One Obama enviro sellout, coming right up!

Sorry, Bill McKibben and all you other White House protesters, it looks like it's going to be for naught in fighting the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

The State Department has released its environmental impact statement on the pipeline, and it's all thumbs up.

The State Department said in an environmental impact statement that the pipeline’s owner, TransCanada, had reduced the risks of an accident to an acceptable level and that the benefits of importing oil from a friendly neighbor outweighed the potential costs.

Of course, this isn't true. Unless "acceptable level" is a Jupiter-sized loophole.

For many in the environmental movement, the administration’s apparent acceptance of the pipeline was yet another disappointment, after recent decisions to tentatively approve drilling in the Arctic Ocean, to open 20 million more acres of the Gulf of Mexico for oil leasing and to delay several major air quality regulations. ... Analysts and environmental advocates said these decisions had opened a wide and perhaps unbridgeable breach between the Democratic president and environmentally minded voters.

Bullshit, on that sentence after the ellipsis points. Many environmentalists, certainly those that work at Gang Green organizations, will find ways to rationalize continued support for Obama, albeit perhaps at diminished levels.

Speaking of, here's Sierra Club President Michael Brune trying to talk tough:

“The decision-making authority is solely the president’s,” he said. “Keystone XL is a huge issue for our young leaders at the Sierra Club, but they’re also watching the president’s actions on other critically important environmental and public health protections. It will be increasingly difficult to mobilize the environmental base and to mobilize in particular young people to volunteer, to knock on thousands of doors, to put in 16-hour days, to donate money if they don’t think the president is showing the courage to stand up to big polluters.”

Really? Remember when your organization rolled over and played dead for Obama after his nomination of Kenny Boy Salazar to run Interior? Once Team Obama rolls out the re-election anti-GOP fear machine, you'll "snap to."

After that, the NYT story engages in typical he said, she said on carbon emissions issues without spelling out any numbers in detail. A typical teh suck there. Especially when it lets an industry flak, a subdivision of Cambridge Energy Resource Associates, have the last word in the story.

Meanwhile, showing "battered Obamiac" syndrome, Bill McKibben, Van Jones and Lennox Yearwood still try to halfway defend Obama.

In trying to make good on his promises, he's been oft-hampered by a recalcitrant Congress, of course.

Bullshit there, too.

Telecom immunity? Flip-flopped even before his election.
Civilian trials for terror suspects? Pulled his horns in without any act of Congress.
Shutting down Gitmo? Ditto, even while expanding Bagram Air Base.
The stimulus? Compromised away the compromise in advance.

Van Jones was kicked to the curb by Obama without a single tear of remorse and he can still write a bullshit defense of him. That's "battered Obamiac syndrome."