Supporters of sustainable energy use rally outside of Sen. Mark Warner’s office in Richmond

On Monday, supporters of sustainable energy use, otherwise known as “environmental activists” by the mainstream media, rallied outside of Sen. Mark R. Warner’s comfortable Richmond office on Main Street to pressure him to vote against the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.[1]

It was only last year that Sen. Warner claimed he wouldn’t vote for the tar sands pipeline[2]. This time around, Warner is looking for “a truly bipartisan consensus (that) included construction of Keystone with the appropriate environmental reviews, inclusion of the energy tax cuts and tax provisions that would continue to allow wind and solar and other renewable energy production to continue in this country.”[3]

But like Emily Heffling, rally organizer for the Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN), understands, the Keystone XL pipeline would result in unnecessarily high emissions in greenhouse gases “with potentially devastating impacts on Virginia.”[4] This is big reason number one to reject the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Big reason number two for rejecting the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline are the repeated “pipeline failures”[5] that lead to local, and sometimes not so local, environmental damage. Considering the fact that the tar sands pipeline would be carrying tar sands oil all the way from Canada to refineries on the Gulf Coast of Texas, there are more opportunities for a disastrous pipeline failure than I care to think about.

Big reason number three is that most of the tar sands oil that would be refined in Texas wouldn’t even enter the U.S. market, it would be shipped overseas, thus negating the ‘energy independence’ argument to a large enough degree to make this point significant.[6] And folks, even Fox News agrees with this point! Enough said!

I get it Sen. Warner, I get it. You’re a business man and you see a supposedly great business opportunity, so why pass it up, right? The problem remains in these economic/environmental discussions that the environment is not valued sufficiently, if at all. It’s as if a healthy environment has no monetary value to Americans who shrug at the thought of environmental degradation caused by the Keystone XL pipeline.

The environment is valuable, valuable beyond the phantasm of energy independence being brought about due to Canadian tar sands. And as usual, the lion’s share of the profits reaped from the sale of Canadian tar sands wont spread across the American landscape, it will be concentrated in the hands of a wealthy few. So while our environment degrades and promises and hopes are broken and shattered, an elite few smile like the sun. That’s not capitalism and that’s not democracy, it’s robbery.

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[1] http://www.foe.org/projects/climate-and-energy/tar-sands/keystone-xl-pipeline

[2] http://amerpundit.com/2012/03/08/mark-warner-i-support-keystone-xl-but-i-wont-actually-vote-to-support-it/

[3] http://www.timesdispatch.com/news/state-regional/government-politics/climate-activists-urge-warner-to-reject-pipeline/article_f8f02ef9-be8e-53fc-9319-42f765b15e0a.html

[4] http://www.chesapeakeclimate.org/

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pipeline_accidents_in_the_United_States_in_the_21st_Century

[6] http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/01/18/six-reasons-keystone-xl-was-bad-deal-all-along/