Clayton Williams, the 1990 Republican gubernatorial candidate in Texas, once said about rape that, "as long as it's inevitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it."
Obviously, that was an incredibly insane and ignorant comment. Fast-forward 24 years, and people are using that same insane rationale with the Keystone XL pipeline.
They're saying that as long as it's inevitable, we should just accept it and learn to love it.
And they're also saying that America is a fossil fuel dependent nation and that the Keystone pipeline will help lower gas prices in America and make us more energy independent.
But the Keystone XL pipeline is not inevitable, America doesn't have to be a fossil fuel dependent nation, and the oil from the Keystone pipeline won't do anything to help gas prices in this country.
Big Oil supporters and pundits across the media have been saying that the use of tar sands oil from Canada and the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline are inevitable, but that's simply not the case.
On Monday's episode of The Big Picture, I spoke with Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, director of the International Program with the Natural Resources Defense Council, about the State Department's report on the Keystone XL pipeline that was released last week.
I asked her if the report said that extracting tar sands oil from Canada was an inevitable process.
She said that tar sands oil development is not inevitable, no matter what pundits and Big Oil supporters will try to tell you.