Serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis. © James Conner.

 

4 March 2014

Environmentalists should cut Walsh & Lewis
some slack on the Keystone XL pipeline

Sen. John Walsh and John Lewis support building the Keystone XL pipeline, which would cross northeastern Montana on its way to Houston, Texas, and the gulf coast refineries equipped for cracking the heavy bitumen based crude oil being shoveled and steamed out of Alberta’s Athabasca Tar Sands. For Walsh and Lewis, whether to build the Keystone XL is fundamentally more an issue of energy production and jobs — especially, jobs — than of global warming (or in the weasel phrase of the day, “climate change”).

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That delights unions, many of them actively campaigning for building the pipeline because of construction jobs, but rankles environmentalists, who regard global warming as the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse and the Keystone XL as the Devil’s drinking straw.

Unfortunately, some environmentalists, looking for arguments against the pipeline, are deriding construction jobs as temporary and therefore of little benefit to local communities. That’s a mistake.

All construction jobs, by definition, are of limited duration; temporary. That doesn’t make them bad jobs, or jobs communities should discourage. Most construction jobs, especially those with union benefits, pay well and provide a good life for workers and their families.

The Keystone XL will not create many long term jobs along its route, but it will contribute to creating and/or keeping jobs in the gulf coast refineries — jobs just as important to the nation as job building the pipeline through Montana.

If environmentalists continue to rail against construction jobs, they’ll needlessly drive a wedge between themselves and organized labor.

I urge environmentalists to join me in cutting Walsh and Lewis some slack on this. Unless, of course, they like the sound of Sen. Steve Daines.