Vice President Biden speaks at Democratic fundraiser along with environmentally concerned ‘activists’

Vice President Joe Biden attended the so-called Jefferson Jackson Dinner on Saturday to give the keynote speech and stump for Terry McAuliffe’s gubernatorial campaign. Biden was met on his way to this political fete  by nearly 70 environmentally concerned individuals, according to the Chesapeake Climate Action Network’s Beth Kemler.

While the smokestream (i.e., mainstream) media focused almost exclusively on the elbow-rubbing and back-slapping that was going on inside the fundraising dinner, the environmentally concerned individuals who gathered outside of the fundraiser had an important message for Vice President Biden and President Obama: protect our planet’s future by rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline.

Opponents of the Keystone XL pipeline have largely aimed their rhetorical guns on the deleterious carbon emissions that the pipeline will spew into our atmosphere for a number of years. As important as this point is, I’d like to go a few steps beyond this point.

Let’s say that proponents of the XL pipeline are (somehow) correct in concluding that carbon emissions spewing from the pipeline will be negligible over its lifetime, or at least no worse than any other economically viable source of energy in today’s market. Here are a few more reasons why the Keystone XL pipeline only digs a bigger hole for the U.S.

First, how much of the Keystone XL pipeline crude oil would even be sold to the U.S.? The presumption has all too often been that a sizable quantity of the XL crude will be sold to the U.S., but this isn’t necessarily the case. As we live in a global market system, the XL crude will inevitably be sold where the greatest profits can be had, and that may not be the U.S. (hint, China). Officials from Canada and representatives of the Keystone XL pipeline have both touted the potential for energy independence if the pipeline is built. But if you dig for specifics, promises, or guarantees, you’d be hard-pressed to find any that will assuage suspicions that the Keystone XL pipeline is a golden ticket for its owners and its eventual overseas buyers, not the U.S.

Secondly, there are those darn oil spills that seem to happen periodically (or at least when the mainstream media feels like reporting them). In fact, oil spills are reported quite frequently in the U.S., and these are only the spills that are actually reported. The oil spills stemming from pipelines in the U.S. don’t look any better, either.

Among other consequences, these copious oil spills deplete our ecosystems of essentials like clean water, diverse animal species and plant organisms. You don’t have to be a tree-hugging nature lover to appreciate the economic value and human necessity of these largely invaluable ‘resources’.  

I would love to see energy prices fall. I would love to see the U.S. become ‘energy independent’. I would love to see hundreds, or even thousands of U.S. citizens with a steady, good paying, job. But not only are these outcomes not guaranteed, they may come at a price that is still too large to warrant further consideration of Keystone XL pipeline construction.