Nebraska Makes Late Entry Into an Oil Pipeline Debate

[alp227]

Source: NY Times

With a federal decision anticipated soon on whether an oil pipeline will be allowed to run from Canada through the nation’s midsection, lawmakers in Nebraska are being summoned on Tuesday to an unexpected legislative session over the issue, which has stirred up a level of rancor that few had predicted.

“The public outcry has just continued to get louder and louder, stronger and stronger,” said Annette Dubas, a state senator who is among those who want to consider how Nebraska might regulate such projects, but who seemed as surprised as anyone last week when Gov. Dave Heineman, a Republican, called legislators into a special session on the issue.

The outcome of such a session, which could last for two weeks, seems uncertain. For one thing, no one knows how many members of Nebraska’s 49-member unicameral Legislature will support adding standards that would give the state new control over pipelines within its borders.

At least some of the lawmakers have expressed concern that adding regulations now might land Nebraska in a legal battle over the project, which is known as the Keystone XL pipeline. It would run 1,700 miles from the oil sands of northern Alberta to refineries near the Gulf of Mexico.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/31/business/energy-environment/nebraska-legislature-to-debate-keystone-xl-oil-pipeline.html

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Dave Heineman opposes this pipeline project; this is ONE Republican whose position against an Obama administration project we can support, instead of the stubborn obstructionists in Congress like McConnell and Cantor. In the Nebraska unicameral legislature are 49 seats: 34 Republicans and 15 Democrats.

[TwilightGardener]

1. What's really pathetic is the pipeline supporters' emphasis on jobs--

that's how they got us all by the short hairs, isn't it? They're hoping people in the Midwest are so fucking desperate for employment that they'll risk their precious and irreplaceable aquifer for a relative handful of jobs and giant profits for a foreign company.

[SpiralHawk]

2. The official State Dept. estimate is for maybe 500 jobs

while the multinational republicorp estimate is for 20,000 jobs or more more more, and manna dropping from the sky.

I think they are lying to America baldly about the jobs...