Skip to main content

squeezing jobs through a pipe

"TransCanada numbers count each job on a yearly basis. If the pipeline employs 10,000 people working for two years, that's 20,000 jobs by the company's count. The estimates also include jobs in Canada, where about a third of the $7 billion pipeline would be constructed... Even according to TransCanada, the amount of permanent jobs created would be only in the hundreds."

The pipeline plan would have very little impact on the unemployment rate in the states it passes through. The pipeline plan would have no measurable effect on the supply or cost of petroleum in the U.S. Finally, the petroleum will not belong to any of us. It will belong to TransCanada, who will obviously sell it to the highest bidder (for many barrels, experts say that will be China).


The greatest problem is the process of gathering and processing oil from oilsands. This is not like the stereotype of a gusher, with oil bursting from the ground. They have to dig down with gigantic machinery, hauling out ton after ton of goop - dirty, tarry sand. It is very expensive and wasteful to separate the sand from the oil, polluting thousands of gallons of water, which is then simply dumped onto the ground by TransCanada. All this arguably makes oilsand one of the most wasteful forms of energy. The process creates 25% more pollution and greenhouse gas than regular oil, such as is generally found in Arabia, Mexico, and Russia.

In short, everything that is bad about regular petroleum is even worse with the stuff that would come through the proposed pipeline. Even if it does satisfy some of our appetite for fossil fuels, it will only delay the inevitable, while accelerating the destruction of our climate.

http://money.cnn.com/2011/12/13/news/economy/keystone_pipeline_jobs/index.htm?hpt=hp_t1

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Refugees in Europe deserve help, but refugees in U.S. deserve to "be sent back"?

--> September 4, 2015 Hillary Clinton on the refugee crisis in Southern Europe:   “Well the pictures, well the stories, we’ve been watching this terrible assault on the Syrian people now for years, are just heartbreaking. I think the entire world has to come together, it should not be just one or two countries, or not just Europe and the United States. We should do our part, as should the Europeans, but this is a broader, global crisis.   We now have um, more refugees than we’ve had, in many years, I think since the second world war. And as we’ve seen tragically, people are literally dying to escape the conflict in Syria. Uh, I think that the, the larger Middle East, I think Asia, I think everybody should step up and say we have to help these people. And I would hope that, under the aegis of the United Nations led by the Security Council, and certainly by the United States which has been such a generous nation in the past, we would begin to try to...

be the movies

i guess it's because i've been watching too many movies about relationships. or that most movies are specifically about relationships ,and i've just been watching too many movies. whatever: recently the screen seems to invade my imagination. too often. i thought maybe i was a character from Closer . only in a few scenes, not the whole thing. "there's always a moment." in my film class this quarter, we read shit about the overwhelming sense of realness in film. how and why it can surpass literature, visual art, stage, and tv. nothing can manipulate as effectively. it controls time and perception (you cannot go back and re-read a page at a movie theater - but i'm re-reading a book stanza now). And yet, love knows it is a greater grief To bear love's wrong, than hate's known injury other forms often suggest to us that "we are there," in a moment. but the experience of directed gaze at a photo or painting, this is limited to 1 sense, and we ...

Jared Kushner & the Meritocracy

Congratulations to Jared Kushner for getting the federal government to cover a well-deserved $800 million loan! This is such a feel-good story, showing our meritocracy at work: As a child, Jared's family ran a small business of owning 25,000 apartment units. They barely scraped by on less than $100 million income per year. The Kushners were forced to live off of government assistance, via the rent received from their low-income tenants. When it was time to apply for college, Jared didn't have the advantages of other applicants. For example, he wasn't a great student, his GPA was low, and he got a bad score on the SAT. It was only by a stroke of luck that Jared's dad Charles cobbled together a $2.5 million donation to Harvard. Just in time to get him a spot.  Yet even with a Harvard degree and Ivy League connections, poor Jared didn't find anyone willing to hire him! Except for his dad. So, he pulled himself up by his bootstraps and took an entry-level positio...