TRAINING FUEL

"On the other hand, if you don't build any pipeline capacity, you're going to be moving a lot of crude by train."

When President Obama finally decided to definitively say "no" to the Keystone pipeline extension through America, the progressives in America cheered a victory for clean energy and the environment. No new pipeline which would certainly break and murder billions of caribou, or whatever lives in those big states where no one votes properly!

As many have noted, this is no environmental win, since the fuel will be harvested and will be sold anyway, but there's another layer to this that isn't being discussed much. Sure, the news mentions that certain Obama allies and friends will benefit:

Warren Buffett's Burlington Northern Santa Fe LLC is among U.S. and Canadian railroads that stand to benefit from the Obama administration's decision to reject TransCanada Corp.'s Keystone XL oil pipeline permit.

With modest expansion, railroads can handle all new oil produced in western Canada through 2030, according to an analysis of the Keystone proposal by the U.S. State Department.

"Whatever people bring to us, we're ready to haul," Krista York-Wooley, a spokeswoman for Burlington Northern, a unit of Buffett's Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire Hathaway Inc., said in an interview. If Keystone XL "doesn't happen, we're here to haul."

But wait... shipping oil by rail? Are we supposed to believe that shipping tanks of oil over 130 year old rail lines is safer than a pipeline? Indeed it is not. Wayde Schafer, North Dakota spokesman for the Sierra Club, says "There is no question that oil by rail or truck is much more dangerous than a pipeline," and he's right.

So not only are the Canadians going to be harvesting that oil and shipping it to China, they will also be shipping it to the US, just not down a pipeline. So how, exactly, did this save the environment, again? All that's happened is that an estimated three quarters of a million jobs were not created or saved, and China gets more oil. I suspect the increased rail traffic will create a few jobs, and they'd be longer term than pipeline building, so that's a win, of sorts.

But this is a win, somehow, for progressives?