One Last Energy Fact From the Presidential Debate
October 17, 2012, 2:40 pm
One assertion by President Obama about energy achievements in Tuesday night’s campaign debate drew little notice. Refuting Mr. Romney’s charge that he had jeopardized American energy security by vetoing the Keystone XL pipeline for carrying crude oil from Canada, the president said: “And with respect to this pipeline that Governor Romney keeps on talking about, we’ve — we’ve built enough pipeline to wrap around the entire earth once. So I’m all for pipelines; I’m all for oil production.”
According to the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, between the beginning of 2009 and the end of 2011 the United States added a little more than 43,000 miles of oil and gas pipelines – considerably more than the circumference of the earth, which is 24,901 miles. The pipeline statistics are here.
But, as Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post and a few others noted, most of those were natural gas distribution lines to homes, offices and factories, not new pipelines to carry crude oil and natural gas from production fields.
To read the entire article go to: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/17/one-last-energy-fact-from-the-presidential-debate/
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