Venango County Tea Party Patriots

A non-partisan, non-profit, non-member, association dedicated to educating the public and promoting the principles of fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government and free market economics, and all other lawful activities.

Sierra Club

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Southern Leg Of Keystone Pipeline Opens

Oil shipments on Wednesday began to flow through Keystone XL’s southern leg.

TransCanada announced the start of oil deliveries to Gulf Coast refineries on Wednesday morning. The shipments run from Cushing, Okla. to Nederland, Texas.

While not as controversial as its northern leg, which is still under review by the State Department, the decision by the Obama administration to allow the flow of oil through the southern Keystone leg is stirring controversy.

Green groups like the Sierra Club blasted the administration for failing to adequately review the pipeline.

“Today’s announcement is a painful example of President Obama’s all of the above energy plan at work: polluted air and water, carbon pollution, and the ever present threat of poisoned drinking water for millions of Texas and Oklahoma families,” Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said in a statement.

“The Sierra Club will fight hard to protect the families who are now at risk, and turn the Obama administration’s shortsighted dirty energy policy around,” added Brune, who is normally a fan of Obama’s climate agenda.

The environmental advocacy group 350.org’s Bill McKibben, also pointed the finger at Obama for falling out of line with his promises to battle climate change.

“Expediting KXL south was not the mark of a president who really ‘gets’ climate change,” McKibben said in a statement on Wednesday.

The administration still faces a decision on approving Keystone’s northern leg, which would carry crude from the oil sands in Alberta to Gulf Coast refineries.

The northern leg require approval from the president because it crosses over the U.S. border with Canada.

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Environmental Groups Want Obama to Block Oil/Gas Drilling

Environmental lobbyists are pressing President Obama to turn more western lands into national monuments to prevent oil-and-gas companies from drilling there.

The Sierra Club is leading the charge and is sweetening its message with political sugar, saying Obama could thereby help Democrats win House and Senate seats in midterm elections year.

This week it will launch a campaign called “Our Wild America,” which will call for new national monument designations.

“We think there’s real opportunities for them to do additional monument designations by the midterm elections and that it’s a positive political thing for the administration and for senators and congressmen,” Dan Chu, who is leading this program, told The Hill in a recent interview.

Chu pointed to Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), who is up for reelection in 2014.

Udall, a first-term senator, has sponsored legislation to provide permanent protection from oil and drilling for the 22,000-acre Browns Canyon, which runs along the Arkansas River. GOP congressmen from his state have proven resistant to other public lands protection measures, making it unlikely to become law.

The Sierra Club argues Obama should make the Canyon a national monument, and that this could help Udall in his reelection bid.
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Interior Secretary Nominee Concerned About Her Carbon Footprint

Sally Jewell, the woman President Barack Obama has nominated to be the next Secretary of the Interior, said in a 2007 interview that she was “not proud of our employee commuting footprint” during her time at the helm of outdoor retailer REI.

“Is there anything you’re not proud of or you’re looking forward to changing soon?” a reporter with the environmental Web site grist.org asked Jewell, who was the CEO of REI at the time.

“I’m not proud of our employee commuting footprint,” Jewell said. “We’re sitting out here in an office park [in Kent, Wash.], in an area that used to be farmland, probably in a floodplain.

“And many people are driving single-occupancy vehicles to get in here,” Jewell said.

Environmental groups also are praising Jewell, including Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, who said he hoped Jewell will protect the Arctic from “risky drilling” and “dirty and dangerous fracking.”

“We look forward to working closely with her to preserve more of those benefits and more of our natural heritage by designating new national monuments, protecting America’s Arctic from risky drilling, and keeping dirty and dangerous fracking out of our public lands,” Brune said.

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