Pipeline flowing even without Keystone vote

On Friday, our Congressman, Blake Farenthold sent an email praising the House’s passage of a bill to approve the Keystone XL pipeline which, he says, “will put America back on the path to prosperity by creating good-paying jobs in Texas.”

The Texas leg of the pipeline already exists.

It has been pumping oil from Cushing, Okla. to the refineries along the Gulf Coast of Texas since January 2014.

I guess I was part of the vast conspiracy that kept that quiet since the pipe runs through the section of East Texas where I lived and edited a newspaper before I moved to Gonzales in October 2013.

Many of my good friends in law enforcement were charged with disentangling the protesters from the heavy equipment they chained themselves to when they could make their way onto construction sites and disrupt the process.

I know well the business owners who celebrated when their restaurants, RV parks, and other businesses were filled with the construction crews that came to town to put the pipeline in place.

I even earned a few tips running movies and hot meals out to the guys and girls tasked with the complex task of providing a security perimeter around a long, skinny, dark, muddy job site. Everyone who had a law enforcement license had plenty of extra jobs for several months while the pipeline was being laid.

They were defending from a well organized group of protesters who would even descend from the trees in the Big Thicket or, conversely, climb up in the trees set for removal and refuse to come down. They staged several marches in downtown Houston and camped in the Alabama-Coushatta Indiana Reservation near my hometown where organizers taught the wannabe protesters how to be the most effective at their game.

So, this existing pipeline, like much of the boom in the oil and gas industry, provides prosperity for the communities that see an increase in activity. And, even though the current price for oil is down, I’m with Erica Greider at Texas Monthly’s Burkablog who wrote about the most succinct piece ever about why there’s plenty of reason not to panic about oil prices.  If you haven’t seen it, dial up Dec. 22, 2014 edition. You will understand way more about the oil business than you ever did.

In fact, maybe Farenthold could just have a hotline to Erica installed on his desk to explain economics.

The downturn in the price of oil is jazzing up the remaining 75 percent of the economy. The fact that you are paying $1.78 a gallon for gas instead of $3.50 means your family is much more likely to take that weekend road trip; and your small business is much more likely to give workers a small salary bump. Mr. Small Businessman is more likely to finally give that part time worker some full time hours and benefits; which will boost his production, and hopefully the company’s bottom line.

I’ve already given my border rant, which Farenthold says is his other main objective. But this move on the pipeline — which is destined to see the business end of Obama’s veto pen — is just another example of how Congress lives in a protective bubble of its own making. I guess he considers the Ebola epidemic that he was panicked over in November now solved.

Passage of the Keystone pipeline won’t create one single Texas job. The pipeline work is done here. Google it. This is a bit like cheering for a World Series team in the middle of the Super Bowl, as far as Texas is concerned. And nationally, the project is dead until there’s a new occupant in the White House. If then.

There’s also the nagging detail that there isn’t one U.S. based petrochemical company that can process the tar sands that would come down from Canada, should that pipeline stop carrying regular oil and switch to the nearly solid stuff Canada wants to sell. Coastal companies aren’t even sure where they would ship it off too when it got to the coast.

We’ve got plenty of regular ol’ oil to move around, even without the stinkin’ bitumen.