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| No. Not through us. |
Gas Pipeline:
"All indications are that the benefits to Jackson County will be extremely minimal, while the costs to our wetlands and water bodies is high."
Letter from Jackson County Commissioners to the Oregon Dept. of State Lands
Border Wall:
"I haven’t found anybody — and I know people from Nogales [Arizona] to Brownsville — who wants that wall.”
Dob Cunningham, Texas rancher and retired Border Patrol agent, quoted in the Fort Worth Star Telegram
Donald Trump and a Republican Congress could have funded and added to the existing border wall without a single Democratic vote, using the reconciliation process. They didn't.
Why?
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| Click: Fort Worth newspaper |
Two reasons. One is that the issue motivates Republican voters best when it is a vague ideal, held just out of reach.
The sizzle, not the steak.
Republicans want the idea of a wonderful, beautiful, protective wall of safety to keep the bad guys out. Trump isn't selling a wall per se. He is selling a benefit: safety from criminals and job-takers and poor refugees and people who would change America by their very presence.
But an actual, physical, real wall is a messy, disruptive, impractical idea--which is why is hasn't been built. Statewide in Texas, 61% oppose expanding the border wall; 35% support it. It is unpopular in Arizona, too.
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| Pembina image from website |
Southern Oregon has its own close up version of the border wall controversy. We are experiencing a massive advertising campaign by Pembina, the company that wants to build a pipeline that would connect fracked natural gas from mid-continent to a new facility in the port city of Coos Bay, where it would be condenced for export.
The pipeline company advertisements are saying all the things that would motivate small-city Republicans and their Chamber of Commerces. Jobs. Economic Growth. Business-as-Good-Citizen. The three County Commissioners are Republicans and all got substantial campaign finance help from the Chamber of Commerce, which supports the project.
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It didn't matter. The Commissioners oppose the pipeline.
The reality is that that it is potentially--arguably--a good deal for someone else, and a bother for people in Southern Oregon. People in Coos Bay may get a big taxpaying entity. Owners of gas leases in Alberta get to sell their gas; the Canadian company developing the project would make money. Lucky them.
In this bright red Republican portion of the state that should be dispositive. The issues that motivate Democrats, including methane emissions at the port, global warming, and environmental risk here, should all cut the other way, and be dismissed by Republican officeholders since Trump and Republican orthodoxy says those issues are all overblown.
But it didn't. Not in our backyard.
For us, it isn't the symbol of jobs and nice-guy businesses, with their talk of partnership for jobs and the economy, their images of smiling women in hard hats, and their spreading lots of campaign cash and big media buys. We get the pipeline reality. We get the inconvenience, land condemnations, and risk.
So the Republican County Commissioners said no.
The border wall of reality divides the backyards of communities along the border. The Texas border with Mexico is a river, and rivers flood and meander. The wall divides ranches. The wall divides economically viable communities. The City of Nogales is in both Arizona and Mexico. Click
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The less you know, the simpler the problem. The farther away you are, the more easily you can deal with this as a symbol.
The people closest to the border and the people who represent them, including Republican officeholders, are not the ones clamoring for the wall. For them it is an inconvenient mess that won't solve a nuanced immigration problem they understand and live.
The border wall did not get built in 2017 and 2018 because there was no GOP consensus for Trump's wall. It was real to too many people.
The border wall did not get built in 2017 and 2018 because there was no GOP consensus for Trump's wall. It was real to too many people.
1 comment:
Peter, your analysis is very good. I appreciate your ability to draw a parallel between the border wall and the pipeline and how they both fail to be popular with the local areas to be affected.
To add a little more regarding the pipeline, it's MY understanding that Pembina and the company who preceded them, want to bring gas from CANADA through our state. Why transport it here? Because the Canadians didn't want a pipeline crossing 1/3rd of their country. I have not read any information where that has changed to American fracked gas.
My family owns a cabin at Lake o'the Woods. So we get the permit updates and a slew of PR information about the pipeline. Adds to my recycling load. One of the things proposed is a temporary pipeline from Lake o'the Woods to the pipeline itself to draw multiple millions of gallons of water out of Lake o'the Woods in order to pressure test the 36" pipeline. Lake o'the Woods water is all from the Klamath watershed. But the proposed pipeline crosses the crest of the Cascades near the unincorporated town of Lakewood. The "used water" will be dumped out (MILLIONS OF GALLONS) on the west side of the divide. Pembina has not addressed that question.
Our First Nations (the Klamath Tribe primarily, but also the tribes all the way to the ocean) may have some concerns about the appropriation of such a great quantity of water as well as the farmers and ranchers of Klamath county. To say nothing of the commingling of organisms from different water sources.
I'm glad our commissioners decided this issue correctly. I wish the Klamath commissioners had had as much courage. But they went for the short term dollar rather than the long term investment.
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