Keystone is all underground.
So much for supporting shovel ready projects.
The ONLY reason Obama would object to this pipeline is because he wants to hurt our country. The route was never an issue. There are other lines in the same area. After 3 years of study, even the State Dept approved the pipeline. Obama is bad for the US. He needs to be impeached, soon.
Obama is managing his base constituencies, this time favoring the enviro-weenies (LHC!) over the unions who’d’ve caught union dues over the jobs created. Behind the scenes I’m sure the unions were promised some other gift in recompense.
You know, Henry, the E-weenies are mostly a threat to the economy in this country. In many less developed nations they are a direct threat to the environment itself … irony lost on a group that, like other groups of lefties, and the British, flagrantly pride themselves on their grasp of irony.
I was taking a regional geography grad class on South America when my nephew suddenly dropped out of college. He had been becoming increasingly aggravated by the stifling PC environment on his school’s campus. An excellent writer, he was getting A’s on all his papers in an English class he was taking when the professor then had the class pick a political issue and argue one side for the next paper. He argued from a conservative viewpoint in his paper … and received a D.
He told me had known there might be trouble, so he made sure it was his best paper yet, in all aspects, but he was still flabbergasted. He said he immediately politely protested to no avail, and then invited his classmates to read his paper to judge for themselves … which was met by silence from his classmates and a smirk and a laugh by the professor. He got up, handed the paper back to the professor, and walked out … and hasn’t been back to college since.
I was so angry about this that when we were asked to write a paper about environmental concerns (I think it was on Peru) in my class a short time later, I let it rip and made the case for growing the economy and lifting people out of poverty as far and away the best approach to aiding the environment. It would’ve made Milton Friedman smile (and maybe even blush).
I expected to catch hell … but he raved about it and read it to the class! He was about the only professor I think I’ve ever had who wasn’t an obvious lefty … even though he stated during one lecture some time later that he had considered himself a Marxist early in his career.
Dangit, Luke! Tell us what happened to your nephew!
I was largely apolitical my first go-round in college (1973), focused more on what I was sure was a mere stepping stone to the NHL, but when I later returned for post grad I found much the same as your nephew did. A streetsmart kid out of Detroit, I used it all against them. I had an elective titled Fundamentals of Interpersonal Communication, a euphemism for Grad Student Gets To Push His Political Agenda. I’d hit the bong, go in and talk philosophical postmodern rubbish, and aced the class by saying, essentially, nothing.
University is the cheapest and most efficient way to get an education, but it is far from the only way, and not always the best way.
A one-time Asst Attorney General for the state of Michigan, a besotted frequent flyer in the bar my father owned after retiring as a police officer, once offered to sponsor my admission to Cooley Law School. I turned him down (no hockey team!). Had I accepted I might now be the author of a famous political blog!
My nephew has been spinning his wheels ever since … going absolutely nowhere and constantly battling severe depression.
“Had I accepted I might now be the author of a famous political blog!”
I hear the Professor would now be an NHL goalie (a slashing one) if he hadn’t started blogging.
Fascinating story, yours is, Henry!
LukeHandCool (who sat behind world figure skating champion and Olympian Tai Babilonia in his 7th grade history class. She was tiny back then!)
Geez. Couldn’t you have lied to me, told me he now ran a multinational corporation, or was mayor of some great city, or something? Married Cameron Diaz? SOMETHING.
Bummer for Jacobson, on the NHL goalie thing not working out. His own dang fault, though. I mean, c’mon… NHL goalie? Blogger? NHL goalie? Blogger? And he went with blogger… (shaking head, here).
Heh, I’ll bet there are times a political blogger feels like an NHL goalie.
It is devastating to discover when you stand accused, that you stand alone. The only thing I can really say is, if you let it kill you, the only thing that bastard is going to do is snicker about it. Don’t give him that satisfaction.
Actually, there is another thing I can say about it, if one finds oneself dealing with such a professor ever again.
I have an uncle, who has a low and devious mind, had a professor like that, and being forewarned, what he did is he spent the first half of the semester writing poorly written papers that sycophantically agreed with the prof in question. Those, of course, got A’s.
Then for the second half of the semester, he wrote very well written papers savaging the prof’s positions. These, of course, got D’s.
Then, he took the whole stack to the Dean…
He never got a degree either. I figure, once you’ve stomped all over someone’s feet of clay, it is hard to ever take them seriously again. I doubt that your nephew is the first kid that prof has done this to, and I doubt he will be the last either.
It hurts when the people you trusted betray you, but in the end, you have to let go of them.
Let the dead bury the dead.
That’s a great story, voyager.
There is no lonelier place on earth for a young conservative than a college classroom with a lefty professor and captive, credulous, nodding students. It’s just a horrible environment … and pure malpractice on the “educator’s” part.
Forgot to add—
Writer Michael Crichton, when he was an undergrad at Harvard, turned in a paper as his own, which was really something written by George Orwell … and the professor gave it a B … he did it to show how full of crap so many professors are.
Voyager, isn’t that enough evidence for a lawsuit against the college for fraud? Ditto for your nephew, Luke; if the administration wouldn’t do anything about it wouldn’t he have legal recourse? They’re taking people’s money and purporting to provide honest instruction and grading, leading to a degree, when in fact they’re dealing dishonestly. Sounds like fraud to me.
Thank GOD EVERY DAY you declined going to the Thomas M. Cooley Law School. I like to try to think the best about people, but they are the most dishonest, lying, unethical individuals school that I have ever seen in my entire life, and their graduates, on the whole, do a disservice to the profession of law.
As the author of the Thomas M. Cooley Law School Scam Blog (http://thomas-cooley-law-school-scam.weebly.com/) says its “a school of last resort which has one of the worst reputations and one of the most dubious distinctions in the legal community. The Cooley brand is well known for the irreparable stigma it carries, and with the filing of these SLAPP suits (lawsuit meant to censor and intimidate critics) as a reckless abuse of the legal system it is unlikely that their reputation as a legal institution can fall much lower.”
They’re teaching style is awful, and they’re a mill. They accept 1000 students about every 14 weeks, and drum out 2/3rds of them via the curved grading system right about week 8 of your first semester, AFTER you’ve paid your first semester tuition of 20K. They’re accepting students who have absolutely NO business being in a law school merely to steal their tuition.
It’s so bad that it is (or was) being sued in August 2011 in a class action lawsuit for fraud, negligent misrepresentation, and deceptive business practices for $250,000,000 by Cooley graduates.
Thanks, Chuck, but this was like 40 years ago.
This is step #1 of the new Democrat pamphlet – “How to Lose a Re-Election in 10 Easy Steps”
you can fill in #2 -#10 🙂
How Obama reasons. Should be obvious to those that have subscribed to Trafamadorian Economic theory. Just doesnt work here on Earth.
http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/obama-more-jobs-jobless-benefits-keystone/244871
Once again: More jobs created by extending jobless benefits than Keystone.
Okie dokey.
‘Trafamadorian’……… Vonnegut?
Schweitzer, governor of Montana, was just on Cavuto. He said BO had to reject the proposal because Nebraska did not have a final plan in place. Does anyone know if this is true?
Schweitzer is a Democrat, ergo, he is lying.
That was my first thought, but he seemed SO aggravated about it, that I believe him. He just saw a lot of jobs walk out the door.
He was probably pissed at that. For a state like his, any big job that can promise to bring jobs that might even stick around longer is great.
He’s obviously rather angry.
^^Yeah..and looking at it I think I missed the L Trafalmador lol
(Psssst, I didn’t notice it either, and what with Wikipedia closed today….)
This clearly confirms that Obama is nothing more then a hyper-partisan Democratic Socialist – as if we ever had any doubts. And he’s not the only one. There are thousands of liberals that stand fast right behind him on this decision.
I am no longer going to just sit around and wait for November to take action against these liberal vermin that are ruining our country. Our company now has a totally new set of procedures when it comes to hiring. We are going to check new candidates political affiliations down at the county. When people come in for an interview, we are checking for political bumper stickers on their cars. We are checking people’s Facebook pages, Linked-in pages and doing a thorough internet search to see if we can learn about their political affiliations.
We are doing thorough criminal background checks and searching the court records to see if people have engaged in litigation and if so, why. We are going to make every effort to weed out the liberals and not hire them. If we have the slightest doubt about someone’s political affiliations – they will NOT get hired. We don’t have to prove anything to anyone.
In addition, the worm that is causing our entire nation to rot is our failed liberal-controlled educational system. I am writing all congressional Reps, Senators and State Reps to get the ball rolling to get the federal government OUT of the business of cultivating liberal lemmings for the Democratic party. Until we rid academe of the liberal plague that now controls it, we are wasting our time trying to fight off the Democratic Socialists because our school systems are churning out constituents for their party like mad.
C’mon guys, cut Obummer some slack here….he’s just doing it for the kids (insert gagging sound here) 🙁
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/01/disgusting-white-house-claims-keystone-pipeline-decision-was-made-for-the-kids/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+gatewaypundit2+%28Gateway+Pundit%29&utm_content=FaceBook