Monday, February 13, 2012

Tar sands

Did you know that the Keystone XL pipeline is being built by a Canadian company to ship Canadian tar sands to refineries in tax exempt zones along the Gulf Coast so that the end products can be exported out of the US and not used here?

So much for it helping the US economy and energy independence.

This does not get more oil into the US. Canadian oil production currently can’t meet the capacity of the existing pipelines into the US so this is only about making it cheaper to export tar sands oil from Canada using the US as a conduit. As a country we get all the risk and almost none of the benefit.

Unless of course you’re a corporation in the oil business, then there will be lots of profit.

Whatever temporary jobs this might create are minimal compared to what could be done putting the money into permanent sustainable energy businesses.

2 comments:

pasoc said...

What if all the money being spent on political primaries was spent on something useful?

beatthereaper said...

I think we would have a really strong economy and more jobs than people to fill them.