Erika Johnsen:
As I’ve argued before, the Obama administration’s relentless dithering on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline — a 1,700-mile transport project that would ship oil from Canada as well as North Dakota to refineries on the Gulf Coast — doesn’t have nearly as much to do with the president’s ostensible desire for so-called green energy as it does with his desire for the green lining the pockets of certain wildly wealthy and woefully out-of-touch Democratic donors.
The environmentalist movement, in their self-imagined righteousness, has determined that the Keystone XL pipeline heralds mankind’s worst development since… well, practically ever, actually, and with all of the fervor of crazed religiosity, they have set their sights and their dollars on thwarting Keystone as the trendy cause du jour. Never mind that, by doing so, they are denying Americans jobs and economic growth, but they just don’t seem able to grasp the concept that Canada will be developing and shipping their natural resources with or without the pipeline. Keystone would still be the best, most efficient way to do so, but if President Obama has a chance to keep flirting with these Democratic donors and teasing them out of their money while he goes off on grandiose tangents about slowing the rise of the oceans and whatnot, he’s going to do it.
Ryan Lizza has an excellent piece today over at the New Yorker about some of these specific anti-Keystone aficionados, starting with one Tom Steyer:
The difficulty Obama has in making a decision about the WMDs in Syria is he is looking for some donor to contribute funds based on his decision or non decision. Now, if Warren Buffet had stock in cruise missles, they would already have landed in Syria!