Great Teamwork
"So these two ... they're going to making sure that we're investing in American energy, that we're doing everything that we can to combat the threat of climate change, that we're going to be creating jobs and economic opportunity.
"They are going to be a great team."
U.S. President Barack Obama
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| Pete Marovich/Bloomberg |
American environmentalists are ecstatic; their president has come through with the promise implicit in his re-election. In his second term, the president will get down to business.
His choice of 'green quarterback' Gina McCarthy, a committed and outspoken environmentalist to become head of the Environmental Protection Agency will provide some impetus to the White House's response to the U.S. State Department's lapse, in pronouncing TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline as representing a good choice to proceed with in its latest environmental assessment.
The announcements have been parsed by eager environmentalists as assurance that President Obama's second-term agenda on climate change and energy sufficiency for the country will be led by the head of the EPA, not Congress. It will be the EPA's final assessment and advising of the Obama administration on the $76.-billion pipeline to carry millions of barrels of bitumen weekly from Alberta's oilsands to the U.S. Gulf Coast that will resonate and compel the awaited response.
As for the chosen head of the Energy Department, who better than a nuclear physicist to be assigned that key role. Ernest Moniz currently ensconced at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to be energy secretary. A man the president has praised as a "brilliant scientist" who will take the lead in ushering the United States into a self sufficiency state of energy production coupled with environmental and climate protection.
The State Department's ecological analysis of the XL pipeline has not set well with the EPA. Nor with the powerful environmental lobby in the U.S., responsible in part for the re-election of the president. "A lot of voices still have to weigh in on the pipeline, and the EPA has a role to play in that. We expect the EPA's voice to be elevated on Keystone moving forward", said Gene Karpinski, president of the League of Conservation Voters.
There have been, with this president, an awful lot of show-downs between those who consider themselves responsible stewards of the future and those who feel themselves stuffed uncomfortably between current energy needs being satisfied expeditiously and economically, eschewing any further reliance on hostile states whose petroleum assets have been benefiting the United States, and the criticism being leveled against their near-sighted vision.
Canada will be waiting with bated breath to hear the results of the final determination on this mutually beneficial, mutually troublesome file.
Labels: Canada-US Relations, Crisis Politics, Energy, Environment, Marketing, Natural Resources
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, March 06, 2013
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