The GOP Must Be Crazy

Now we get to see just how crazy they are. (photo: Getty Images)

Well-paying jobs will be cleaning up Keystone XL pipeline leaks

By Charles Peirce, Esquire

19 November 14

readersupportednews.org

ur old friend, the Keystone XL pipeline, the continent-spanning death-funnel that would bring the world's dirtiest fossil fuel down through the most arable farmland in the hemisphere and to the refineries along the Gulf Coast, and thence to the world, has revealed in itself an incredible capacity to make people act stupidly.

It has moved beyond being a public policy issue among the ascendant Republican party, and within the movement conservatism which is that party's only remaining animating force. It has moved beyond being a financial windfall for the plutocrats whose money has been rendered the lifeblood of our politics, on both sides, but especially among the Republicans, who share a few more of the plutocracy's ultimate goals than do the Democrats. Among the Republicans, and among their most fervent political zealots, the pipeline has become an ideological fetish object, something to which fealty must be paid, a measure of loyalty and devotion to every other part of the political faith, a lasting symbol of triumph over the other side, like the steles erected in Mesopotamia or the pyramids. Its essential utility, its negligible economic impact, the environmental peril presented by the toxic goo it will carry through the fragile breadbasket of the country, the demonstrable bad-faith and neglect of the foreign corporation that will benefit from it, the blatant disregard of all potential (and, I would argue, inevitable) catastrophes inherent in the project -- all of these are beside the point. The Keystone XL pipeline must be built because it is the Keystone XL pipeline.

The Keystone XL pipeline must be built only so that the people who oppose it are defeated. The Keystone XL pipeline must be built because it is no longer a construction project, it is an article of the conservative faith.

(As to the Democratic supporters of the project, their motives are of a more purely self-centered variety. Mary Landrieu wants to keep her job, or set herself up for a fat new one at some lobbying firm. Heidi Heitkamp is an oil sheikh, and Joe Manchin wants to demonstrate to the entire extraction industry that he's on board and open for business. As for the president, if he really believes that folding on this will buy him goodwill somewhere else, as the story in the New York Times implies he does, he'll just never, ever learn, will he?)

I first heard of the Keystone XL pipeline not long after I opened this shebeen along the docks of Blogistan. I went to cover the incredibly useless Florida Presidential Straw Poll in the autumn of 2011. At that gathering of the faithful, every one of the speakers talked about the necessity of building the pipeline. (It was also at this event that I first became aware of another conservative signifier -- Agenda 21, the secret UN plan to steal all our golfs.) Most of them cited economic benefits that long since have been debunked. But all of them cited the pipeline as a demonstration of our national resolve to defeat tree-hugging hippie environmentalists. All modern conservative politics blow away on the wind without some Other at which to direct their dark energy. But this was something different. This wasn't fervor animating an idea. This was devotion to an actual object -- a sludge-bearing Arc de Triomphe to demonstrate the inalienable right of some Americans to despoil America without serious consequence.

Even today, every practical argument in favor of the pipeline has been rendered threadbare. Poor David Brooks makes a try in The New York Times today, attempting to hilarious effect to cast the opponents of the pipeline as the true Luddites in the drama.

Usually presidents at the end of their terms get less partisan, not more. But with his implied veto threat of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, President Obama seems intent on showing that Democrats, too, can put partisanship above science. Keystone XL has been studied to the point of exhaustion, and the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that it's a modest-but-good idea. The latest State Department study found that it would not significantly worsen the environment. The oil's going to come out anyway, and it's greener to transport it by pipeline than by train. The economic impact isn't huge, but at least there'd be a $5.3 billion infrastructure project.

Actually, science says that the stuff that the pipeline will carry is best left in the ground. Journalism says that the State Department report was put together by a firm with close business ties to TransCanada, the Canadian corporation that is the only entity in the world that actually will profit from the project. And, when I first heard about the project, at that 2011 tent revival down in Florida, there was talk of thousands and thousands of good-paying jobs and gas prices down into the double-digits again. Now, thanks to the delay, and to the laudable agitation by the likes of Bill McKibben and the Bold Nebraska crew, even TransCanada admits that it's the permanent jobs that will total in the double digits, and Brooks can only meep about an economic impact that "isn't huge," and that the pipeline is merely a "modest-to-good" idea.

The economic impact isn't huge, but at least there'd be a $5.3 billion infrastructure project.

Yeah, we can't get a highway bill passed, and our bridges are falling down, and the entire rest of the world is leaving us behind on high-speed rail, but we should put in a pipeline as an "infrastructure project," and that's not even to mention the well-paying clean-up jobs that will appear as soon as the thing leaks and poisons the Ogallala Aquifer. But Brooks's muted assessment of the pipeline's benefits are not his real reason why it should be built. According to him, the pipeline should be built as a demonstration that the president "gets" the message sent a couple of weeks ago by 52 percent of the 38 percent of eligible voters who bothered to get off the couch. The pipeline should be built as a symbol of a new commitment to "governing." It should be built as the ultimate hippie punch. It should be built simply because it...is. Throw the bone into the air, David. Maybe it will turn into a spaceship.