There are new revelations in the fight to build the Keystone Pipeline. You remember Keystone? It’s the project that would transport oil from Canada, south through several states, including Oklahoma, to refineries in Texas. It is guaranteed to create more than a few jobs and provide energy to North America. The Obama administration has fought it at every turn. They claim they are taking a deliberative approach, making sure all the environmental studies have been done, redone, examined, and reexamined. In other words, they have dragged their feet. We now know there is much more to this fight than Obama’s EPA wants to admit.
As it turns out, the EPA has been working closely with environmental groups as they fight to keep the Keystone Pipeline from seeing the light of day.
Fox News – Newly disclosed emails suggest senior policy officials at the Environmental Protection Agency and environmental groups are working closely to kill the Keystone XL pipeline, critics say.
“These damning emails make it clear that the Obama administration has been actively trying to stop this important project for years,” Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., who has long advocated for the Canada-to-Texas pipeline’s construction, said in a statement to Fox News.
The emails were obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request by the Energy and Environment Legal Institute. In one communication, Lena Moffit of the Sierra Club wrote to three senior policy staffers at the EPA, including Michael Goo, who was then the associate administrator for policy.
“Thanks so much for taking the time to meet with us on Keystone XL yesterday,”she wrote. “Let me know if I can be helpful in any way — particularly in further identifying those opportunities for EPA to engage that don’t involve ‘throwing your body across the tracks,’ as Michael put it.”
EELI senior legal fellow Chris Horner told Fox News that as a government agency, EPA couldn’t be seen as overtly trying to kill Keystone, but was reaching out to environmental groups for other ideas on how to do it.
“On its face,” Horner told Fox News, “it smacks of classic secret dealing and an uncomfortably close working relationship and one that is known to these parties, but quite plainly not advertised to the public.”
Barrasso was less diplomatic. “Despite the fact that Keystone XL has bipartisan support in Congress and from governors, environmental extremists inside and out of the administration are working behind closed doors to kill it,” he said.
Many EPA staffers — including Goo — came from the environmental movement. Goo, who is now at the Department of Energy’s policy shop, was with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Horner said many EPA staffers share a policy agenda with environmental groups, a common cause illuminated in the emails his group obtained.
“This series of correspondence plainly indicates that you’ve got an agency that’s made up its mind — working with allies with whom it is ideologically and substantively aligned on this — trying to find ways to advance their argument without being too obvious about it,” Horner told Fox News.
Anyone who has paid attention to the agenda being advanced by the EPA should not be surprised at these new revelations. The agency has not been exactly hiding their motives. At every turn, they have issued regulations that have done nothing but harm the ability of America to produce its own energy. From coal to oil, and everything in between, they act as if these energy products are being produced by the devil himself. In their eyes, the only good energy is solar and wind. Electric is good, as long as it is produced by something other than coal.
The EPA has been quite good at hiding their true agenda, as long as you are on their side, or do not pay attention to what is going on in your world. To everyone else, their agenda has been quite obvious. These emails expose the EPA for what it really is; a government agency that knows no boundaries to its authority and that is willing to push that authority to any limit and beyond. It is a government agency stacked with agents who are more than willing to further their agenda, no matter the cost to the rest of America.
I could write paragraphs about how the EPA needs to be reined in and their authority curbed back to proper levels. Truly, that is what needs to happen, but I would be naive to believe it will, at least until after the 2016 presidential election. As long as President Obama, or any other liberal is in the White House, the EPA will continue to have the freedom to destroy the oil and coal industries of America. And they will not stop with them. Once they have them under submission, they will be coming for things such as farm dust and water runoff. They have already taken steps in that direction. Who knows what they will attack next?