By: Jeffrey Klein, Political Buzz Examiner
Examiner.com

President Obama’s refusing to permit the Keystone XL Pipeline last week has nothing to do with “environmental concerns” arising from it crossing the Ogallala Aquifer, and everything to do with an even more sinister agenda that could keep the middle class in economic straits for a generation or more.

First, he wants to keep [fossil fuel] energy prices high, according to Thomas J. Pyle, CEO of the American Energy Alliance, in his January 20, 2012 FOXNews article.

“The reality at the White House has nothing to do with protecting the environment — it’s about reinforcing a myth of energy scarcity on the United States and driving up the price of energy.

For decades, one of the key tenets of environmental doctrine has been that the United States, and North America as a whole, is running out of affordable energy sources like oil, natural gas, and coal.

Yet the discovery of cost-effective oil production from Canadian oil reserves—as well as the large-scale deployment of shale [oil] technologies here in the U.S.—turns the environmentalists’ politics of energy scarcity on its head, and that is at the heart of the administration’s opposition to Keystone XL.

First, let’s quickly dispel the “environmental concerns” once and for all.

We had already identified the fact that TransCanada already operates an “existing” Canada-to-Texas, shale-oil Keystone Pipeline, a portion of which runs through the eastern section of the “sensitive” Ogallala Aquifer in Nebraska–without there having been any environmental impact.

Now, we can offer an expanded perspective by viewing the U.S. map with pipeline routes overlaid, in Cristina Corbin’s FOXNews article from January 21, 2012, representing the nearly 2 million miles of energy pipeline criss-crossing the United States, 50,000 miles of which carry crude oil from wells located in all of the oil producing states in the nation, upon which the U.S. has been dependent for transmission of fossil fuel energy.

Now, compare that with a map of all of the aquifers in the National Atlas of the United States, which shows that these pipelines have been operating in proximity to sources of drinking water–including the Ogallala Aquifer–for decades.

“There’s no shortage of energy pipelines,” Dan Kish, senior vice president for policy at the Institute for Energy Research, told FoxNews.com. “This [Keystone XL] pipeline would be better than [the existing] 1.9 million miles of pipeline already in the United States. It’s newer and has the best technology.”

“We have tens of thousands of pipelines and I don’t think there’s any good evidence that pipelines are a significant impact on ecosystems to the point that they can’t adapt,” said Kenneth Green, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Kish and Green both said the transportation alternatives to a pipeline system, tanker ship, train or truck – all pose a considerably higher risk for accident and spillage.

Kim Huynh, a spokeswoman for Friends of the Earth, had said in Ms. Corbin’s article … “It will be environmentally and economically devastating if there were to be a spill.”

Unfortunately, both the probability and scale of her statement are unfounded by either fact or the vast recorded experience of pipeline performance–particularly the U.S.

The environmentalist’s new narrative, once they managed to get ANWR and coastal oil drilling banned in the U.S., is against the successful shale oil technology, which Ms. Huynh describes as [being] “the world’s dirtiest oil that needs to stay in the ground.”

Robert Schulz, a professor at the University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business, disagrees, but recognizes that it is a popular “misperception” of environmental activists. Professor Schulz argued that testing proves the level of contaminants in Canadian oil–particularly CO 2–are reasonably similar to those coming from oil in both Venezuela and the Middle East.

Ms. Huynh’s phrase … “needs to stay in the ground,” is basically the naive environmentalist’s pushback against the reality of the Earth being fossil fuel driven–and will continue to be so for our lifetimes and beyond.

In stark contrast of what President Obama would like is to believe, we are not energy poor.

Recently, the Institute for Energy Research released The North American Energy Inventory, which pulls together data from government sources to prove that North America holds the world’s largest combined oil, coal, and natural gas resources in the world–enough oil in North America to fuel our present needs for 250 years.

In my opinion, our vast fossil fuel energy resources of the U.S., provides the perfect catalyst for our country to exit this terrible recession–just like the Soviet Union did ten years ago.

Energy natural resource exploitation was the primary catalyst that propelled the former Soviet Union, from being a broken nation that spent a “lost decade” from 1991 in the throws of transformation from communism to capitalism began by Mikhail Gorbachev. Then, in 1998 it defaulted on its national debt sending it into an economic spiral.

According to Thomas White Global Investing–Russia Country Profile, published in January 2011, the eight years between 1998 and 2006 have virtually been witness to an economic miracle, as Russian GDP expanded by an unprecedented 57.6%, while real income of the population grew by 65%. Poverty rates were cut by half and regional disparities toned down to a degree.

The inflation rate, which was as high as 47% in 1996 declined to 9.6% by 2006. High-energy prices, robust domestic demand, large foreign inflows, and macroeconomic reform enabled the economy to clock an impressive growth. Economic growth averaged above 6% between 2001 and 2008, touching a high of 8.1% in 2007.

In fact, right now, Russia’s economy is far outpacing our own, at an incredible growth rate of 4.8 percent in the third quarter of last year, according to TradingEconomics.com.

Russia boasts of abundant mineral resources, especially oil, natural gas, and coal reserves. It is the world’s largest oil producer and the second largest exporter after the OPEC, which has driven its GDP to 12th ranked in the world at $1.231 trillion per year.

The necessary sea change in national ideology is already underway in the U.S., and assuming Republicans have a clean sweep in the November 2012 elections, beginning in January 2013, we could engage and streamline the process of accessing our rich natural energy resources as the catapult to creating millions of new high-paying jobs, while lowering the cost of energy in the U.S. and insuring our energy independence from nations who fundamentally don’t like us.

Copyright (c) 2012 by Jeffrey Klein