The PenOpticon

TransCanada Pipelines has co-opted a few American veterans to shill for the Keystone XL project as part of a lobbying effort to get Hillary Clinton to approve it. As they say in a March 4, 2011 letter to Clinton:

“One only needs to consider the recent events unfolding in the Middle East to understand the vulnerabilities our nation faces and the need for a more domestic, secure supply of oil from a friendly and reliable trading partner such as Canada.”

It’s not quite American oil, but it is “more domestic”. It’s as if they really wanted to contrast “wild”, unsafe oil from sketchy parts of the planet with “domesticated” oil that can be sent down the pipe from compliant Canadians.

But how compliant are we? Very:

Sean McMaster, TransCanada’s executive VP noted that the pipeline will “provide thousands of high-quality jobs for Americans and invest billions of dollars from the private sector, at no cost to American taxpayers”. No cost to American taxpayers, because domesticated Canadians have been footing the bill for tar sands exploitation for a long time. In 2008 alone, Canadians gave 2.8 billion to big oil.

It looks like Canada’s just gotta trash the Boreal forest over the tar sands because the Americans don’t want to trash their own tar sands in Utah. As stated in this 2008 Congressional Research Report: “In light of the environmental and social problems associated with oil sands development, e.g., water requirements, toxic tailings, carbon dioxide emissions, and skilled labour shortages, and given the fact that Canada has 175 billion barrels of reserves… the smaller U.S. oils sands may not be a very attractive investment in the short term.”