Well, that was nice while it lasted. But despite the fact that domestic oil production doesn’t do a dicky bird to bring down gas prices, President Obama is now paying election-year lip service to the idea of, and I quote, “drilling all over the place.” And even more depressingly, he’s now saying that the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline, which he’d previously opposed, should be “a priority.”
At a campaign stop in Cushing, Okla., which would be the northern end of the pipeline portion, Obama acknowledged that Keystone XL has “generated a lot of controversy” but claimed that it would be beneficial for the U.S. oil supply, helping to solve a bottleneck in getting domestic oil to refineries. Strangely, he doesn’t seem to have mentioned all the spills it could cause, or its disastrous net effect on employment in affected states.
Here’s Bill McKibben’s response:
