Keystone XL Pipeline & Watchtower Research

by IWant2Leave 18 Replies latest watchtower bible

  • IWant2Leave
    IWant2Leave

    You may know that President Joe Biden canceled the permits for the XL Canadian pipeline on his first day in office. This was a controversial move, and there has been discussion and videos floating around the office where I work. One of my co-workers showed a video of all the jobs being lost. After watching one of the videos, I was quite upset that the president would do this. Then I got to thinking, let me go back and do research and read articles about this pipeline. The research was eye opening. I'm not here to support or fight against the pipeline. I decided to research and read articles both for and against the Keystone XL pipeline, and a case could be made both for support or opposition of the pipeline.

    It made me think about how I used to quote Watchtower articles as if they were the final authority, not doing any reading or research beyond what WT had written. Made me think too how my wife agreed that Christ is our Mediator until she read the WT articles saying that he is Mediator only for the 144K! I guess WT articles trumps/outweighs the Bible. The point for me is, if you go a source that supports a subject, all you get is information that supports that viewpoint. Makes sense? But to make informed, smart decisions, we must consider and weigh all of the data, research and information available, whether positive or negative. That's my rant for today! Take care.

  • Anony Mous
    Anony Mous

    How was the research eye-opening? There are many partisan think thanks that give their opinion. This pipeline would've added 1M jobs to the US economy, obviously not directly employed (which is the media skimming over a LOT of details and economics) by the company but it is an effect it has.

    Even today, there are 11,000 people working on the project and this project has been going on for years now and will for many more. That isn't a drop in the bucket.

    Do research, but also understand what the research means and all its biases. Obviously everything has a side effect, both positive and negative, but these engineers involved have built pipelines across the world without major environmental disasters and this particular line is so over-engineered it's unlikely to fail even if it was totally neglected for a decade.

    Even if you ignore everything, just think logically. This guy has been President for what, 24h and he suddenly has all the information to make a balanced decision? Even just the legal implications (Presidents, unlike what the media tells you don't have unlimited power) would've taken weeks if not months to research, the President does not have unilateral power to just cancel a permit that has been provided.

  • frozen2018
    frozen2018

    I saw Justin Trudeau commenting on Keystone. He said he was disappointed but he understood Biden's action as it was, after all, a campaign promise and that makes it okay. I guess if Trump thought it was okay for Mexico to pay for a wall it would make sense that Biden should expect Canadians to pay for his campaign promises. He also said that Biden rejoining the Paris Accords made cancelling Keystone more understandable. He further said he was excited that President Biden was going to call him today. He is no doubt waiting by the phone.

  • IWant2Leave
    IWant2Leave

    Eye opening in that there are facts that I either had forgotten or didn't know. This pipe line is not something new, and Biden has been involved with, both at the Senate level and as Vice President in the Obama administration. The Keystone pipeline was put on the board for construction as far back as the Bush administration. So there has been a multiplicity of research, studies and debates long before the president withdrew the permits.

    Here are some things that people may not know.

    1) There is already a pipeline that runs from Canada to Port Arthur, Tx. 2) Farmers, ranchers, American Indians, all that would stand to make profit from the pipeline, most, do not support it. Environmentalists are against it. Underground water supply could be polluted. As much as we like and need oil, we can't drink it. 3) Only 48% of Canadians support this 2nd pipeline(XL). This could mean that 52% are against or don't have an opinion on it. 4) Canada is on track to set record oil exports to the U.S via railcar and the existing Keystone pipeline that has been operational for years now. 5) Many of the jobs related to the construction of the pipeline are temporary. 6) The oil that would run through XL pipeline is a thicker corrosive crude that is extracted from the Canadian and Nebraska sands, that creates more pollution than normal oil operations.

    These are a few of the points Anony Mous that I came across. Time magazine has an article from 2014 that is very informative also.

    I don't have a dog in the fight, even though for over twenty years I owned a company whose profit margins were dependent on low oil and gas prices. So I am not against Capitalism or profit. I'm also aware of pollution of the planet, global warming, and a belief that man must strike a balance with the environment in order to survive. Don't get me wrong, I like getting into my big truck, turning up the a/c when it's hot, and pulling into the gas station and paying under $2 per gallon. But I'm willing to change if it means breathing fresh air and having clean drinking water!

    The point that I wanted or tried to make is that sometimes we make snap judgements after only hearing one side of an issue. (I think Solomon gave counsel about not doing that). I was quite upset with Mr. Biden yesterday. Today, not so much.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_Pipeline

  • Anony Mous
    Anony Mous

    Here is a completely non-partisan, logical consideration of your point

    1) There is already a pipeline that runs from Canada to Port Arthur, Tx. - correct, but your own point 4 undercuts the notion that it is sufficient - running oil through train cars is significantly more pollution (you have to run the train after all) and the accelerant to the Keystone XL pipeline was that a train derailed and spilled all over a nature reservation. It was then found out that more pipeline would have avoided all that.

    2) Farmers, ranchers, American Indians, all that would stand to make profit from the pipeline, most, do not support it. Environmentalists are against it. Underground water supply could be polluted. As much as we like and need oil, we can't drink it.

    Farmers are always against taking their land under executive order as the land grab never ends. I concur with their issues but there is a balance to be struck somewhere. The history of the "American Indian representatives" is full of anti-government sentiment stoked by white people more interested in protecting the idea of 'the noble savage' which left their populations in the state they currently are in.

    As far as the groundwater pollution, that is assuming the pipe leaks non-stop without anyone fixing it. Pipelines don't just leach things into the ground, everything going in the ground is waste and a potential for expensive cleanups. Hence what I said prior, engineers have figured out ways to build pipelines without leaks and plenty of backups.

    3) Only 48% of Canadians support this 2nd pipeline(XL). This could mean that 52% are against or don't have an opinion on it.

    Or it means the media has painted a bad picture of the thing. You could cut the same to say only 30% of Americans support Biden because the rest either voted Trump or didn't vote. It's a bad argument if you don't present all the pros-and-cons honestly.

    4) Canada is on track to set record oil exports to the U.S via railcar and the existing Keystone pipeline that has been operational for years now.

    See point 1 - there are seriously more issues with railcars than pipelines

    5) Many of the jobs related to the construction of the pipeline are temporary.

    That is a bit of a tautology, because the pipeline won't be endlessly constructed. So yes, those jobs are temporary, but there will be more jobs at the refineries and transportation of finished products, the trucks and boats and trains that it fuels that drive the economy etc.

    6) The oil that would run through XL pipeline is a thicker corrosive crude that is extracted from the Canadian and Nebraska sands, that creates more pollution than normal oil operations.

    According to whom? And yes, pollution happens when we extract and burn oil. Low-pressure collection of shale and fracked gas/oil is cheaper and thus less polluting than drilling high-pressure holes far off-shore and deep into the ocean floor (remember the BP leak a few years ago that took months to close and Exxon-Valdez for the transport of said oil). But the only true zero-emission (nuclear) has been paused indefinitely by the same environmentalist and wind/solar is both too unreliable and too expensive and very, very polluting (heavy metals, lead, rare earths - look at factories and mining in China that produce solar panels and large motors - they are slowly poisoning entire cities with all their major cities now covered in a fine yellow haze from the byproducts of heavy metals like lithium, which is worse than the smog we had in the 80s and 90s in the West). There is a balance between dumping the oil in the nature parks and using 100% of it without emission. A pipeline is the cleanest, least amount of energy required to transport oil, regular transport has major issues and is a lot more expensive, which is why they want a pipeline in the first place, to make cheaper and more profitable oil.

  • frozen2018
    frozen2018

    5) Many of the jobs related to the construction of the pipeline are temporary.

    I worked construction for almost 15 years and I made really good money with just a high school diploma. I think I can say this with some authority. ALL CONSTRUCTION JOBS ARE TEMPORARY! Construction workers are always working themselves out of a job. It is the nature of the business. I can never understand why this argument is tossed out about pipelines. The same logic could be applied to roads, houses, skyscrapers, and anything else that has to be built.

  • Anony Mous
    Anony Mous

    @Frozen it's the looped thinking of the ecological movement. According to them we should all be living off the land in grass huts cutting our own trees and finding berries (not meat) to eat.

    They don't understand economics which demonstrate that if we had the number of people currently alive cutting trees for fuel, we'd have no forests left anywhere on earth and that we'd need 3 more planets just to grow more food. Every economic shortcut gives a much greater amplifying effect. It's very easy to say "well, about 80% of the Internet is not directly contributing any value related to economy" (and it is true YouTube videos are not directly economically productive) or nobody needs 3 computers, 2 tablets and 5 TV's at home or having more than one car per family is wasteful, but it's the consumer economy that has driven the cost and efficiency of computers and TV's down to the point where they are cheap enough for not just the largest corporations to afford them and become economic drivers.

    And people in the 1950's understood this. So a lot of us older folks coming down from the Boomer generation should understand this as well. The government needed integrated circuits to go to space, so they asked private corporations to build it for them, which then turned around and marketed and sold the remainder of the production runs to researchers and hobbyists which some of them turned this computer thing into a small business (eg. Intel) which after selling a few units someone thought it would be great if we packaged these up for business (IBM) and then how about we can get this stuff at home to play games and do homework (Atari, Dell, ...)

    Same goes for this pipeline, it drives an economic output of 1M jobs downstream, it is not directly employing 1M people, but it is generating an income equal to 1M people working by employing the jobs for a value of maybe 10% of 10M people or 1% of 100M people. The dozens of people that work at the pipeline, feed the needs of the refinery that employ hundreds of people that employ thousands of people in the gas stations it fills that fuel the millions of people in the area that need to go back and forth to work every day. The media and these Greenpeace hippies use false dichotomy and bend the narratives because explaining economics is really hard and the average person has no desire studying for a degree in economics just to understand their vote on a pipeline.

    It's the same arguments the JW's use to justify their pictures of paradise, not understanding that you're interrupting entire economic and ecological and biological structures by turning carnivores into herbivores just to satisfy a single verse in a poem from the Bible.

    A "planned economy" (1 car per family, defined number of electronics, equality through laws and procedure) was the prevailing theory of the Soviet Union, Pol Pot, North Korea and many other communist systems and they fail invariably because nobody is driving the economy with better and bigger projects.
  • hoser
    hoser

    I’ve never understood the one big customer economic theory. Canada exports 98% of our oil to the US, at the same time importing 19 billions dollars worth of oil every year. Riddle me that one.

    Canada has access to three oceans. Why be a price taker from the US? Put the oil on a boat and sell it to the highest bidder.

  • WTWizard
    WTWizard

    So much for advancement. There are forces far stronger than us, empowered by people that use that bible to donate our energy, that are determined to have us all languish as slaves. This time, they have more energy--and will stop at nothing than Worse Than Dark Ages conditions forever.

    They have halted development of free energy, yet they blame us for using oil that pollutes (and wish to stop that, too, so they can use human labor for energy instead). They have halted cures for diseases that they brought in in the first place. They have created the need for money, and then they took it all for themselves (which will become absolute in the next few months, especially once Komodo Dragon Harris becomes president). They have taken everything--wealth, knowledge and wisdom, health. And now, they are going after science.

  • Anony Mous
    Anony Mous

    @hoser: For one, there are different types of oil. I think Ted Cruz did an interview on his podcast once with a small business oil producer but each type of oil has different products you can get from them and methods to refine them. It really gives you a better perspective on the oil industry to know it's not just ExxonMobil, but the majority of US oil is currently produced by small business owners.

    On the other hand, Canada also doesn't have all their refineries in one place. It may be cheaper overall to supply areas around Toronto through the US because the transport from the North and the oceans where most of the Canadian oil is produced would be cost prohibitive.

    So it may be more cost effective to ship oil from Canada to a Pennsylvania refinery and then sell it back to Toronto than shipping it from Prince Rupert to Vancouver to get refined and sell the final product in Toronto.

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