The smart money thinks it's only a matter of time before President Obama (speaking of spine) caves on the Keystone Pipeline. After all, if Canada doesn't pump all that crud in our direction, the Chinese are happy to take it. And there are those tens of thousands of jobs for the Gulf coast.
They might as well go to Americans, right? It's true that a blowout of the pipeline somewhere along the route would be catastrophic, just as it's true that the pipeline symbolizes everything wrong with the current energy path. But we could block that pipeline and still face catastrophic climate change.
Obama, to his credit, did belatedly allow the Environmental Protection Agency to tighten standards on health-destroying smog (ground-level ozone)—more than three years after the White House killed similar proposed regulations—in a craven suck-up to business after the Democrats' 2010 mid-term defeat. Still the new ozone regs are but a baby step.