U.S Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Lisa Jackson is leaving the Obama cabinet, apparently at least partly because of her opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline.
It’s worrisome that this one effort at controlling the growing North American fossil fuel industry – by blocking Keystone XL – has produced so much opposition. Meanwhile, there has been huge expansion in unconventional oil and gas production, including both fracking and the continued growth of the oil sands.
What we are doing now, continuing to invest the lion’s share in fossil fuel energy, is both environmentally destructive and economically wasteful. This infrastructure just isn’t compatible with what we are going to need in the future, once we finally start taking climate change seriously. Once we eventually find ourselves shutting down coal, oil, and gas infrastructure only partway into its economic lifetime we won’t be asking why Keystone XL was not approved, but why so many other misguided projects got built during these years.
