Coming Down The Pipeline

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

24 April 13

esterday, the 45-day "public comment" period on our old friend, the Keystone XL pipeline, ended, with over 800,000 comments weighing in on the elongated death-funnel designed to transport the world's dirtiest fossil-fuel from the ecological moonscape they've created in Alberta to refineries on the Gulf coast in Texas, and thence to the world, or what's left of it after we burn a good piece of it down. There is starting to be a stirring in the elite press that the White House may be preparing to quietly endorse this bag job. (My man Chuck Todd opined yesterday that he expects the administration to approve the completion of the pipeline some Friday afternoon, maybe at the beginning of the Memorial Day weekend.) The State Department's only public hearing on the project - conducted a week ago in Nebraska - turned out to be something of a pep rally for pipeline opponents.

It really is remarkable at this point how completely tattered the case for building the pipeline actually is. The jobs claims have been debunked time and again as inflated. The public-safety promises from TransCanada, the corporation seeking to completely the pipeline, have collapsed as badly as that pipeline in Arkansas did. And, in a country that prizes bipartisanship as much as this one allegedly does, the coalition against the pipeline is as diverse as could ever be expected - ranchers and tree-huggers, scientists and Native American activists. On the other side is money and power, and a simple brute desire not to be frustrated by the lines of ranchers, tree-huggers, scientists, and Native American activists. That's the whole fight now. One side wants what it wants because it wants it. Period. The president has to decide where he's lining up.