The Keystone XL pipeline is forging ahead, bringing shale-oil to the U.S. and when the current phase is complete, it will also be moving crude oil from Oklahoma to the refineries near the Gulf Of Mexico (GOM). The project will also create about 4,000 jobs for Americans, but the radical environmentalists are still trying to derail it. They're fighting the progress of construction crews, state-by-state, from Nebraska to the GOM.
Having failed in the courts, the "activists" are falling back on their usual tactic of chaining themselves to machinery and buildings.
Their complaint in Nebraska has been that a rupture could contaminate the state's Sandhills region, but on September 5th, the president of TransCanada Corp., the pipeline's owner, announced that the company had submitted a new route that would avoid the region altogether. Undeterred by reality, the "environmentalists" are continuing to object. Jane Kleeb, executive director of "Bold Nebraska", stated that "We will not allow middle America to be the middle man for a foreign tar sands pipeline."
In Oklahoma and Texas, organizations like "Tar Sands Blockade" are doing their best to slow construction. In mid-August protesters unfurled protest banners at two equipment staging yards in Texas and Oklahoma, but since there was no actual construction being done on the sites, it had no real effect at all on the progress of the pipeline.
The Tar Sands Blockade admits, on its website, “We intend to delay construction of this dangerous project long enough to force the termination of TransCanada’s shipping contracts and investments.”
The protests have been sporadic and could hardly be described as massive:
On Aug. 28th seven activists showed up at the Livingston, Texas, equipment yard of a contractor working on the pipeline. Four of them chained themselves to a flatbed truck loaded with pipe. The county Sheriff sent several deputies to the site, where they separated the four from the truck. The deputies then arrested them and three other activists who had been loitering nearby and charged everyone with trespassing. After a total delay of three hours, the trucks were unloaded and on their way to get more pipe, and the seven activists were sitting in jail.
The Sept. 5th protest in Saltillo, Texas, consisted of three youths who chained themselves to a piece of tree-cutting machinery and unfurled a homemade banner (that was visible only to contractors and the local police because no one else was there). The police conferred with the construction crew and decided to make no arrests. Their consensus was to leave the activists baking in the blistering Texas sun and let nature take its course. After a few hours the protesters unchained themselves, declared "victory" and then went home. Work on that section of the pipeline resumed the next day without incident.
All these organizations opposing the pipeline have two things in common; first, they don't like oil, end of statement, and second, they obviously don't care at all about what's good for America.
Who else doesn't want the pipeline completed? That would include the anti-American regimes in Saudi Arabia (15 of the 19 911 hijackers were Saudi citizens, as was Osama Bin Ladin) and Venezuela (whose "president" Hugo Chavez called President Bush "the devil" and has referred to President Obama as "a clown").
Those countries don't want America to be able to access Canadian shale oil. They also don't want us to be able to cheaply move crude from Oklahoma to the refineries in Texas. Cheap gasoline for America is very bad news for them.
We now get 18.6% of our imported oil from Canada, with Saudi Arabia and Venezuela providing 21.8%.
When the activists travel hundreds of miles, sometimes halfway across the U.S., to stage a protest, they're burning some form of petroleum product. Gasoline, diesel and jet fuel all come from the oil the activists hate so much. How can the activists afford all that travel? Surely they're not being financed by wealthy, oil-producing countries that hate us and would do almost anything to keep America from being energy-independent.
