At your service

Apparently, President Obama is trying to blame Republicans for his rejection of the Keystone pipeline expansion, claiming that the deadline was too short, and that the environmental problems are intractable.  Let's try a little bit of reality here; he's had three years to make this decision, there are 25,000 miles of oil pipelines over the Ogalalla Aquifer already (including the current Keystone Pipeline), and the sum total of oil that has spilled from a similar pipeline, that across Alaska, has leaked a sum total of....

....about enough oil to fill a modest sized pond.

OK, not good for that pond area, but let's face facts.  If Team Obama can't evaluate a building permit application in three years, maybe he ought to do the honest thing and resign from the job he obviously isn't doing.  Moreover, his move is going to put more supertankers on the seas (more Amoco Cadiz and Exxon Valdez disasters), burning more greenhouse gases, all while keeping tens of thousands of construction workers unemployed.

Oh, and the kicker; the current Keystone pipeline actually has a greater risk to aquifers because (a) it is older,  (b) crosses the rivers in the Mississippi River watershed at a lower point--where water flow is greater--and (c) it intersects rivers in the Hudson's Bay watershed, which the proposed new pipeline does not.  So what President Obama has done is to increase reliance on the pipeline which actually would pose the greater danger to watersheds.