Draw The Line At Keystone XL

Yes, both Buster and wife have cars, and they're not electric -- they have internal combustion gasoline engines.  Our home is heated by ever-increasingly fracked natural gas, and we use plenty of electricity, via coal-fired power plants.  Our carbon footprint is not small.  Yours probably isn't either.

And we like low utility prices as much as anybody, but low prices at what larger, long-run cost?  It's time for a change.  We need to change.  When do we draw the line on our same-old, same-old fossil fuel follies?  How about at the Keystone XL pipeline?  How about now?

What follows are excepts from "I'm With the Tree Huggers", another fine Time article by Michael Grunwald, one of my new favorites.  Full article link:  http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2137419-1,00.html       
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The activists fighting the Keystone XL pipeline are right.  The respectable center has recognized that climate change is not only real and man-made, but also a genuine emergency.  The scientific evidence has become too stark to indulge denial or dithering.




The pipeline isn't the worst threat to the climate, but it's a threat.  Keystone isn't the best fight to have over fossil fuels, but it's the fight we're having.


If we're serious about reducing atmospheric carbon, we need to start leaving some carbon in the ground.  Rejecting Keystone would at least put a logistical price on tar sands oil.


What we really need is a policy presumption that cleaner is better.  Fossil-fuel interests understandably reject that notion.  So do some respectable pundits.  Like armchair McClellans, they endorse the war but are always finding excuses for why we shouldn't fight.
 

There are many climate problems that a President can't solve, but Keystone isn't one of them.  Obama has a choice between Big Oil and a more sustainable planet.  The right answer isn't always somewhere in the middle.


Now is the time to choose sides.