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In Keystone XL Rejection, We See Two Americas At War With Each Other
America has two basic economies, and the division increasingly defines its politics. One, concentrated on the coasts and in college towns, focuses on the business of images, digits and transactions. The other, located largely in the southeast, Texas and the Heartland, makes its living in more traditional industries, from agriculture and manufacturing to fossil fuel development....

...Oddly, in their self-righteous narcissism, the urbanistas seem to forget that driving production from more regulated areas like California or New York to far less controlled areas like Texas or China, may in the end actually increase net greenhouse gas emissions. The hip, cool urbanistas won’t stop consuming iPads, but simply prefer that the pollution making them is generated far from home, and preferably outside the country.

The perspective in the Heartland areas and Texas, of course, is quite different. They regard basic industries as central to their current prosperity. Oil and gas, along with agriculture and manufacturing, have made these areas the fastest growing in terms of jobs and income over the past decade....

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Obama kills Keystone pipeline plan; Why he did it
A pretty amazing presidential decision out of the White House today, to kill the Keystone XL Pipestone plan to bring 700,000 barrels of oil per day from Canada to Texas.

Treating Canada, our largest trading partner, next-door neighbor (or neighbour), most trustworthy longtime friend and ally in good times and Afghanistan, as if it can only sell all that oil to us instead of building a shorter pipeline to British Columbia and selling to -- wait for it -- China.

After all, who needs a secure energy source from a best friend when you can pay a fortune to buy it from unfriendly people in faraway unstable places?...

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Jobs Vs. Greens? On Keystone Obama Chooses His Base
...For Obama, what matters is that the green left is making Keystone a litmus test. Obama fundraiser Wendy Abrams, for example, a well-heeled Chicago enviro-activist and Rahm Emanuel buddy whose family owns the country's largest privately held medical equipment maker, recently warned that the Keystone decision would show whether Obama "really wants to begin the transformation to building a renewable energy future."...