I've been trying to figure out one which side I come down on regarding the Keystone XL pipeline. For those unfamiliar with it, the Keystone XL pipeline is a proposed expansion of a pipeline operated by TransCanada to bring oil from the Northern Alberta refined from the oil sands (or tar sands) into the United States and down to the main American refineries in Texas and Louisiana.
Be prepared - this is a long post, because this is a complicated and difficult issue. I am writing about this now because there has been a series of protests against the oil sands by Greenpeace and Bill McKibben's
350.org group. I see that a number of protesters have been
arrested this week at the White House.
This is a difficult topic to write about because, as I have been writing, most recently in my paper "
America's Energy Choices" and the Op-Ed
published along with it, we have to consider three aspects when making choices about energy: (1) energy security, (2) economic stability, and (3) environmental sustainability. The problem with the Canadian oil sands is that these three concerns come into conflict, thus proving that determining America's energy future will require us to make difficult choices.
