House Passes Another Useless, Destructive Bill

Overturning Obamacare—for the 37^th time—was the focus for the House of Representatives last week. This week they have wasted their time with the Keystone XL oil pipeline. Today with the help of 19 Democrats, GOP representatives approved a H.R. 3, “The Northern Route Approval Act,” declaring that a cross-border presidential permit was not needed from the president to approve the Canada-to-Nebraska leg of the Keystone XL oil pipeline.

I call the action useless because it has to go through the Senate, where it will most likely fail, and then be signed by the president, who said that he veto it. In a memo yesterday, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget said that the House bill “conflicts with long-standing Executive branch procedures.”

They did spend time proposing amendments, allowing nine of them to Democrats, some concerned with pipeline safety and clean-up costs for pipeline spills. All of these failed along party lines. And it’s only the seventh time that the House has voted on the bill, wasting fewer millions of dollars than on Obamacare.

The proposed pipeline would carry dangerous tar sands oil from Alberta to Texas. That Oklahoma to Texas leg is finished, and TransCanada needs permits to get the oil to Nebraska.

Conservatives are quite insistent about getting the pipeline approved because of all the money that they have taken from the oil industry. Congressional members have taken $56 million from fossil fuel interests, $36 from just oil industry interests. The pipeline supporters have paid almost $400,000. Members opposing the pipeline have received less than $50,000.

Just three weeks ago, the Pegasus oil pipeline that devastated the Arkansas community in Mayflower and surrounding area, again developed a leak, this time in Missouri. Although the leak was small, it shows the problem with pipelines, especially when oil companies claim that they are not responsible for clean-up because of the chemicals added to the tar sands oil. The leak also occurred while the pipeline was closed.

Oil companies have a history of not paying for the damage that they cause. Three years after the epic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that caused 11 deaths, the BP, the responsible company, is lying about the dispersant used for clean-up and refusing to pay for the countless illnesses that workers have suffered.

It’s not as if the company can’t afford to pay: their 2013 first quarter profit was $4.2 billion. In the first three months of this year, BP made enough to almost pay the $4.5 billion fine levied against the corporation. BP put aside $8 billion of medical expenses related to the spill, but the illnesses of people who did the clean-up are not covered by that settlement.

BP has almost $28 billion in cash reserves and paid CEO Bob Dudley $2.7 million last year. The company gave over $400,000 in federal campaign contributions and spent almost $9 million on lobbying.

Perhaps new Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz can persuade BP to loosen their purse strings for the people suffering from their toxic chemicals. He did serve on the company’s Technology Advisory Board for six years.

Some of the people on the Keystone pipeline route are beginning to fight back. Residents of Manchester, a Houston neighborhood, now realize that children trying to play in a park playground in the shadow of an oil refinery get sick. People living near there are subject to chronic headaches, nosebleeds, sore throats, and red sores on their skin that don’t heal for month.

When they try to document the problems at the playground, they are told that they cannot photograph the playground where they take their children, but guards video people who go there. An activist teacher, her partner, and a few other young people have set up a community space in the yard of a house with free donated clothing, food, information on air pollution, meetings of local government officials, and trainings in skills like talking to the media and filing pollution complaints with the city.

After a small rally and march last year, two activists from the Gulf Coast locked themselves to trucks entering a the oil refinery and launched a 45-day hunger strike, demanding that the oil refinery divest from the Keystone XL pipeline. People who actually live in the community lack the resources and support to protest like this.

The Keystone XL pipeline is “the fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet,” according to former NASA climate scientist James Hansen. Tar sands crude oil is much more toxic than regular crude, and contains 11 times more sulfur and nickel, and 5 times more lead. That makes it a threat to everyone who lives along its path.

People who live in the area of the proposed pipeline and think that it is a boon don’t understand that they can lose their land. Several states have granted eminent domain authority to private entities, including oil and gas companies. Thus private companies can force the sale of anyone’s property even if the seller is unwilling to do so.

The Supreme Court cemented this deal in Kelo v. City of New London (2005) when it ruled that the city of New London could take private property and give to a private company for “economic development.” The people were all forced out, the houses knocked down, and the land left lying fallow because the private company never followed through with its “development.”

When North Carolina legalized fracking, it also gave private entities the right to take private property. This law is not restricted to just laying pipelines; the private companies are now designated as “public enterprises,” giving them unlimited rights to anyone’s private property. Pennsylvania and Texas have the same rights to anyone’s property.

We don’t need the pipeline. First, it will provide approximately 3,000 jobs for the first two years and then only 35 jobs for maintenance after that. Second, the oil that is refined will largely be shipped out of the country so that people in the United States don’t benefit from it.

And third, alternative forms of energy exist. In Washington, D.C., where the conservatives in the House voted today to destroy the environment and give away private property, Union Station has started using only wind power for its energy and will continue that for another three years. The nearly 19 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year will come from wind farms, reducing gasoline consumption by 1.4 million gallons.

Wind energy grew 28 percent in 2012. According to the America Wind Energy Association:

“Over 6,700 new wind turbines were erected, which produce enough electricity to power the equivalent of 3.5 million homes. Overall, America finished the year with 45,100 wind turbines that can power 15.2 million homes.”

This sounds much better than promoting vast desolation of the land and chronic illnesses.