Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
Editorials & Other Articles
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Breaking: Obama Administration Will Reject Keystone XL Pipeline
Source: Wall Street Journal
@WSJ: Breaking: Obama administration will reject Keystone XL pipeline https://t.co/5xQPDPcm8q
Obama Administration to Reject Keystone XL Pipeline, Citing Climate Concerns
State Department review faced many delays since TransCanada’s 2008 proposal
By AMY HARDER
Updated Nov. 6, 2015 11:09 a.m. ETWASHINGTON—The Obama administration will reject the Keystone XL pipeline, according to people familiar with the decision, capping a politically charged review of the oil project that lasted more than seven years and escalated into a broader debate on energy, climate change and the economy.
President Barack Obama is expected to cite the urgency of climate change as a key reason behind his decision, these people said.
Read more: http://www.wsj.com/articles/obama-administration-to-reject-keystone-xl-pipeline-citing-climate-concerns-1446825732
99 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Twitter stream
@POTUS is expected to reject #KeystoneXL today. He will make a statement at 11:45 AM. Watch: https://www.whitehouse.gov/live
Mashable
@POTUS is expected to reject #KeystoneXL today. He will make a statement at 11:45 AM. Watch: https://www.whitehouse.gov/live
Mashable
Look pretty damn flimsy to me.
Cher
I'm to the point I don't trust anyone anymore. But this is GREAT NEWS any way you look at it! 
Last edited Fri Nov 6, 2015, 01:24 PM - Edit history (1)
I also think that he has particular contempt for transparent political games (what he called "okey-dokey" in one of his 2008 debates with Hillary) , of which the Canadian "suspension" was a particularly insulting example.
Good job, Pres. Obama! 
Yeah OBAMA
THANK YOU!
MAJOR props also to Jane Kleeb and Bold Nebraska for their great work. Their fingerprints are all over this decision.
http://boldnebraska.org
once again failed to come to true. I'm shocked I tell you shocked.
They'll always have the, "
paraphrasing) with a bill this big ... they always put everything in it, including the kitchen sink" argument to preserve their indignation, should a single thing go wrong with the bill ... and they need to exonerate the one, while condemning another.
Quite a day
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/11/06/obama-rejects-keystone-xl-big-and-just-beginning
Published on Friday, November 06, 2015 by Common Dreams
Obama Rejects Keystone XL: This Is Big.... And Just the Beginning
by May Boeve
'The win against Keystone XL is just the beginning, because this fight has helped inspire resistance to a thousand other projects.'
(Photo: AP)
This is a big win. President Obama’s decision to reject Keystone XL because of its impact on the climate is nothing short of historic -- and sets an important precedent that should send shockwaves through the fossil fuel industry.
Just a few years ago, insiders and experts wrote us off and assured the world Keystone XL would be built by the end of 2011. Together, ranchers, tribal nations, and everyday people beat this project back, reminding the world that Big Oil isn’t invincible--and that organized people can win over organized money.
But the win against Keystone XL is just the beginning, because this fight has helped inspire resistance to a thousand other projects. Everywhere you look, people are shutting down fracking wells, stopping coal export facilities, and challenging new pipelines. If Big Oil thinks that after Keystone XL the protesters are going home, they’re going to be sorely surprised. Today in Canada, dozens of people are risking arrest at Prime Minister Trudeau’s residence as part of the ‘Climate Welcome’ action to urge him to put an immediate freeze to tar sand expansion.
More than anything, though, today’s decision affirms the power of social movements to enact political change, and a clear sign that our movement is stronger than ever. We’re looking to build on this victory, and show that if it’s wrong to build Keystone XL because of its impact on our climate, it’s wrong to build any new fossil fuel infrastructure, period. With the same broad coalition that stood up against this pipeline and took to the streets during the People’s Climate March, we’re better positioned than ever before to make real climate policy a top priority for the U.S. government and achieve meaningful progress in this year’s climate talks. Our movement simply will not rest until our economy shifts away from the dirty fossil fuels of yesterday to the clean renewables of tomorrow.
May Boeve is the Executive Director of http://www.350.org.
Published on Friday, November 06, 2015 by Common Dreams
Obama Rejects Keystone XL: This Is Big.... And Just the Beginning
by May Boeve
'The win against Keystone XL is just the beginning, because this fight has helped inspire resistance to a thousand other projects.'
(Photo: AP)
This is a big win. President Obama’s decision to reject Keystone XL because of its impact on the climate is nothing short of historic -- and sets an important precedent that should send shockwaves through the fossil fuel industry.
Just a few years ago, insiders and experts wrote us off and assured the world Keystone XL would be built by the end of 2011. Together, ranchers, tribal nations, and everyday people beat this project back, reminding the world that Big Oil isn’t invincible--and that organized people can win over organized money.
But the win against Keystone XL is just the beginning, because this fight has helped inspire resistance to a thousand other projects. Everywhere you look, people are shutting down fracking wells, stopping coal export facilities, and challenging new pipelines. If Big Oil thinks that after Keystone XL the protesters are going home, they’re going to be sorely surprised. Today in Canada, dozens of people are risking arrest at Prime Minister Trudeau’s residence as part of the ‘Climate Welcome’ action to urge him to put an immediate freeze to tar sand expansion.
More than anything, though, today’s decision affirms the power of social movements to enact political change, and a clear sign that our movement is stronger than ever. We’re looking to build on this victory, and show that if it’s wrong to build Keystone XL because of its impact on our climate, it’s wrong to build any new fossil fuel infrastructure, period. With the same broad coalition that stood up against this pipeline and took to the streets during the People’s Climate March, we’re better positioned than ever before to make real climate policy a top priority for the U.S. government and achieve meaningful progress in this year’s climate talks. Our movement simply will not rest until our economy shifts away from the dirty fossil fuels of yesterday to the clean renewables of tomorrow.
May Boeve is the Executive Director of http://www.350.org.
Celebrate plus next steps: http://350.org/kxl-victory/
http://archive.onearth.org/articles/2013/08/if-built-the-keystone-xl-pipeline-will-end-in-one-toxic-town
Port Arthur, Texas: American Sacrifice Zone
After decades of neglect, residents of the Gulf Coast’s most toxic public housing complex are preparing to get out. But in a city given over to oil refineries, is anywhere really safe?
by Ted Genoways • August 26, 2013
This story was awarded a 2014 James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. Judges honored it for exposing "how the oil industry wreaks havoc on the environment and health of a predominantly poor, African American community."
If you splinter off the interstate from Houston into the inky dark of the sloughs and bayous surrounding Texas State Highway 73, you will eventually emerge on the outskirts of Port Arthur and into the otherworldly light of one of the world’s largest oil refinery complexes. To the north and east is the 3,600-acre Motiva plant, a joint project of Shell Oil and Saudi Aramco; to the west is a 4,000-acre plant owned by Texas-based Valero. Together the two facilities refine more than 900,000 barrels of crude per day. Shrouded in billows of smoke and bathed in the radiance of round-the-clock floodlights and the molten glow of gas flares, their towers seem to rise on clouds of fire, suggesting a floating megalopolis that sprawls in all directions toward more refineries and petrochemical plants, toward the lighted cranes and petroleum coke conveyers that line the shipping channel, and away to hazardous waste incinerators and dump sites in the distance.
On one side of Terminal Road, the long, angling track that borders these facilities, is a chain-link fence and a berm made of buried pipelines that occasionally sprout from the hillside into aboveground shutoff valves and standpipes. Overhead, cameras placed atop a straight seam of street lamps provide a constant feed to guards in their nearby trucks, ever alert for signs of vandalism or trespass. On the other side of the road is West Port Arthur: an overwhelmingly African American community of churches, shotgun shacks, and several complexes of low-slung, barracks-like brick row houses—public (or public-assisted) housing meant for those who can’t afford to live anywhere else.
The oldest and closest of these complexes is Carver Terrace. In 1952, Port Arthur’s white town fathers took public housing dollars from Washington and erected these apartments directly on the refineries’ fence. They followed up soon thereafter by building two more projects. Within five years, roughly a third of West Port Arthur’s 1,500 households were in public housing, and there were only seven white families in the whole community. To this day, it remains roughly 95 percent African American. And as West Port Arthur’s enormous refineries have spewed forth benzene, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and other pollutants—permitted or unpermitted—for more than six decades, the effects of these emissions, then, have been experienced disproportionately by African Americans.
Some local officials excuse the stench given off by those emissions as the smell of money, but the residents of Carver Terrace reap no economic rewards from the refineries. While the oil and gas industry accounted for almost 7 percent of new jobs created nationwide between 2005 and 2011, Port Arthur’s unemployment rate nearly doubled over that same span. Though it sits barely a hundred yards from some of the most profitable oil and gas complexes in the world, Carver Terrace is utterly cut off from any of the benefits they might yield. Residents of West Port Arthur—those who can find work—earn half what the average Texan makes. In the wee hours, when a shift ends at the refineries, taillights race up the highway toward Winnie or Nederland or other predominantly white suburbs, taking with them whatever prosperity these facilities confer locally.
But even worse than the economic inequity is the documented health effect on West Port Arthur residents, who have been regularly and repeatedly subjected to major emissions events—what the refining industry euphemistically terms “upsets.” I was drawn to Port Arthur, in part, by a video posted to YouTube by Hilton Kelley, a local environmental and community activist. It shows no fewer than eight enormous towers spewing huge flags of orange fire and thick, black smoke into the sky over West Port Arthur, the result of a brief outage at a sub-station owned by Entergy Texas, a local power provider. Without the benefit of an independent power grid or a sufficient backup system, the coking units at various refineries had powered down and filled with dangerous gas; to restart after a blackout event like that, these refineries had to “flare off” huge quantities of toxic emissions. As the refineries came back online, flaring for more than an hour, the sky turned murky, then dark. It looked like nightfall. But near the end of the video—which otherwise records only the calls of mourning doves and other songbirds—Kelley can be heard stating calmly: “April the 14th, 2013. Time now about 10:30 a.m.”
<>
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxics Release Inventory places Jefferson County among the very worst in the nation for air releases of chemicals known to cause cancer, birth defects, and reproductive disorders. In a state that regularly records in excess of 2,500 toxic emissions events per year, Port Arthur is near the top of the list of offending cities. Data collected by the Texas Cancer Registry indicates that cancer rates among African Americans in Jefferson County are roughly 15 percent higher than they are for the average Texan. Shockingly, the mortality rate from cancer is more than 40 percent higher. And cancer is only part of the story. A study by the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston found that residents of Port Arthur were four times more likely than people just 100 miles upwind to report suffering from heart and respiratory conditions; nervous system and skin disorders; headaches and muscle aches; and ear, nose, and throat ailments.
<>
Port Arthur, Texas: American Sacrifice Zone
After decades of neglect, residents of the Gulf Coast’s most toxic public housing complex are preparing to get out. But in a city given over to oil refineries, is anywhere really safe?
by Ted Genoways • August 26, 2013
This story was awarded a 2014 James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. Judges honored it for exposing "how the oil industry wreaks havoc on the environment and health of a predominantly poor, African American community."
If you splinter off the interstate from Houston into the inky dark of the sloughs and bayous surrounding Texas State Highway 73, you will eventually emerge on the outskirts of Port Arthur and into the otherworldly light of one of the world’s largest oil refinery complexes. To the north and east is the 3,600-acre Motiva plant, a joint project of Shell Oil and Saudi Aramco; to the west is a 4,000-acre plant owned by Texas-based Valero. Together the two facilities refine more than 900,000 barrels of crude per day. Shrouded in billows of smoke and bathed in the radiance of round-the-clock floodlights and the molten glow of gas flares, their towers seem to rise on clouds of fire, suggesting a floating megalopolis that sprawls in all directions toward more refineries and petrochemical plants, toward the lighted cranes and petroleum coke conveyers that line the shipping channel, and away to hazardous waste incinerators and dump sites in the distance.
On one side of Terminal Road, the long, angling track that borders these facilities, is a chain-link fence and a berm made of buried pipelines that occasionally sprout from the hillside into aboveground shutoff valves and standpipes. Overhead, cameras placed atop a straight seam of street lamps provide a constant feed to guards in their nearby trucks, ever alert for signs of vandalism or trespass. On the other side of the road is West Port Arthur: an overwhelmingly African American community of churches, shotgun shacks, and several complexes of low-slung, barracks-like brick row houses—public (or public-assisted) housing meant for those who can’t afford to live anywhere else.
The oldest and closest of these complexes is Carver Terrace. In 1952, Port Arthur’s white town fathers took public housing dollars from Washington and erected these apartments directly on the refineries’ fence. They followed up soon thereafter by building two more projects. Within five years, roughly a third of West Port Arthur’s 1,500 households were in public housing, and there were only seven white families in the whole community. To this day, it remains roughly 95 percent African American. And as West Port Arthur’s enormous refineries have spewed forth benzene, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and other pollutants—permitted or unpermitted—for more than six decades, the effects of these emissions, then, have been experienced disproportionately by African Americans.
Some local officials excuse the stench given off by those emissions as the smell of money, but the residents of Carver Terrace reap no economic rewards from the refineries. While the oil and gas industry accounted for almost 7 percent of new jobs created nationwide between 2005 and 2011, Port Arthur’s unemployment rate nearly doubled over that same span. Though it sits barely a hundred yards from some of the most profitable oil and gas complexes in the world, Carver Terrace is utterly cut off from any of the benefits they might yield. Residents of West Port Arthur—those who can find work—earn half what the average Texan makes. In the wee hours, when a shift ends at the refineries, taillights race up the highway toward Winnie or Nederland or other predominantly white suburbs, taking with them whatever prosperity these facilities confer locally.
But even worse than the economic inequity is the documented health effect on West Port Arthur residents, who have been regularly and repeatedly subjected to major emissions events—what the refining industry euphemistically terms “upsets.” I was drawn to Port Arthur, in part, by a video posted to YouTube by Hilton Kelley, a local environmental and community activist. It shows no fewer than eight enormous towers spewing huge flags of orange fire and thick, black smoke into the sky over West Port Arthur, the result of a brief outage at a sub-station owned by Entergy Texas, a local power provider. Without the benefit of an independent power grid or a sufficient backup system, the coking units at various refineries had powered down and filled with dangerous gas; to restart after a blackout event like that, these refineries had to “flare off” huge quantities of toxic emissions. As the refineries came back online, flaring for more than an hour, the sky turned murky, then dark. It looked like nightfall. But near the end of the video—which otherwise records only the calls of mourning doves and other songbirds—Kelley can be heard stating calmly: “April the 14th, 2013. Time now about 10:30 a.m.”
<>
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxics Release Inventory places Jefferson County among the very worst in the nation for air releases of chemicals known to cause cancer, birth defects, and reproductive disorders. In a state that regularly records in excess of 2,500 toxic emissions events per year, Port Arthur is near the top of the list of offending cities. Data collected by the Texas Cancer Registry indicates that cancer rates among African Americans in Jefferson County are roughly 15 percent higher than they are for the average Texan. Shockingly, the mortality rate from cancer is more than 40 percent higher. And cancer is only part of the story. A study by the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston found that residents of Port Arthur were four times more likely than people just 100 miles upwind to report suffering from heart and respiratory conditions; nervous system and skin disorders; headaches and muscle aches; and ear, nose, and throat ailments.
<>
Related: https://theintercept.com/2015/11/04/erasing-mossville-how-pollution-killed-a-louisiana-town/
