Pipeline Strategy and Politics

It's sheer madness to continue to push for pipelines across any territory.  Here are the facts:

Any pipeline requires onerous regulatory review, which often ignores the facts, and review at many levels.  All it takes is one jurisdiction to object to the placement en route to block the project for almost indefinite periods.  Certainly longer than any company can afford to wait.  As the resource loses value, the business justification evaporates as well. Anytime the people get upset, the politicians fear for their jobs and delay the business.  Any politically motivated mayor, reeve, or alderman can manipulate the democratic process for personal gain. Obama, the Democrats, Boehner, the Republicans, Harper, Prentice, and Trudeau and Mulcair are all benefiting from energizing people to get active in the political process, supporting them, which has little to do with the approval of any pipeline.  Pipelines are approved by bureaucrats.

The environmental lobby is powered by emotions, not facts. The environmental agenda manipulates people to ignore the relative safety and risks of options.  It's far easier to manipulate sentiment.  How does one gallon of oil sands refined oil emit more than a gallon of Saudi Arabian oil?  It does because Neil Young says so. The environmental lobby is the same as the politicians - they want people to support them on an issue people agree with.  We still need energy at the end of the day, what alternative do they offer?

No one remembers the Three Mile Island accident, they remember that nuclear power is dangerous because Greenpeace told everyone it is.  Why do we need to burn oil as the majority fuel source in North America?  Because people blocked the construction of nuclear power plants because Greenpeace told them so.  So, now what? We would have been better off with a nuclear power plants so we didn't need as much crude.

Every jurisdiction demands their cut, their bribe, from the proceeds of the pipeline business.  One could argue that insurance towards reimbursement for loss from pipeline spills justifies this demand.  But the reality is if a spill happens people will sue the company and expect them to pay it off any case.  All those payments are a tax on oil that doesn't belong to them.  A tax that benefits environmentalists as much as other citizens.

What Alberta should do is build a refinery and save the jobs for the local Albertans. Then the problem of shipping the refined oil becomes everyone else's problem. That's the way the public wants it, and then no other jurisdiction can benefit from it.