Oh snap: Postscript

Image via Giphy.

Thomas P. Friedman ("Can the U.S. Win This Election?"), better known as Thomas L. Friedman, Mystax Mirabilis, hopes Congress goes Democratic in an overwhelming way, so Clinton will be able to push through some Republican policy:

we have to hope not only that Hillary Clinton wins the national election but also that Democrats retake at least the Senate, so she has some real leverage to forge trade-offs with a more sane G.O.P. to start fixing things: putting in place common-sense gun laws, like restoring the Assault Weapons Ban, requiring universal background checks and making it illegal for anyone on the terrorist watch list to buy a gun; borrowing money at near-zero interest rates to rebuild our infrastructure; replacing some income and corporate taxes with a revenue-neutral carbon tax to stimulate more clean-energy production; fixing Obamacare; and implementing sensible immigration reform and responsible tax and entitlement reforms.

The bigger Clinton’s margin of victory, the less dependent she’d be, I hope, on the left wing of her party, and the more likely she’d work with Republicans, as she vowed during the last debate, by “finding common ground, because you have to be able to get along with people to get things done in Washington.”

I'll stick with that old-fashioned kind of logic, thanks, where the consequent is kind of attached to the antecedent, and the better the Democrats do the more ability they'll have to implement the Democratic platform, and the less power the Republicans have the more things can get done in Washington without them.

Don't know where Tom is hoping to get those votes for a carbon tax, revenue-neutral or otherwise, other than the despised "left wing of her party"; for Republicans, it's the worst of all possible tax hikes and permanently off the table, and Clinton herself has not been very supportive. The Sanders forces were unable to get her to sign on for it and had to make do with a deliberately ambiguous declaration that

Greetings, Earth Day

Just in time, the Times did something for Earth Day, and I heard about it from Gomez at Atrios:

Hipster fairy? Herbert, by Paulina Cassidy.

The Environmental Protection Agency again is raising objections to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would carry oil from western Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast. 

The EPA said that despite more than four years of study, the State Department still has not done sufficient analysis of the project's environmental impact.

Yes, it seems that what's been going on all this time with the Keystone is one of those Village turf wars: the EPA has the expertise to decide just how much of a disaster the pipeline is going to be, but State has the authority to make the decision—because it will cross the international border, apparently making it a Foreign Affair. And the EPA is raising its tiny, tinny, morally and scientifically authoritative voice. I want to believe it will make a difference, I want to believe it will make a difference, I want—clap your hands, children! This sometimes works!

How many Americans...? (addendum)

I didn't really finish the previous, because of the risk of belaboring the obvious, but then the belaborer is worthy of his hire, so:

Q: Why did TransCanada and the US Chamber of Congress and so forth lie to the US Congress, and the American people, and their shareholders about how many jobs the Keystone XL pipeline project would create?

A: Because the project is a stinker which actually advantages no one except those who can extract some profit out of it; but if it created jobs, then it would have created jobs, and practically everybody likes that.

Q: So how come they told the truth to the Canadians?

A: Because Canada is ruled by Tories, also known as Conservatives, the only exception to the "everybody likes jobs" rule. They do not give a frack, as we say, about jobs. Give them a chance to extract profits and they're fine--and the opportunity to destroy Alberta is just icing on the cake.

Beach wedding sand cake; stolen from Flickr.

How many Americans does it take to lay some pipeline?

From a patent application by Ezra Cornell, 1844, for a machine to cut trenches and lay pipes for telegraph cables. Cornell University's Chronicle Online.

It seems the proportion is about 67 US citizens to one Canadian. That's at any rate, according to a Greenpeace Report (via ThinkProgress), what the TransCanada company (aka TRP) told its investors when it was selling that Keystone XL pipeline from the Alberta tar sands out through the Ogallala Aquifer to Texas; that is, the figures they gave the Canadian National Energy Board suggested the total amount of employment they were going to create with the Canadian part of the project would be about 442 person-years, while for the US portion, four times as long, the US Congress was given a number amounting to 118,000.

Of course when people asked Dr. Johnson how he expected to finish his Dictionary in three years when it had taken 40 years for the 40 Immortals of the Académie Française to complete theirs, he replied,

This is the proportion. Let me see: forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman.

I guess those Canadians must be really patriotic.  Or maybe they're just making the numbers up because they know what the Congresspersons like to hear. How did they come up with the 20,000 construction jobs that will build the pipeline to start with? On the basis of a $7-billion budget; but

Simple arithmetic shows that this figure is grossly overstated, possibly by more than 350 percent, because Perryman included three major budget items that have little or nothing to do with investment or job creation in the U.S.:

• The $1.6 billion Canadian portion of KXL;   

• The $683 million section of Keystone Phase II in Kansas that is already built; and

• The $3.1 billion already spent or committed, most of it on pipes and pumping component from companies outside the U.S.

  This means the total spending in the U.S. may be $2 billion or even lower. That translates into significantly fewer jobs simply because the true budget for KXL in the U.S. is less than a third of Perryman’s budget. Dividing TRP’s claim of 20,000 jobs by three equals 6,667 – a number that may still be overstated but is much closer to reality for a project such as KXL.

According to the US Chamber of Commerce,

We can put 20,000 Americans to work right away and up to 250,000 over the life of the project

and the American Petroleum Institute's Keystone XL Pipeline website still says

Projects like this, along with additional investment in oil sands development in Canada and expansion of pipelines and refineries in the U.S., make it possible to realize an additional 500,000 U.S. jobs in 2035.

So who knows? Maybe the Keystone XL Pipeline will end up employing everybody in the world. Or maybe (since they not only lied to the US Congress, but far worse, to their shareholders, just maybe, something bad will happen to them for once. I mean, no doubt jail is too much to hope for, but if we could hurt their feelings a little bit?

I fear if you are at all hip this may not be funny—it's four years old, for one thing—but I think it's a gas, as it were.

The unconscious of a conservative (addendum)

Central Plains prairie. From ecolandscaping.org

That inability of conservatives to imagine themselves in the other guy's position may help explain the habit they have of regarding everything as a game, but not "only" a game.

Republican reaction to the president's cancellation of the Keystone pipeline project made me think about this--like Rep. Lee Terry of Nebraska, quoted on NPR this morning as saying,

I'm deeply, deeply disappointed that our president decided to put his politics above the nation.... To me it's pretty obvious, it's all about election-year politics.

The party line is that Obama has [jump]