Bill O'Reilly and the Teamsters Union claim the Keystone XL will see an overall 42,000 jobs created. Really? Some are questioning this as fact. Some critics propose that this is a grossly inflated figure and that other trades and professions will be negatively effected if the Keystone XL is constructed.
And there are a lot of other questions left unanswered, like where exactly will the crude be refined? Will any of it be used domestically? And how's about existing treaties with American Indian tribes? Will the U.S. government break them like they've broken, altered, or discarded more than 500 other treaties since Colonial times? And how's about those two billionaire brothers from Wichita, Kan.? Is the Keystone XL something that will benefit David and Charles Koch and not the American people?
Both the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate passed legislation allowing for the Keystone XL to be constructed. President Barack Obama has voiced concern over this monstrosity, however, and is expected to veto.
So the Keystone XL Pipeline will create 42,000 jobs, according to the Teamsters and
Bill O'Reilly on FOX News.
Will it really? In a day and age of 'let's make up the stats as we speak,' some are questioning the Teamsters' and O'Reilly's claims that the Keystone XL will become a job-creation godsend. Some even say the only people who will really benefit from this gargantuan snake will be the Koch brothers. And nobody knows how many jobs will actually be created. As Jon Stewart's spoof on this issue contends, total job creation will actually be somewhere between "millions and 35."
It needs to be emphasized, as well, that the jobs being touted by the Teamsters and the FOX News pundit are construction jobs. As soon as the pipeline is built, there will be no more need for construction work. The jobs, even if there actually turn out to be 42,000, are virtually all temporary jobs.
According to OpEdNews.com, which headlined an article on Jan. 14 the predictions of immense job creation for constructing the $7 billion, 1,700-mile Keystone XL are greatly exaggerated: "Cornell University's Global Labor Institute calculated that KXL will produce 304 to 838 full-time equivalent, temporary jobs in Montana, South Dakota, and Nebraska plus some overseas, over the two-year construction phase. The US State Department estimates 4,000 construction jobs will be added. To put the Cornell Institute's 838 jobs number in perspective, 23-times that many (20,000) construction jobs were added in the US in November 2014," writes Russ Doty, whose commentary was headlined for the past few days on the national progressive web magazine.
The Teamsters are banking on predictions the Keystone XL will create 42,000 new jobs. But while Teamsters tradesmen might benefit from the Keystone XL, if this monstrosity is approved and is constructed, Doty contends that it will cut into other trades and will inevitably lead to job loss. And it will lead to a never-ending series of nightmares for those employed in health care in areas where this pipeline is destined to be built.
Doty writes in his OpEdNews.com article: "Even though it is supposed to be a jobs bill, several unions oppose Keystone. Transit unions like the Amalgamated Transit Union will likely lose jobs if Keystone XL is built because crude now moved by rail will begin flowing through the pipeline. Unless I've missed it, the question of how many permanent transportation jobs would be lost if Keystone is built is not being discussed by the Teamsters. That number has to exceed 35."
And health care workers will also have more to keep them busy. Building a pipeline is dangerous and hazardous work, and work-related injuries, possibly even fatalities, will come with the Keystone XL's construction. "Healthcare unions like National Nurses United, 1199 SEIU Health Care Workers East, and New York State Nurses Association oppose Keystone because the added jobs come with a price affecting human health that is too high," Doty writes.
I wonder if the Teamsters factored into their total jobs creation equation the need for more health care workers at hospitals near towns and cities where the pipeline is to be laid. Sometimes such job-creation studies cover every little detail, and even the popcorn company near one of the cities where the Keystone XL is being built is thrown into the equation, with an addition of some 30 or 40 workers because so many snacks are bought during lunch breaks by construction crews.
Are the Teamsters tub-thumpers for the Keystone XL for self-serving reasons? Well, if you consider the words of their top official, this is the case. Teamsters President James Hoffa wrote an op-ed, which explains just how many jobs this enormous piece of crude-pumping infrastructure would create: “Jobs might not be in such short supply like they once were in Michigan and elsewhere. But good-paying jobs still are. That’s why the Teamsters support the Keystone XL pipeline project that would allow North America to produce more of the world’s oil supply. And that’s why Michigan’s elected officials should too."
"Completing the final segment of the pipeline from Nebraska to the Canadian border would employ upwards of 2,500 Teamsters and would infuse millions of dollars into local economies. That’s not just where the pipeline is being built either — it’s right here in Michigan, where suppliers could see substantial growth,” Hoffa wrote in his op-ed.
“It’s crazy. It helps Canada, but it does nothing for the United States," said Nebraska farmer Jim Tarnick. "I don’t see why I need to be a mule for Canada to pump its tar sands oil through my ground and through water. We don’t want to take that chance – not for a product that’s not U.S.” .
Some Nebraska farmers even built a barn in the path of where the Keystone XL is to be constructed. This group of farmers are not advocates of a 'green society' or environmentalists. And they're certainly not part of some whacked-out, eco-terrorism cell. No, they're farmers, plain and simple as that. And they don't want the Keystone XL to ruin their livelihoods and their way of life.
“Farmers and ranchers in Nebraska didn’t ask to do business with TransCanada, and TransCanada isn’t asking to do business with us," says a voice-over in a video these farmers produced. “They tried to bully us,” the voice continues. “They told us it was a done deal, but they didn’t know much about Nebraskans.”
Of course, there a other negative consequences at play, like breaking treaties with Indian tribes whose reservations the Keystone XL will cut through. But does the U.S. government care about treaties? Since Colonial times, more than
500 treaties have been broken, so what's a few more?
A group of 16 American Indian tribes in three states whose reservation lands this gargantuan oil snake is planned to cross sent a letter to President Barack Obama this week urging him to reject the pipeline permit application.
"The association represents tribes in South Dakota, North Dakota and Nebraska, and is also seeking a meeting with Department of Interior Secretary Sally Jewell to discuss their concerns about the pipeline," according to Huff Post Politics.
"This is our land," said Marie Brush Breaker Randall, during a blockade in March 2012 in the middle of Highway 44 near Wablee, S.D., "We have to protect" our grandchildren. Randall, then 92, appealed to the truckers attempting to pass through the sovereign territory in Wablee, S.D.: "Please stay out of our nation."
Randall was joined by 70 other members of the Oglala Lakota Nation during this blockade. "Randall's plea went beyond halting the truck caravan. She and other Native American activists share strong and broad opposition to the development of tar sands, including TransCanada's plan to send Canadian tar sands oil through the Keystone XL pipeline to the U.S. Gulf Coast. The White House final decision on the controversial conduit is expected this summer," according to
Huff Post Green.
The Rosebud Sioux Tribe called the Nov. 14 U.S. House of Representatives passage of the Keystone XL's construction "an act of war," according to Indian Country Today Media Network. “The House has now signed our death warrants and the death warrants of our children and grandchildren. The Rosebud Sioux Tribe will not allow this pipeline through our lands,” said Rosebud Sioux President Cyril Scott in a statement. “We are outraged at the lack of intergovernmental cooperation. We are a sovereign nation, and we are not being treated as such. We will close our reservation borders to Keystone XL. Authorizing Keystone XL is an act of war against our people.”
The town of Cushing, Okla., sits right in the way of the proposed Keystone XL and is highlighted on the map accompanying this opinion. "Row after row of giant oil storage tanks are lined up around a moribund downtown and a shopping strip. At the edge of town stands a sign made of white pipes declaring: “Pipeline Crossroads of the World,” according to The Washington Post.
Cushing is an important place for the overall infrastructure of the pipeline. It's the end of TransCanada’s existing Keystone pipeline and it's where the southern expanse of the new Keystone XL pipeline will begin, The Washington Post reports. And despite talk that there is no sovereign reservation lands owned by Indians in the way of this project, Cushing is part of the Sac and Fox Nation. Yes, this is land belonging to Oklahoma’s 38 tribes, each with sovereignty over its own affairs and land, and this land is protected under treaty law.
"George Thurman, chairman of the Sac and Fox Nation and a descendent of Black Hawk, is worried that the pipeline could dig up unmarked graves or other sacred archaeological sites even on private lands," The Washington Post article reads.
“There are mass graves where people were buried after dying of smallpox,” Thurman told The Washington Post. “There could be another buried out there.”
Thurman's aide for cultural and historic preservation, Sandra Massey, added: “How many times do we have to move? Our dead are never at rest.”
On social media like Facebook, the American Indian Movement, Idle No More and other organizations comprised of Indians have set the Internet abuzz with condemnation, ridicule and protest for the Keystone XL pipeline. "Not on our reservations," seems to be the common credo being chanted in cyberspace. Protests are being organized by Aim and Idle No More and a constant barrage of anti-Keystone XL
And the fact that transforming one of the world's last remaining intact ecosystems was overlooked for harvesting the oily tar sands gunk. "Alberta's boreal forest and wetlands are home to a diverse range of animals, including lynx, caribou and grizzly bears, and serve as critical breeding grounds for many North American songbirds and waterfowl. Oil companies are scraping up hundreds of thousands of acres of this wildlife haven to mine tar sands -- silty deposits that contain small amounts of crude bitumen," according to the National Resources Defense Council.
Fresh water use in tar sands extraction has seen a walloping 370 million cubic meters of water from the Athabasca River alone used by the oil industry, which was heated or converted into steam to separate the viscous oil, or bitumen, from sand formations.
Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images
An aerial view of the Suncor oil sands extraction facility on the banks of the Athabasca River in Alberta, Canada, in 2009. Scientists say contaminants found at the bottom of lakes in Alberta are from air pollutants from the facilities responsible for producing and processing tar sands oil. And that's not all, Canada, a country that was known for the best fresh-water fishing in the world now has a daunting lake pollution problem.
"Canadian researchers have used the mud at the bottom of lakes like a time machine to show that tar sands oil production in Alberta, Canada, is polluting remote regional lakes as far as 50 miles from the operations," according to an NPR online report of a little more than two years ago.
"The forested part of Western Canada, where tar sands oil is produced, is so rich with the thick, asphalt-like stuff that you can actually see it coming out of the ground all over the place. That's made it easy for industry to claim that contaminants in waterways could have gotten there naturally," the NPR report reads.
Anything that can be skewed will be skewed in favor of the tar sands oil harvesting, and having opinion-based rhetoric coming from pundits like Sean Hannity at FOX News only seals the deal for the Koch Brothers big investment in the Alberta tar sands. On
Hannity on Wednesday, Jan. 14, the fiery-tempered, talking head lambasted a young college student, who was a self-admitted liberal, for not agreeing that drilling for oil, fracking and projects like the Keystone XL pipeline will lead to great economic times for the U.S. economy. The young college student tried to state his case, but the argumentative, loud-mouthed, nasty Hannity talked over the kid and made sure the typical FOX News opinion was the only opinion that got heard. And in translation, this all lead to Keystone XL - very good; disagreeing with seeing the Keystone XL constructed, very bad.
Meantime, back to reality and a world that has scientific laws at play, along with the breakdown of an ecosystem due to the heavy tolls that oil sands' harvest is causing: "The rapid expansion of the tar sands is creating a world-class pollution problem. Industry uses as much fresh water as a large Canadian city and almost none of it is returned to the natural environment. Ninety-five per cent of this water is so polluted it has to be stored in toxic sludge pits that cover 176 square kilometres, held back by two of the three largest dams on the planet. An estimated 11 million litres of toxic wastewater leaks into the Athabasca River every day," according to the Tar Sands Solutions Network.
"Tar sands oil production also emits twice as much air pollution as conventional oil, which contributes to acid rain and emits significant amounts of heavy metals and other toxic pollutants to the region's lakes and rivers," TSSN continues.
There's so many question marks about the Keystone XL Pipeline that it's scary. Will the crude oil harvested in Canada be processed by Canadian refineries? Or at least will some of this crude be processed there?
If the crude is shipped via the pipeline unprocessed and is to go through the refinery processes on the U.S. Gulf Coast, a whole new set of dynamics come into play. "Gulf coast refineries are at or near full capacity now because of the abundance of fracked lighter oil coming from US wells," in his OpEdNews.comcommentary.
A year ago, an online offering -
Oil Change International, had this to say: "Many Gulf Coast refineries have access to deep water port facilities and the region now produces much more product than the US markets can handle. Throughout the 2008-2013 period, the Gulf Coast refineries averaged 73% of US oil exports. In 2013, that rose to 76%."
So to answer this crucial question of where the crude will see the final refinery processes completed, I guess it's good to go to the oil industry itself. "It is a supply line to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries — which have signed up to 20-year binding commercial contracts to receive oil through Keystone XL. This much-needed oil will allow refineries to create products that we all rely on every day — gasoline for our vehicles, aviation fuels, and diesel fuels to help transport goods throughout the continent. It makes absolutely no sense for companies to purchase cheaper Canadian crude, and then pay (again) to ship that product overseas, while continuing to import higher-priced oil from the Middle East and Venezuela," says an online publication of TransCanada.
"To guarantee that oil flowing in Keystone XL will be used only by US consumers, Democrats proposed an amendment to the pipeline-construction legislation. However, when US Senator Ed Markey offered such an amendment as a Congressman, it was defeated. If the Democratic amendment is defeated again, it will strengthen the claim that oil carried by Keystone will be exported. Otherwise, why defeat a US domestic-use requirement?" Doty writes.
According to a report from last autumn, an all-Canadian oil pipeline that would serve as an alternative to the proposed Keystone XL project is well underway. The shorter Northern Gateway pipeline, which is planned to extend from Alberta to the Pacific Ocean, might be a better fit for Canada anyhow.
“It’s always been clear that denying it [the Keystone XL pipeline] or slowing Keystone wasn’t going to stop the flow of Canadian oil,” Michael Levi, senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Bloomberg News in a report published Tuesday.
The proposed $12 billion project would send 1.1 million barrels per day of western Canada’s oil-sands crude 2,900 miles east to Saint John, New Brunswick, on the country’s North Atlantic Coast.
And this project would serve for the conversion of a 1950s-era underutilized natural gas pipeline, adding extensions to the existing infrastructure - one to a terminal south of Alberta’s oil sands in the oil town of Hardisty and the other reaching from Montreal to a refinery in Saint John, which "has supertanker access that would allow the crude to be transported globally, including to the refineries in Louisiana and Texas that the Keystone XL pipeline would be intended to serve," according to
International Business Times.
With this alternative to the Keystone XL, "Canada can develop more lucrative export markets for its crude, including Europe, which might need more oil as its relationship with Russia, a major source of natural gas, sours," International Business Times reports.
"Loosening Canada’s dependence on the U.S. market by providing supertanker access o Alberta’s heavy crude from the New Brunswick coast would allow Canada to wean itself off heavy dependence on U.S. consumption," International Business Times goes on to say.
"Similar to Keystone XL and Northern Gateway, the Energy East project faces considerable challenges, not just from environmentalists but also an unwillingness of New Brunswick’s Irving Oil Limited, which would refine the heavy crude from Alberta, to make commitments on the amount of crude it would accept. Irving Oil wants to continue to be able to take crude from the most cost-efficient sources as they arise, while the Energy East project requires commitment of about 550,000 barrels a day. After threatening to build its own terminals, TransCanada and Irving Oil agreed to form a joint venture that ostensibly resolves concerns about how much the refiner will accept," the publication adds.
"Quebec remains a sticking point, too. With a bounty of hydroelectric power, politicians from the eastern French-speaking province have embraced renewables and could face considerable opposition to a project that crosses the St. Lawrence River, a major source of drinking water for the local population," this report continues.
Well, are you confused? I certainly am. Who knows what the future holds for the Keystone XL Pipeline, but with the total land holdings of the billionaire Koch brothers being 360,000 acres in the Alberta region of this tar sands extraction, something's got to be in the works.
According to a late-October, 2013 offering of Huff Post Politics, the Keystone XL could yield $100 billion for David and Charles Koch. "A progressive think tank called the International Forum on Globalization completed the study, which found that the Kochs and their privately-owned company, Koch Industries, hold up to 2 million acres of land in Alberta, Canada, the proposed starting point of the Keystone XL. Several Koch Industries subsidiaries stand to benefit from the pipeline's construction, including Koch Exploration Canada, which would profit from oil development on its land, and Koch Supply and Trading, which would benefit from oil derivatives trading, the Huff Post Politics article reports.
The biggest foreign lease holder of the Canadian tar sands is not Exxon Mobile, Chevron, or BP, but the Koch Brothers, according to
The Washington Post. "The Koch Industries subsidiary holds leases on 1.1 million acres -- an area nearly the size of Delaware -- in the oil sands region of Alberta, Canada, according to an activist group that studied Alberta provincial records," the article says.
And like all things regarding the hoodoo-voodoo economics and a myriad of speculations regarding the Keystone XL, are the Koch brothers planning to ship the crude that they might harvest from Canada via the Keystone XL? Well, the thing hasn't been built yet, so there's a lot of 'he says, he says," going on in regard to this long, winding contraption destined to transport as much as 510,000 barrels a day, if it is actually built and begins pumping the black gold.
So who knows? One source claims the figure of Koch brothers profits is grossly inflated, and like everything else pertaining to the Keystone XL, the numbers are out-of-whack. Like they say, money talks, and as long as it does, people in the Teamsters, on Fox News, and many other nooks and crannies of the All Important the the Good and the Great, will be doing a lot of talking for the laying down of this leviathan known as the Keystone XL Pipeline.