A funny thing happens when you overlay two of President Barack Obama\u2019s recent energy proclamations onto a 2008 electoral map: You find out just how political is his decision to kill the Keystone XL pipeline and embrace natural gas from the Marcellus Shale formation.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s a map of the Keystone XL project<\/a>.\u00a0 And this is a map of the 2008 presidential election<\/a>.\u00a0 Note that the path of Keystone XL runs from Canada directly south through six states: North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.\u00a0 All of these states voted for John McCain in 2008.\u00a0 (Incidentally, not even a sideline to Obama\u2019s Illinois during the pipeline\u2019s initial phase could placate the anti-fossil fuel President.)<\/p>\n Now look at this map of the Marcellus Shale natural gas formation<\/a> that the Obama White House now says would be a great place to start drilling for America\u2019s energy future.\u00a0 It touches vast swaths of New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, with a large portion covering West Virginia.\u00a0 Obama won New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio in 2008, and will need to do so again in 2012 to stay in the Oval Office.<\/p>\n As I said in my column<\/a> last week, expect to hear Obama make the pitch that natural gas from Marcellus Shale is the new way forward as a way to placate blue collar energy workers in states he needs to maintain \u2013 and in the case of West Virginia, possibly pick up.\u00a0 (Reports are coming in that the President will devote a significant portion of his State of the Union Address<\/a> to promoting domestic natural gas production.)<\/p>\n It\u2019ll be a tough sale.\u00a0 Obama\u2019s EPA is trying to regulate the West Virginia coal industry out of existence, while working class voters are rightfully suspicious of a President who promises everything from expanded offshore drilling to solar powered miracles (Solyndra, anyone?), only to be exposed as a fraud.\u00a0 Natural gas may be the next big thing, but it won\u2019t mean anything to a coal worker out of work because his industry went out of business thanks to Obama\u2019s latest round of picking winners and losers.<\/p>\n The big question is: Will the GOP be able to turn Obama\u2019s politicization of America\u2019s energy future into an articulate appeal for an all-of-the-above approach?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A funny thing happens when you overlay two of President Barack Obama\u2019s recent energy proclamations onto a 2008 electoral map: You find out just how political is his decision to kill the Keystone XL pipeline and embrace natural gas from the Marcellus Shale formation. Here\u2019s a map of the Keystone XL project.\u00a0 And this is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[143,195,3293,2514,1216,3043],"class_list":["post-12770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-barack-obama","tag-energy","tag-keystone-xl","tag-natural-gas","tag-oil","tag-solyndra"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12770"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12776,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12770\/revisions\/12776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}