I have a strong hunch Oklahoma’s Sen. James Inhofe (the world’s leading denier of climate change via carbon emissions who probably, because of the recent election, is going to head the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee come January) if he gets his way and the Keystone XL Pipeline is built, is going to come to wish, instead of tar-sand, water was running through it. 

I believe his region of the country is on the precipice of flipping into a full-fledged Sonoran-like desert. When will it register on policymakers and Wall Street what’s happening in California’s San Joaquin Valley is for keeps: the country’s biggest agriculture-producing area is flipping, before our eyes, into an Oklahoma-style dust bowl, and is only going to get much-much bigger. Will it be only when the heartland is as dry as a bone; is that when we are going to appreciate what’s really keystone to the country?  

Anyway, I only bring this up because the House on Friday, going around the President (a bit of irony, here, given Republicans’ impeachment fever over the President posturing to go around them on immigration) passed a bill authorizing the building of the Keystone Pipeline. On Tuesday it was debated in the Senate. It looks as if it’ll pass there with Democratic help, with Democrats misguidedly attempting to get Louisiana’s senator, Marry Landrieu, reelected with its passage.

And Democrats wonder why 30 percent of their constituency stayed home on Election Day.        

But, at last, it looks as if we are arriving at a moment of truth for the President. By his most recent words on the subject, it sounds as if he might actually veto it. What a teaching moment that could make. I suggest the President tell the country he’s all for the Keystone Pipeline, but with the caveat, he wants what’s actually keystone to our country going through it: water from Canada’s Lake Winnipeg.

It would, certainly, be most instructive to see Sen. Inhofe’s and Canada’s reaction to the idea of what’s actually keystone to existence, itself, going through the pipeline.

Anyway, which do you think is really worth more: tar-sand oil or water? Which do you think will have more of a positive impact on the country — water to irrigate our farms or tar-sand oil to be sold on the world market at bottom based prices at maximum refining cost?

Coming from the arid state of Oklahoma with its Dust Bowl experience of the 1930s, I wonder, just what would Sen. Inhofe have to say?  Do you think it could ever click in him the whole story of civilization has been based on man’s adaptation to water conditions brought to us by the weather? Or doesn’t Inhofe believe in adaptation?  

Tim O’Leary