The Keystone XL? Are You Kidding? This Is Not A Big Deal. It's Been Blown Way Out of Proportion -- The President's Inner Circle -- A New Poll

I just love trial balloons, don't you?

The National Journal is now reporting that the Keystone XL is no big deal, that it has been blown way out of proportion. I said that a long time ago. The president's mistake was not approving it the first time around; now it's become much bigger than it ever should have been. For heaven's sake: it's a pipeline. Millions of miles of pipeline in this country, and this crisscrossed the nation where there was already a thousand miles of pipeline.

Had the president approved it the first time around, it would be off his agenda and he wouldn't be wasting time and political capital discussing this with his base (actually I doubt he's discussing this with his base, but you can bet his staffers are).

So, now we have the National Journal reporting that the Obama staff thinks the Keystone XL is no big deal. Talk about throwing his activist environmental base under the bus. Talk about rubbing salt into the wound. Not only will the president approve the Keystone XL, the story implies, but it won't even be a big deal.

To environmentalists throughout the country, denying the Keystone XL oil pipeline would be the most important sign that President Obama is committed to combating global warming.

To people close to Obama, the pipeline is not nearly that important, and they think the debate surrounding it is overblown, if not misplaced. In interviews with National Journal Daily, people who have advised Obama over the years, including former White House aides, downplayed the effect the pipeline would have on climate change or much of anything really, besides politics.

“It’s important we focus on things that make the biggest difference in terms of global climate change and do the most to actually reduce carbon emissions, like economy-wide carbon policy or use of the Clean Air Act,” said Jason Bordoff, who left the White House this January after advising Obama on energy and climate issues in senior policy positions since April 2009. “I don’t know how much building or not building one pipeline is going to affect either how much oil is produced in Canada or in global greenhouse-gas emissions.” Bordoff now heads up Columbia University’s new Center on Global Energy Policy.

I wonder if Mr Bordoff recommended that the President deny the permit the first time around. 

"I was against it before I was for it."

Time for another poll.

Since the Keystone XL is now no big deal, how will the president announce his decision when he okays the pipeline?

• in a long speech
• during a press conference
• through his press secretary, Art Carney
• through a press release at the end of the weekly news cycle
• over a beer in a bar in Fargo

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A Note To The Granddaughters

I continue to enjoy James Gleick's The Information.

I have always enjoyed number theory, and know about as much about number theory as I know about the Bakken: in other words, not much. Maybe 1%. Smile.

But it's things like this that fascinate me about number theory, on page 339:

Number theorists name entire classes of interesting numbers: prime numbers, perfect numbers, squares and cubes, Fibonacci numbers, factorials.

The number 593 is more interesting than it looks. It happens to be the sum of nine squared and two the ninth -- thus a "Leyland number" (any number that can be expressed x^y + y^x).

Wikipedia also devotes an entire article to the number 9,814,072,356. It is the largest holodigital square -- which is to say, the largest square number containing each decimal exactly once.  [The square root can be found here: 99066.]

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Of more relevance, perhaps, from page 347, in the chapter on randomness:

Photographs are compressible because of their subjects' natural structure: light pixels and dark pixels come in clusters; statistically, nearby pixels are likely to be similar; distant pixels are not. Video is even more compressible, because the differences between one frame and the next are relatively slight, except when the subject is in fast and turbulent motion. Natural language is compressible because of redundancies [f u cn rd ths] and regularities...Only a wholly random sequence remains incompressible; nothing but one surprise after another [earlier, it was said, information = surprise].