Senator Leahy is not getting much love these days on GMD, thanks to his puzzling support for the Protect IP Act; but a spoonful of sugar truly does make the medicine go down. So I think he deserves applause for the extremely well-crafted statement he has released urging President Obama not to yield to Republican gamesmanship around Keystone XL.
The statement is focussed on two key issues that should resonate with even the most conservative readers.
Addressing the jobs argument he says:
Unable to sell the pipeline as necessary to meet the country’s energy needs, which it is not, or to refute charges that tar sands strip mining and the refining and burning of high carbon oil cause egregious harm to the environment and health, which it does, the Canadian energy company, TransCanada, has flooded the media with dire warnings about the American jobs that will be lost if the pipeline is rejected…What they don’t tell you is that the 5,000 or 6,000 temporary construction jobs will disappear once the pipeline is built. Only a few hundred permanent jobs are needed to operate and maintain the pipeline.
And on the topic of our “need” for this fuel source:
We cannot lessen our reliance on fossil fuels by continually ignoring it.
Fossil fuels are finite, inefficient, and dirty. The cost we pay at the gas pump bears no resemblance to the long-term environmental and health costs borne by society as a whole.
Well said, Senator. Let’s hope President Obama heeds your sage advice; and, in the same vein, let’s hope our discussion here will get you to look with new perspective at Protect IP.
What if Obama hadn’t punted the Keystone issue down the road?
No doubt the Republicans are more than capable of finding any kind a stick (see Republicans winning the light bulb wars!)to beat Dems with but he left this one lying in the road for them.
And from the make lemonade department there is this spin:
http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wi…
have both been stalwart. very proud to be a vermonter
on it in the house–which is, as you can imagine, a pretty thankless place to be working these days.
really, these are three of the five or six people on capitol hill fighting hardest against climate change. and their staffs have been working remarkably hard behind the scenes too.
so grateful
Uh… sorry? One of his top three contributing industries for as long as I’ve been following it have always been the entertainment industry. His support of the Protect IP Act strikes me as a perfectly logical payback for the money he’s been thrown over the years. Actually, that’s probably an overly dark view of it. He may very well have a genuine belief that the industry needs to be protected by destroying everything that stands in the way of its business model rather than just being a bought vote. Either way, the money and his past statements on such things make his support for Proetct IP anything but puzzling. Anyone who is surprised by his support for Proect IP just haven’t been paying attention. His unwavering support for the entertainment industry cartel (and their seemingly never ending goal of pushing their own responsibility of protecting their copyright onto publicly funded law enforcement) happens to be one of the issues I always have to hold my nose on when I fill in his oval at the ballot box. Greater good and all that rot.
Yeah…more cart before the horse(shit). If Leahy’s so concerned about the environment, why did he vote for a bill (NDAA) that would have ‘environmental radicals’ rounded up by the U.S. Military and put in Fema camps?
He has voted to give Capitalism (Wall St.) the power to order the President (and don’t for a minute think President Nice doesn’t take orders) to direct the military to make war on the American people. I guess Wall Street’s ‘plan’ is working–any Dem who votes for Fascism is OK, because he/she is not a Republican. Leahy won’t get ‘detained’ for voting against fossil fuels, but what will happen to the folks who engage in environmental action?
Oh yeah…the alternative is so much worse. Bullshit! Once the First Amendment is gone, the ALTERNATIVE has arrived. Kiss your environment, your country, and your Planet goodbye.