Happy Friday folks,
It looks like there isn’t any “oomph” left in President Obama’s second term. The AP’s Josh Lederman and Jim Kuhnhenn reported this morning that his agenda has “no safe bets,” and Peter Nicholas and Carol E. Lee of The Wall Street Journal recently wrote that “Obama’s Agenda Faces Rocky Road.” (Sadly, the article is devoid of ice cream.)
With so little air left in the tires, where can President Obama turn to achieve a solid policy victory in the remaining year or so of his Administration? Well, Laura Barron-Lopez of The Hill recently profiled a study, conducted by the Fraser Instittue, that found that “Pipelines pose less risks than trains or trucks in carrying oil.”
Specifically, fewer people get injured in the construction/maintenance of pipelines, and they have a lower risk of oil spills. Pipelines come “in at fewer than 0.6 incidents for every billion ton-miles of transport annually. In comparison, there were about two incidents per billion ton-miles traveled annually by train and 20 for every billion ton-miles by road.”
This evidence indicates that approving Keystone XL Pipeline would be a smart move for a President that has been sitting on the fence on this issue for so long. President Obama does not have many aspects of his Presidency that a solid majority of the American people are behind, so these data on the proficiency of pipelines should be taken seriously.
Seize the day and rock the weekend.