Keystone Vote: New Depth for the Dems?

I guess it’s a good thing that the 60th vote for Mary Landrieu’s pipeline didn’t materialize, but what does the whole spectacle say about the desperation of the Democratic Party?

The news on climate change is beyond alarming. Today’s NY Times has this op-ed specifically about the Keystone XL pipeline: A Forest Threatened by Keystone XL.

The shallow deposits are scooped up by huge electric shovels and then hauled away in 400-ton-capacity trucks to mills that separate the bitumen from the sand. The waste is then dumped into lakes of polluted sludge. But most of the bitumen lies so deep in the frozen ground that it must be melted with steam and then pumped to the surface for processing. This requires steam injection plants that blast scalding steam into the ground through wells.

Basic mathematics underscores the absurdity of this brute-force enterprise. A study last year found that one unit of energy was required to produce the equivalent of five units of energy from the open-pit mines. For steam-extracted deposits, the ratio was roughly 1 to 3. As the Canadian economist Jeff Rubin put it several years ago, “when you’re schlepping oil from sand, you’re probably in the bottom of the ninth inning in the hydrocarbon economy.”

Where bitumen is near the surface, the landscape is reduced to a treeless wasteland. For the harder-to-extract bitumen, the steam plants require a supporting network of roads, pipelines, power lines, seismic lines and well pads that do their own damage. The natural gas that powers these plants is generated by the hydraulic fracturing of shale-gas formations in British Columbia. One battlefield leads to another.

The majority of Senate Democrats understand this, and understand that the big picture on climate is worse, as Dahr Jamail at Truthout explains at length in Climate Disruption Depression and 2013 Emissions Set New Records.

Caribou feces found in a 700-year-old ice layer were found to contain a virus, which reminded us once again of unintended consequences from overheating the planet. According to the report published in New Scientist, potential threats to people and wildlife through melting caused by ACD are increasing. “The find confirms that virus particles are very good ‘time capsules’ that preserve their core genomic material, making it likely that many prehistoric viruses are still infectious to plants, animals or humans,” said Jean-Michel Claverie of the Aix-Marseille University School of Medicine in France, who was part of the team who found the virus.

[snip]

Meanwhile down in the Southern Hemisphere, Sao Paulo in Brazil, Latin America’s largest metropolis, may soon run out of water. Given that this mega-city of 20 million residents and the country’s financial hub already is seeing many of its taps run dry, the future looks dire. At the time of this writing, the lakes that supply half of all the water to the city have been drained of 96 percent of their water capacity, as Brazil is in the midst of its worst drought in 80 years.

[snip]

In the United States, with California now into the fourth year of its record-setting drought, the small farm town of Stratford is seeing its ground sink due to farmers having pumped so much water out of the ground that the water table below the town has fallen 100 feet in two years.

In the face of this, a group of Senate Democrats decided that the climate was less important than a Hail Mary to save Mary Landrieu’s Senate seat. Landrieu faces a runoff election next month and is behind in the polls. Landrieu herself is from Louisiana and has been in favor of the pipeline all along, so it’s not surprising that she would be pushing the pipeline. After all, we shouldn’t expect a corporate shill to place the health of the planet above the short-term interests of her sponsors or a few crappy, dangerous jobs for her state. And a few other Democratic Senators have supported the pipeline all along.

There were other Democratic Senators, however, who were cynical enough to cast aside their own principles in favor of a last-ditch effort to keep their crony in her seat. That group would include Harry Reid, who previously had not allowed the Keystone bill to reach the Senate floor.

I haven’t followed Mary Landrieu closely. I remember vaguely her name coming up as an obstacle to passing health care legislation. But the absolutely pathetic image of her that will be forever burned into my brain is that of Anderson Cooper ripping her a new rectum on live TV in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when she characterized the “work” she and her colleagues did to pass an aid package as heroic. I can’t imagine there was anyone watching who didn’t share Cooper’s anger at that moment. To say it was embarrassing would be far too charitable.

The bottom line? Senate Democrats actually included a speculative, marginal increase in the prospect of Mary Landrieu retaining her seat in their decision-making process on a bill of enormous significance. Indeed, the timing of the bill reaching the Senate floor was driven almost entirely by Landrieu’s predicament.

So, yeah, this is a new depth for the Dems.

And they wonder why people don’t vote.

[Note: For those of you who have the urge to school me on the “political realities” here and how Obama was going to veto this anyhow and how the bill was going to pass in 2015, blah, blah, blah, please spare me. I don’t buy it.]