I understand that Obama's decision to "delay" the Keystone XL pipeline project was mainly made to keep the ecomentalists in his base happy, but it's interesting that:
Warren Buffett’s Burlington Northern Santa Fe LLC is among U.S. and Canadian railroads that stand to benefit from the Obama administration’s decision to reject TransCanada Corp. (TRP)’s Keystone XL oil pipeline permit. ...
“Whatever people bring to us, we’re ready to haul,” Krista York-Wooley, a spokeswoman for Burlington Northern, a unit of Buffett’s Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK/A), said in an interview. If Keystone XL “doesn’t happen, we’re here to haul.”
It may not rise to the level of Solyndra in the annals of crony capitalism, but it's still a nicely thrown stone that killed two birds at once for the POTUS: ecomentalists happy and Warren Buffett's got more money to spend telling everyone how evil Republicans are.
It really is becoming more and more difficult to ignore, isn't it? Chicago politics at its best: no one should really be surprised by this at all. All the warning signs were there.
Just no one wanting to see them.
Posted by: John F. Opie | 01/24/2012 at 08:09 AM
What's more absurd is the insistence that these are new phenomena under Obama. Solyndra is a non-issue attacked specifically because it represents the potential for a non-petro based economy. In other words... the future.
Solyndra's failure (due largely to the rapid commoditization of solar panels) is a drop in the bucket and more consequential for the tizzy it inspired in the calcified thinkers of the right. All that "picking winners and losers" nonsense is posturing.
Oil is so 20th century and we seem to be unable to appreciate that. And it seems more than a little speculative that somehow Obama has teamed up with Buffet to engage in some sort of nefarious crony orgy.
When the GOP insisted that the expedited decision on XL be a condition of their joining the table, they assured (and surely knew) that the environmental review would be incomplete when the decision date came up, virtually assuring its defeat.
Who was politiking who?
Posted by: Anthony Gibbs | 01/24/2012 at 04:13 PM