posted by prof_improbable #
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Located at this address in sunny Calgary, Canada, is the Transcanada Corp office.
Transcanada is the brain trust that is shoving the XL Keystone pipeline down America's throat via an insecure Congress desperate to prove that they can get something- no matter how ill-conceived and unbeneficial to Americans- done.
The US $12.2 billion project is set to bring tar sands oil from Alberta that is rich in sulfur and other tasty stuff to the only shit pot in North America that will process it- Houston, TX.
But what about the jobs created? The number of actual jobs gets hyper-inflated with the zealousness of the proponent, but a recent Forbes article shows that Transcanada's own applications state they expect (on the top end) only 6,000-6,500 short term jobs created for the complete construction and approximately 35 full time jobs once it's online.
In comparison, Amazon.com is hiring 80,000 short term jobs for the holiday season (view source here).
We, the energy thirsty masses, get to bear the brunt of increased air pollution from the processing and the risk of leaks, contamination, and spills that a 1,200 mile (1,900 km) pipeline brings.
But environmental disasters related to industrial energy use rarely occur, unless you count the Gulf BP oil spill, or the Exxon Valdez, or the Fukushima nuclear power plant, or Chernobyl, or Three-Mile-Island or this rather long and depressing list of recent oil spills.
And then there’s that whole global warming thing that we didn’t get to talk about...
