Is Keystone The Biggest Green Defeat Ever?

The anti-Keystone movement was an accident. Indeed, the environmentalists’ obsession with Keystone began as a gigantic mistake.  –Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine, 31 January 2014

The US State Department finds that the proposed Keystone XL pipeline is the most environmentally friendly option compared to other transportation alternatives, such as railroads and tanker ships. Despite the significant risk of spills, a pipeline like Keystone XL is a safer, cheaper and more environmentally benign way of transporting oil, the assessment concludes. For greens, this should be a gut check—though already we’re seeing that it isn’t. But the hard truth here is that when Obama approves Keystone—and he now has every reason to do so—the green movement will have been soundly defeated not by special interests or some perverse capitalist desire to desecrate the earth, but by a very simple set of facts. –Walter Russell Mead, The American Interest, 3 February 2014

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