Thursday, November 10, 2011

Tar Sands pipeline sent back, likely for good; and Oct. Tim DeChristopher interview


The proposal for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline - said to be "'game over' for the planet" - is now likely effectively dead: Obama sent it back to the State Department "for a thorough re-review, which most analysts are saying will effectively kill the project", said Bill McKibben in Big news: We won. You won.

Which brought Tim DeChristopher to the minds of many - and last month's Rolling Stone has an Exclusive Interview With Jailed Climate Activist Tim DeChristopher by Jeff Goodell.
Message from Tim: you should be the change we need to see in the world; so, since the change we need is a carbon tax, be the carbon tax.

(on the flip side, our extant de facto "dirty energy subsidies"get attention from Coby Beck in his post on Paul Krugman's encouraging "Here Comes Solar Energy". Read Coby, then Krugman.)
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3 comments:

  1. Don Pelton11/11/2011 7:08 AM

    " ... likely for good ... " may be wishful thinking.

    As Brian Beutler, writing in TPM says:

    " ... like McKibben, environmentally minded members worry the GOP will ultimately get its way.

    [...]

    They have good reason to worry. Before activists turned Keystone into a national story, the project was mostly considered a done deal. There’s a lot of institutional pressure on the administration to see it through. And base voter clamor won’t have the same impact if and when Obama’s a second term president."

    http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/11/in-keystone-decision-environmentalists-win-big----but-potentially-illusory----victory.php

    ReplyDelete
  2. frank -- Decoding SwiftHack11/11/2011 10:45 AM

    "which most analysts are saying will effectively kill the project"

    Makes me wonder who these "most analysts" are, and what their track record for accuracy is...

    -- frank

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anna Haynes11/11/2011 3:08 PM

    Likely the implicit "because" was McKibben's next 2 sentences -
    " The president explicitly noted climate change, along with the pipeline route, as one of the factors that a new review would need to assess. There's no way, with an honest review, that a pipeline that helps speed the tapping of the world's second-largest pool of carbon can pass environmental muster."

    But since I haven't asked any analysts, your guess about what they think is as good as mine.

    ReplyDelete

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