UPDATE: below
Yesterday, I was wrong twice. First, I missed President Obama's tepid endorsement of domestic shale gas exploration (corrected the same day via an update).
Next, toward the end of the post, I noted I was "betting Obama finds a way to kick the can on Keystone once again." It's worse than that: According to Politico, the Administration formally will reject the Keystone XL pipeline permit application later today.
Score another for green zealots; zero for cost-effective energy, jobs, and economic recovery.
MORE:
The Presidential statement denying the Keystone pipeline permit is here.
14 comments:
The man's a menace. Even Jimmy Carter knew enough not to obstruct energy development, and he's a complete idiot.
>>> the rushed and arbitrary deadline insisted on by Congressional Republicans prevented a full assessment of the pipeline’s impact
Translation:
"Blame it on Bush... sorta like."
Menace, perhaps, but potentially with favorable (unintended) consequences:
1) Gives Republicans a new number one campaign issue.
2) Takes away Obama's number one talking point about the "do nothing Republican Congress."
CNN: Canada will look to China to sell its oil
Doesn't make sense politically.
Environmentalist aren't going to vote for a Republican. Can't see how approving the pipeline would have hurt him.
And Obama just appointed a former employee of Bain Capital as the new acting director of the Office of Management and Budget.
That makes even less sense. There goes another major campaign talking point.
Maybe Michelle prefers life in Chicago. The have a huge backyard, thanks to Rezko.
@Carl--
on an entirely unrelated subject, I see in The Economist that the ITU is meeting in Geneva next week to decide the fate of the leap second.
What is your take on this? It seems that there are more and more exceptions to UTC, leap seconds are apparently unwelcome in electronic communication causing software confusions etc.
From all that I've read--in and beyond the Economist--it seems kinda compelling to get rid of it, but I'm hardly an expert.
Kit: Thankfully, I'm not attending the ITU's WRC this year (and Geneva in late January through mid February is no fun). So I haven't vote-counted on this issue. But, as the Economist article notes, the leap second is an artificial construct. GPS -- which never employed leap seconds -- will work either way.
Should leap seconds be abolished, atomic clocks will begin diverging from solar time--by just under an hour in a hundred years. So what. I doubt that anyone not wearing a white lab coat even would notice.
>>> The have a huge backyard, thanks to Rezko.
I don't think Michelle's ass is THAT big....
:oP
>>> Should leap seconds be abolished, atomic clocks will begin diverging from solar time--by just under an hour in a hundred years. So what. I doubt that anyone not wearing a white lab coat even would notice.
Well, for certain purposes you'll have to establish a decision on which baseline to use in key arenas. You can see, for example, a Euro space capsule crashing into a Russian space station because one was using solar and the other using "official atomic time".
I would say you probably want to make an adjustment every decade or something to bring it into synchrony. If that's done predictably, even the software will have no problems allowing for it.
OBH: The Russian sat-nav system, and the analogous systems under construction by the EU and China, all depart from the leap-second atomic clock version--coordinated universal time (UTC). So the "problem" you identify exists today, and shifting the official standard from UTC to something else won't exacerbate it.
So...if the ITU is throwing out the leap second, can I have it? :D
Now seriously; @ Carl & Warren in particular:
I have been following SOPA & PIPA very closely ( as a designer with work & images "out there" I am particularly sensitive to--and potentially affected by--some of these issues). However, it seems that the more I read, from both sides, the more muddled I become.
( you already know about my reverence for the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the particular and precious freedoms those grant us...) Please help clarify!
Kit: This is one of those topics which is related to my professional practice, and so legal ethics counsels against my addressing here.
Purely factually, however, I note that the Senate today decided to postpone voting on the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). The full Senate had been scheduled to consider the bill next Tuesday. The statement of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) is here. Reacting to the Senate's delay, the House Judiciary Committee today also postponed consideration of SOPA "until there is wider agreement on a solution." The statement of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) is here.
Oh right---I guess some of it would fall into telecom law; here I was thinking IP law....sorry.
Thanks for the facts. There was an interesting take on it in Salon, today, as well.
It DOES strike me from my study of it all however ( that kind of like gay divorce or the emptying of the mental hospitals in the 70s) the future of enforcement, policing & consequences details haven't been worked through enough to effectively pass such a bill at this time.
re: the above--it was big think , not Salon
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