OBAMA 2.O / ENVIRONMENT
Middle East oil, and to others, the
president’s willingness to mark a
clear end to the era of fossil fuels.
“Reject dirty fuels,” the coalition
of environmental groups declared
in its letter to Obama earlier this
month. “We should not pursue
dirty fuels like tar sands when climate science tells us that 80 percent of existing fossil fuel reserves
need to be kept in the ground.”
Other climate action advocates
see the pipeline as a distraction.
“It has emerged as a very symbolic
flashpoint,” Elliot Diringer, the executive vice president of the Center
for Climate and Energy Solutions
in Washington and a former policy
adviser at the White House Council
on Environmental Quality under
President Bill Clinton. “But I don’t
know that we should expend our
political capital on symbolic victories rather than real progress.”
As the State Department continues a new environmental review of the project, eyes will inevitably shift to retiring Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton’s presumed
successor, the Democratic senator
from Massachusetts, John Kerry.
He will nominally inherit Keystone’s federal permit application
— though the ultimate decision
will be Obama’s.
HUFFINGTON
01.27.13
The administration has already
given a nod to TransCanada, the
company behind the pipeline, to
begin building the lower leg of the
project, which runs from Cushing,
Okla., to the Gulf Coast, prompt-
“We should not pursue dirty fuels like
tar sands when climate science tells us
that 80 percent of existing fossil fuel
reserves need to be kept in the ground.”
ing pitched battles between protesters and local police. But the
connection to Alberta’s oil sands
— an inarguably dirty deposit of
thick bitumen that requires copious, emissions-intensive refining
and chemical treatment to turn it
into useable product — remains
the real test for Obama, a president who has, after all, spent a
good deal of effort touting an “all
of the above” energy strategy.
Any decision is still likely a
good ways off, but it’s certain that
large swaths of the electorate will
be unhappy with whatever decision the president makes.
THE CLIMATE CONVERSATION
The third and final presidential debate last October marked the first
time since the 1980s that an entire season of presidential and vice