Keystone XL … end of foreign oil dependency


Study released on February 1, 2001 shows (Keystone XL Pipe Line Project) the answer, solution, forecast and the projection … simple and direct to creating jobs, elimination oil dependency and making a stronger America for the future.

U.S. Department of Energy suggested the line could "essentially eliminate" dependency on oil from the Middle East within 20 years.

http://www.canada.com/TransCanada+pipeline+would+dependency+foreign+State+Department+report+says/4212086/story.html

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/02/us-pipeline-keystone-middleeast-idUSTRE7110UE20110202

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/04/idUS14536181820110204

Public Servent has shit in those ears or is just stupid?

Not everyone believes the pipeline would cut U.S. oil imports from the Middle East. Energy economist Phil Verleger characterized the report's findings of an essential elimination of those shipments as a "fairy tale."

"The United States believes in free trade, and if the oil is priced right, we will get it from the Middle East," he said.

Oil from Saudi Arabia is among the world's cheapest to produce. Crude from Canada's oil sands is more expensive because companies must use a lot of energy to separate usable crude from sticky grit.

Saudi Arabia's state oil company Saudi Aramco co-owns an oil refinery in Texas which probably would continue to process oil from the kingdom.

In addition, the West Coast gets large amounts of oil from Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern producers. That dependency could grow to 2 million to 2.5 million barrels per day by 2020 as production wanes in both California and in Alaska, Verleger said.

California's environmental concerns also make it less likely that a pipeline would be built from the oil sands to that state.

Here's a better idea: let's reinvest in our cities and public transportation networks Ford and Co. got rid of so we can live efficient lives. The era of sprawl and cheap gas are coming to a close.

Tobias Fünke;670738 wrote:Here's a better idea: let's reinvest in our cities and public transportation networks Ford and Co. got rid of so we can live efficient lives. The era of sprawl and cheap gas are coming to a close.

I'm curious as to why you believe Ford and co. are responsible for the demise of public transportation networks. IMO, once gas becomes so expensive that it is unafforable by most, you will most definitely see a shift in fuel consumption and see public transportation make a rise. As for now, relatively speaking, gas is not outrageously expensive; we were just spoiled for so long with very cheap gas prices.

dwccrew;670776 wrote:I'm curious as to why you believe Ford and co. are responsible for the demise of public transportation networks. IMO, once gas becomes so expensive that it is unafforable by most, you will most definitely see a shift in fuel consumption and see public transportation make a rise. As for now, relatively speaking, gas is not outrageously expensive; we were just spoiled for so long with very cheap gas prices.

Exactly.

Let the market dictate the solution here, not ideology. Ideological "fixes" are almost always expensive, ineffective and a failure.

Who's to say the market isn't dictating the solution and that solution being moving further away from a dependence on oil?

I Wear Pants;670845 wrote:Who's to say the market isn't dictating the solution and that solution being moving further away from a dependence on oil?

No one is saying that isn't happening, but I don't see our dependancy on oil ending anytime soon. Mass public transportation is a "sexy" idea, but won't materialize for many decades IMO. Americans want to have the freedom to come and go as they please and at their own pace, which is why the automobile became so popular in the first place and why we also spent so much money on interstates and not public trasportation.

Mass public transportation isn't some super crazy idea though. It is achievable and works well. Simple things like better subways in our cities would help. Then we start working towards bigger projects like high speed rail (actual high speed and where it makes sense to have it, don't freak out). If Europe and Asia can do it surely we can too right?

I like the idea of mass public transportation, I just don't see it materializing anytime soon.

Fair enough, though I think some people, not you necessarily, have taken a "it'll be a long time before we get that all implemented so it's not worth doing" stance towards public transportation improvements which is a bad way to look at it since the returns on investment have to be massive for most of the improvements being talked about.

I Wear Pants;671158 wrote:Fair enough, though I think some people, not you necessarily, have taken a "it'll be a long time before we get that all implemented so it's not worth doing" stance towards public transportation improvements which is a bad way to look at it since the returns on investment have to be massive for most of the improvements being talked about.

Agreed. I think just because it may take a long time to implement doesn't mean we should totally abandon the idea or implementation. I don't believe the government should be doing the implementing though. It should be the private sector. The government can create a good environment for the private sector to implement the launch, but I don't think the government should be too involved with mass public transportation.

I'm fascinated by the mindset that because the Asians and Europeans have made mass public transit work that it will be successful here as well.

There are huge cultural differences at work here.

Americans have always enjoyed freedom of movement particularly with the invention of the personal automobile. The limitations of mass public transit runs contrary to the freedom of moving from point A to point B at one's leisure. Freedom of movement is quite American.

I agree that over time the ideas of mass public transit - especially cross-country travel - will start to take hold in the United States by economic necessity. But it's going to take time and a lot more economic change for that to occur. As long as relatively inexpensive oil - foreign or otherwise - remains available, America's love affair with the automobile is not likely to disappear anytime soon.

Obama loves this idea and wants to throw billions of taxpayer dollars at it but unless high-speed rail is generated by private enterprise, is shown to be highly efficient, and can turn a good profit it is doomed to failure. Another big waste of taxpayer dollars; dollars we obviously do not have to spare.

Just because something is traditionally American doesn't mean it must stay that way or is good. It's traditionally American to spend way more than one should but that's not a good reason to keep doing that.

And why wouldn't mass public transit work here? No one is saying use the same systems they do but we certainly could use at least some of the ideas. Everyone I know that's gone to Europe or Asia or anywhere that has systems in place has said they loved using them and wish they had similar options here.

I Wear Pants;671194 wrote:Just because something is traditionally American doesn't mean it must stay that way or is good. It's traditionally American to spend way more than one should but that's not a good reason to keep doing that.

And why wouldn't mass public transit work here? No one is saying use the same systems they do but we certainly could use at least some of the ideas. Everyone I know that's gone to Europe or Asia or anywhere that has systems in place has said they loved using them and wish they had similar options here.

That's fine but the Feds need to stay out of it. Again, the only way it will take hold in America is if it is spawned and run privately. The Feds need to concentrate of balancing the budget; NOT spending more taxpayer dollars.

dwccrew;670776 wrote:I'm curious as to why you believe Ford and co. are responsible for the demise of public transportation networks. IMO, once gas becomes so expensive that it is unafforable by most, you will most definitely see a shift in fuel consumption and see public transportation make a rise. As for now, relatively speaking, gas is not outrageously expensive; we were just spoiled for so long with very cheap gas prices.

I don't care for the website (http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/11/16-6) per se, but a solid excerpt:

In a 1922 memo that will live in infamy, GM President Alfred P. Sloan established a unit aimed at dumping electrified mass transit in favor of gas-burning cars, trucks and buses.

Just one American family in 10 then owned an automobile. Instead, we loved our 44,000 miles of passenger rail routes managed by 1,200 companies employing 300,000 Americans who ran 15 billion annual trips generating an income of $1 billion. According to Snell, "virtually every city and town in America of more than 2,500 people had its own electric rail system."

But GM lost $65 million in 1921. So Sloan enlisted Standard Oil (now Exxon), Philips Petroleum, glass and rubber companies and an army of financiers and politicians to kill mass transit.

^^A random Los Angeles road in 1910. Before Henry Ford got them to tear it up.

It is my opinion that the "age of the automobile and suburbs" will be looked at as an anomaly by historians a century from now. With smaller family sizes, peak oil on the horizon, and unsustainable (economically, socially, and environmentally--and for clarification I don't care about that "global warming" crap) sprawl, you will see a massive rush back to urban centers, probably gaining huge traction by 2020. It has already started. In Columbus: just five years ago only ~2,300 people lived downtown; now it's 6,000. Tiny I know, but ~300% growth would certainly indicate the market is "deciding things."

Also, the free market isn't perfect. It has plenty of flaws. I'm no economist, and I do believe it is the best system, but it lacks prescience and the ability to act for everyone, in my opinion (among other things I'm sure). Do you think regulations against tenement housing and air quality happened for market purposes? Take sanitation for example, it's very comparable to public transit. Sewer systems and general sanitation hasn't been around forever. In fact take this excerpt from a Boston report from 1850:

"As the law now stands, any proprietor of land may lay out streets at such level as he may deem to be for his immediate interest, without municipal interference; and when they have been covered with houses and a large population are suffering the deplorable consequences of defective sewerage..."

My point: local governments had to pass laws and completely tear up the city. I mean by the 1860's cities were fairly big and the idea of this expensive system that would tear up the city and no one really knew about was a very hard to swallow. But they did it and everyone benefited. In fact, the uber-rich who fled the terrible cities to their Victorian suburbs (understandably so) had to wait a decade or so for sanitation to reach them.

It would require lots of money (more on this later) to implement public transit, but just like sanitation it would ultimately behoove the lives of the vast majority of people. It's a bit of a chicken or the egg scenario, but do you put inter-city high speed rail systems downtown and make the people move to it, or wait until the people are there and then put it downtown? We absolutely need a centralized high-speed (not this 70mph or 110mph pussy shit, if it's not going twice as fast as I drive on the interstate it's worthless for everyone but the poor--we're not going to build a system for the poor, COTA, TARTA, etc. should've taught everyone that lesson) station to connect downtowns of out big cities (Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland, and Toledo), and those cities need to revitalize their downtowns and make them walkable, and decide what is the best intra-urban system for them.

I know we like to look at Europe and Japan and say "oh those socialist fucks, we do things better here in the states" when perhaps, as far as society goes, they're thousands of years ahead of us. America is a country that was so open and flat it sprawled out of control the last fifty years. We now have a country of people who in large part don't know (read: fear) how to be urban again. Yet we are bold, and perhaps stubborn enough to think this is the way it has always been and this is the way it will always be. What's Ronald Reagan's great line, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction?” Well the same works with knowing how to live in cities. It's no wonder New York is viewed as some majestic and almost foreign wonderland by the majority of it's visitors. Shit so many people who go to cities outside of Ohio are afraid of subways, it's laughable.

As for the money...

I read once that an interstate exchange costs $250,000,000 to build. Look at Toledo for example:



I count five interchanges (I swapped one in Perrysburg for the one by Steve Mix's). How about Columbus:



Holy fuck. Of course these costs are out of sight and out of mind because 1) local governments aren't paying for them and 2) the taxes on our gas help mitigate the costs. What do we do when we switch to hybrids and more fuel efficient cars? The tax revenue for road upkeep is diminished, and yet the road costs go up as we sprawl and sprawl. My father owned a road construction company. The vast majority of his jobs were upkeep. Roads require so much more upkeep than a train.

I guess I'm just saying that the thought that roads are less expensive than trains is false, and even the "infrastructure is in place" argument is lacking because they need to be repaved, rebuilt, widened, etc more often than we like to admit.

....then you could go and calculate the benefit of walking 1/4 mile to work instead of driving in terms of health and lowered health costs in the long run. It's a bit abstract but it's relatively valid. We're fat fuckers who feel the need to drive everywhere. So few of our neighborhoods are walkable. In fact the majority of the developments in the 1950's weren't even built with sidewalks (they're expensive, and they didn't care to walk anymore), many still don't. Did you know that county engineers use federal funding to put in sidewalks for the same reason even today?

One last thing on the free market, political boundaries hinder a lot of that because they need to be regional plans, not city plans. It would be silly for Columbus to put in a subway or rail line if it didn't include Upper Arlington, Bexley, Hilliard, Dublin, Westerville, etc. Most of the time it's in they gray area between city, county, and state governments priorities and jurisdiction.

Sorry for the (hopefully informative) rant. I don't like doing math homework.

believer;671196 wrote:That's fine but the Feds need to stay out of it. Again, the only way it will take hold in America is if it is spawned and run privately. The Feds need to concentrate of balancing the budget; NOT spending more taxpayer dollars.

I agree with you about the federal government not needing to spend in a time like right now. But all they would just need to take a tiny fraction away from the Department of Transportation and direct it towards high-speed rail matching grants with states and it would see benefits soon. But it would need to be economically viable to work, and it would (and will be) when he collapse of suburbs happens in the future. There is simply no way in hell a private enterprise would be able to take people's property. A public-private partnership will almost assuredly be the answer.

.....also we'd need a lot of luck in not getting assassinated by the UAW. They'd either launch an "American = cars. Cars are perpetually the best idea on the table" campaign or you'd mysteriously die.

Big Unions should really just start watching their step. People are starting to get pretty sick of them and if the unions aren't careful, they WILL understand what "the year of our discontent" can mean for them.

believer;671192 wrote:I'm fascinated by the mindset that because the Asians and Europeans have made mass public transit work that it will be successful here as well.

There are huge cultural differences at work here.

Americans have always enjoyed freedom of movement particularly with the invention of the personal automobile. The limitations of mass public transit runs contrary to the freedom of moving from point A to point B at one's leisure. Freedom of movement is quite American.

I agree that over time the ideas of mass public transit - especially cross-country travel - will start to take hold in the United States by economic necessity. But it's going to take time and a lot more economic change for that to occur. As long as relatively inexpensive oil - foreign or otherwise - remains available, America's love affair with the automobile is not likely to disappear anytime soon.

Obama loves this idea and wants to throw billions of taxpayer dollars at it but unless high-speed rail is generated by private enterprise, is shown to be highly efficient, and can turn a good profit it is doomed to failure. Another big waste of taxpayer dollars; dollars we obviously do not have to spare.

+1

believer;671192 wrote:this idea and wants to throw billions of taxpayer dollars at it

"The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it." --John F. Kennedy

The arabs have us by the balls with the route were taking now. Might as well spend some dough and make us energy independent.

Tobias Fünke;675112 wrote:"The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it." --John F. Kennedy

The arabs have us by the balls with the route were taking now. Might as well spend some dough and make us energy independent.

High-speed rail will not make us energy independent.

Instead of spending more taxpayer dough on useless stupidity, the best option the Feds have at this point in helping to make us more energy independent is to be far more reasonable with its over-reaching environmental protection regulations. Regulations that make it nearly impossible for us to tap into existing technologies to feed our insatiable thirst for energy....the kind of energy that has made our standard of living the envy of the world.

That's right let's burn more coal (albeit responsibly), build more nuke plants, tap into domestic oil reserves, spend dough on researching ways to improve our efficiencies in the consumption of fossil fuels, and -yes - expand efforts towards the usage of alternative sources of energy such as solar and wind power.

I can see high-speed rail in strategic areas such as the northeast corridor, maybe Houston to Dallas, LA to San Francisco perhaps. But Cincinnati to Cleveland for example? C'mon....

believer;675202 wrote:High-speed rail will not make us energy independent.

Instead of spending more taxpayer dough on useless stupidity, the best option the Feds have at this point in helping to make us more energy independent is to be far more reasonable with its over-reaching environmental protection regulations. Regulations that make it nearly impossible for us to tap into existing technologies to feed our insatiable thirst for energy....the kind of energy that has made our standard of living the envy of the world.

That's right let's burn more coal (albeit responsibly), build more nuke plants, tap into domestic oil reserves, spend dough on researching ways to improve our efficiencies in the consumption of fossil fuels, and -yes - expand efforts towards the usage of alternative sources of energy such as solar and wind power.

I can see high-speed rail in strategic areas such as the northeast corridor, maybe Houston to Dallas, LA to San Francisco perhaps. But Cincinnati to Cleveland for example? C'mon....

Good thinking, but when we burn more coal and build more nuke plants there will always be those who say "Not in my backyard". The way I see it, we need to rely on these two as a bridge until we can better develop green energy sources. To do otherwise is to doom us to dependence on those who hate us.

As for the high-speed rail, I feel that it is the most economical use of mass transit available. Out here I have the option of driving from St. Louis to Chicago (about 4.5 hours tops), flying to Chicago (50 min. flight plus endless waiting in the airport, followed by a one-hour plus trip into the city) or taking Amtrak (very slow). If high-speed rail could cut that trip down to 2 hours or so I would take that option every time.

The Nuke power NIBY argument is crap. Plants are much safer than 1979 and TMI.
Since TMI, there has not been a single issue on nuclear power plants.

We need them, the problem is they are expensive as hell (due to materials used, safety standard laws, etc) and need federal subsidies to build them. Plus, there is that whole what to do with the waste issue.

I agree with everything you say, ptown. The problem is that there will ALWAYS be those who want the energy generated but don't want it done near them. Same goes with the waste.

ptown_trojans_1;675442 wrote:Plus, there is that whole what to do with the waste issue.

The waste can easily be contained in various locations in the vast mountainous western badlands. I've spent some time in the desert southwest and cannot imagine NOT being able to find suitable storage facilities there.

Unfortunately we have environmental extremists who cannot see the forest because of the trees.

I personally can't understand how any politician cannot pick the "all of the above" policy in terms of energy. I am in the crowd of people who think fusion power will be here in twenty years and solve all of our problems though. I guess that means we can stop the "need it for future generations" argument in terms of saving oil, because we are the future generation that needs it!

Still though, demographics show that family sizes are getting smaller and single-family housing will continue to dwindle in need.

I would argue though that Ohio, with it's distance between cities, huge population, and flat land is actually one of the best choices. I think Florida (Miami--Orlando--Jacksonville, Tampa--Orlando) and the Texas triangle are two areas were it's ridiculous it doesn't exist.