This isn’t saying they’re exempt from cleaning up spills, it’s saying they’re exempt from paying in to a liability fund for cleaning up spills they can’t fund (i.e. they’ve gone bankrupt). We have a similar program here in Alberta - the Licensee Liability Program - where operators pay a certain amount in to a fund based on a confusing calculation associated with production and existing facilities/pipelines/wells. We also have the Orphan Well Program, which is similar, but specific to wells. This is done to ensure there are funds available to the government should a company go bankrupt and not be able to pay for reclamation/remediation.
I’m not saying I agree with that decision, but that decision doesn’t mean they ‘don’t have to pay for spill clean up’.
On the one hand, Obama isn’t up for reelection, the midterms are over, and has no reason not to veto.
On the other hand, 2016 Democrats could be negatively affected by such a veto.
Oh, like how you guys cared so much about the average American that you basically shut down the entire government, including national parks, over the Affordable Care Act?
Hmmmmm, I don’t know. Vetoes do put 2016 candidates on the spot(Senate as well as Presidential), but it’s the kind of issue where someone like Clinton can credibly just say she would have signed it.
They may have enough votes for an override in any case. And at this point, why should any Democrats do the President a favor?
After Landrieu loses in the runoff, what incentive do six Democrats have to vote for it to break the filibuster? Unless McConnell plans to get rid of the filibuster in January. Here’s the ayes from the Democrats:
Sen. John Walsh and Jon Tester of Montana; Joe Manchin III of West Virginia; Mary Landrieu of Louisiana; Tom Carper of Delaware; Joe Donnelly of Indiana; Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota; Michael Bennet of Colorado; Mark Begich of Alaska; Mark Pryor of Arkansas; Mark Warner of Virginia; Kay Hagan of North Carolina; Claire McCaskill of Missouri; Bob Casey of Pennsylvania.
From that list, Landrieu is gone and so are Pryor, Hagan, Walsh, and Begich. Assuming 54 Republicans and 46 Democrats, McConnell still needs to get 6 Democrats. So that leaves Tester, Manchin, Carper, Donnelly, Heitkamp, Bennet, Warner, McCaskill, and Casey who voted for cloture today. Short term, only Bennet has to defend in 2016. Assuming he votes yes, will five other Democrats from that list really vote for cloture?
Republicans better hope that if he has to, he does. They’re counting on their base being so fucking stupid that they think the pipeline will lead to $1.50 per gallon gas, and if it’s built and doesn’t do shit to lower gas prices they’ll lose one of their base-rousing arguments.
It’s not all for export; Canadian oil sand oil has been shipped to the US for upgrading and use in the US for years now. Canada is the biggest exporter of oil to the US, after all.
Yup. It’s fairly ignorant of how the world works to think that this is all about Canadian oil companies trying to build a Canadian pipeline for Canadian oil to export from a US coast so Canada can makes tons of money from it. Most of the companies in the oil patch are international, if not outright American. The upgrading refineries will be American. The products will be sold to Americans. The only thing it won’t do is bring gas prices down in the US, and who the hell has been selling that line of bullshit? That has nothing to do with any of this.
They will. I predict the pipeline will be passed in early 2015.
I agree with what has already been said; the oil is coming out of the ground, and we are going to use it. Period. It can get transported (more dangerously) by truck or train, or it can get transported more safely by pipeline - name your poison. What I really wish is that British Columbia would quit being a bunch of whiny bitches and let the pipeline be built through BC already so we can stop trying to play ball with the shitshow that is US politics. But we are building a refinery in northern Alberta, so hopefully soon we can cut the US out of their price gouging us for our crude sometime soon, as well.
Additionally, Transcanada has at least claimed that the pipeline will be able to carry large amounts of US-produced crude out of the Williston Basin area in Montana and North Dakota, which is currently seeing bottlenecks due to low pipeline capacity requiring mostly oil-by-rail shipments. This is incidentally also why Tester and Heitkamp at least are probably pretty safe yea votes on this issue.
Hey! I was AT the NWR refinery project THIS AFTERNOON where the company I work for is building a pumphouse for waste water treatment. It’s actually a very interesting project and the first of its kind: a bitumen refinery that skips over the upgrading process and produces ready-to-ship diesel fuel. There is also a carbon-capture process built into the program so that CO2 produced in refining the fuel gets taken off site and pumped back into the oil sands mines from whence it came. Spiffy neato!
The company I work for also spent a bunch of the summer at Enbridge’s Hardisty tank farm helping build the pipeline from Edmonton to Hardisty where bitumen earmarked for shipping to US refineries will sit in storage until tanker trucks come get it. Or the Keystone XL gets built and it gets sent that way.
The critical point, as Cat Whisperer rightly pointed out, is that Alberta bitumen already gets shipped to US refineries and has been for quite a long time. The pipeline is simply another cheaper, safer method for doing it. But one way or the other, it’s getting down there.
Do you have any cite to back up this “safer” claim? What are the safety statistics of pipeline vs. rail, in terms of deaths per X barrels transported, or amount spilled per X barrels transported?
