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" The most remarkable thing about the president&amp;#039;s big speech on climate this afternoon was that it was considered remarkable at all. Everybody except the deliberately ignorant, or senators from Oklahoma, but I repeat myself, believes that climate change is the most critical issue facing the planet since some particularly bright hadrosaur in the Yucatan looked up and thought, &amp;quot;Hey, what&amp;#039;s that big rock doing in the sky there?&amp;quot; However, because the American political system is a buyer&amp;#039;s market for deliberate ignorance, what the president said today will be reckoned as a landmark in coping with the incredibly obvious. On the good side, the president did indeed announce, if not a war, then a prolonged skirmish on coal, which is a good thing, but a little late, since the EPA has been under a court order to do something about coal emission for some years now. And he said all the right things about an international response to a global threat, and about renewables, and about his personal committment to the issue, which is all to the good. But he got a little fuzzy, in an ominous way, about our old friend, the Keystone XL pipeline. This is what the president said: I know there&amp;#039;s been, for example, a lot of controversy surrounding the proposal to build a pipeline - the Keystone pipeline, that would carry oil from Canadian tar sands down to refineries in the Gulf. The State Department is going through the final stages of evaluating the proposal. That&amp;#039;s how it&amp;#039;s always been done. But I do want to be clear. Allowing the Keystone pipeline to be built requires a finding that doing so would be in our nation&amp;#039;s interest. And our national interest will be served only if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution. The net effects of the pipeline&amp;#039;s impact on our climate will be absolutely critical to determining whether this project is allowed to go forward. It&amp;#039;s relevant. OK, good as far as it goes, until you realize that the president&amp;#039;s own State Department already has certified that the pipeline won&amp;#039;t &amp;quot;significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.&amp;quot; (The EPA and the State Department have been fighting over this very issue since April.) And, also, it&amp;#039;s not like emissions are the only -- or even the most immediate -- problem with the death-funnel with which TransCanada proposes to bisect the United States. Pipelines leak because the people who build them cut corners to make money, and then the energy companies that use the pipelines lie about safety and their compliance with regulations. Those are the inescapable facts about pipelines, especially oil pipelines, especially tar-sands oil pipelines, especially tar-sands oil pipelines built by Trans-Canada and called Keystone. People aren&amp;#039;t fighting this just because of that with which it&amp;#039;s going to poison the atmosphere and thereby further char-broil the planet. They&amp;#039;re fighting it because they don&amp;#039;t want their farms, and fields, and wells, and the goddamn Oglalla Aquifer infected by the death-serum produced by the filthiest fossil-fuel ever devised. I think the president&amp;#039;s setting himself up to take a dive on this issue myself. I&amp;#039;d watch the news carefully every late Friday afternoon all summer, if I were you. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a23247/president-obama-climate-speech-062513/>