By Ashley Berry
“Because if you haven’t seen a raise in a decade; if your house is still twenty-five thousand, thirty thousand dollars under water; if you’re just happy that you’ve still got that factory job that is powered by cheap energy; if every time you go to fill up your old car because you can’t afford to buy a new one, and you certainly can’t afford to buy a Prius, you’re spending forty bucks that you don’t have, which means that you may not be able to save for retirement.” He added, “You may be concerned about the temperature of the planet, but it’s probably not rising to your number one concern.”
This was part of President Obama’s speech at a fundraiser in 2014. He was speaking to a room full of donors, many of whom came to lobby the President on the many issues regarding the expansion of the Keystone Pipeline. The President argued that the majority of Americans are not the people in that room, that they are members of the working class who are trying to make ends meet. When everyday life is a struggle, it is difficult to think about the big picture, but we need to or we could be headed for a global disaster. Global warming is not just the big picture, it is the biggest picture and it needs to be our number one concern.
The proposed 1,700 mile expansion of the pipeline would carry 830,000 gallons of tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada to the Gulf Coast of Texas daily. Tar sands oil, or bitumen, is extremely dangerous for several reasons. During the refining process, three to four times more carbon dioxide is released than in the refining of traditional oil. Also, since tar sands oil sinks instead of floats, it is much harder and more costly to clean up.
If there is any doubt in the matter just ask the residents of Mayflower, Arkansas who are still feeling the repercussions from a 5,000 gallon oil spill in 2013. The tar sands gushed into a residential neighborhood, through a creek and culverts settling in its final resting place of a marshy lake. Residents of the town still say they can smell the oil after a heavy rain and are convinced that it has leaked into a nearby lake. Many people who live near the spill are still experiencing health problems and have reported headaches, nausea, vomiting, dizziness and difficulty breathing as a result of the contamination from the spill.
Just the possibility of a spill similar to this should be a very serious deterrent. Expanding the pipeline would be like playing Russian roulette with our environment and our health. It would cause irreversible damage that no amount of money could fix. With 2014 being the hottest year on record, it is becoming clear that there needs to be an aggressive push towards renewable energies and as far away as possible from oil projects.
Those in favor of the expansion argue that it will create jobs that the U.S. desperately needs. While the U.S. desperately does need jobs, there are far better ways to create them. A push to increase the use of renewable energies will create these jobs and increase access to renewable energy that is desperately needed. The expansion seems like the best idea to create jobs and boost our economy but it is merely the easiest and most convenient option. After all, the jobs and economy boost will not do anyone any good when our drinking water becomes poisoned, sea levels rapidly rise, species become extinct and the earth is no longer able to support us because of our own ignorance.