IT WAS NICE FOR A WHILE, EARTH. SEE YA

It has fallen to the city of Detroit to be the poster child for the emerging rampage by extremely wealthy and powerful people to magnify their sense of self-importance at the expense of the world around them, and indeed , by extension, because of the magnitude of their different modes of mischief, placing the entire global environment in peril.
 
Outside the city, alongside the Detroit River, is a petroleum refinery that belongs to one of the Koch brothers. It is not an ordinary refinery. It processes crude oil that flows in by pipeline from the Canadian tar sands, an oil deposit that rivals the largest ever discovered. It is not easy stuff to refine, like light crude. The residue is not black tar, which can be mixed with sand to pave our roads. It is a form of coke (Koch? how appropriate!), heavily laced with sulphur and other chemicals that place it in a class that bans its burning in the U.S., as specified in EPA rulings.
 
So what to do. There is a lot of energy in this coke, and acid rain and other harmful effects notwithstanding, there ought to be a way to make a buck with it. Here’s an idea. Let’s ship it to China and India. They don’t much care what they burn (If they die, they die). So that is where the Detroit mountain of coke is headed.
 
As it happens, Detroit is small potatoes. The Keystone pipeline, Canada’s bid to increase its shipments of refined petroleum to a global market, relies on Texas refineries to process orders of magnitude more tar sands oil than possible at the Detroit refinery...........and in the process produce more mountains of coke. Guess what else Texas ports will be shipping to China, India, and other nations.
 
There are of course other concerns with the pipeline, such as potential leaks and effect on the aquifers that it crosses. The latter may be avoided. If it happens to flow into rivers, the oil sinks to the bottom. A messy job, dredging oil from miles of river bottom. But the pay is good. Perversely, a leak over land may not be a hazard as the oil reverts to tar sands when it seeps into the earth So we dig it up and ship it back to Canada. Try again, Buster.
 
All this doesn’t take rocket science to think through, but my guess is that wealth and power will prevail. Letters to my Senators Feinstein and Boxer are answered politely, but with no evidence of serious concern.
 
What is that saying? Oh yes. “Suck it up.”

LETTER TO THE WHITE HOUSE

Dear Mr. President:

An article in the May 18 issue of the New York Times addresses the problem of the mountain of coke outside of Detroit that is the product of refining Canadian tar sands oil. It has high sulphur and other environmentally bad content and cannot be burned in the US by EPA rules. So it is being shipped to China, India and Mexico where they don’t care much about the environment. This brings up the subject of the Keystone pipeline. We can forecast, without any doubt, that mountains of coke will  be produced in Texas, and Texas will be a big shipping point to any buyers worldwide that can be found for it. This will be a big step backward in our efforts toward global warming abatement. Further, the Keystone pipeline is the medium through which Canada, exploiting its tar sands,  can produce and ship refined petroleum products around the world, It will have little US benefit. I hope you will reconsider your support for the pipeline.







Sincerely,
Edward Hujsak