Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin this week reiterated his opposition to the Keystone XL oil pipeline, saying the proposal to carry oil extracted from tar sands in western Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast would contribute to global warming.
“If we can’t get through our thick heads — after what we have been through as a nation in terms of weather challenges, just since (Barack) Obama has been president — that we can’t afford to burn every drop of fossil fuel that we can extract from the ground with technology, then we are going to destroy the planet,” Shumlin said during a meeting Tuesday with Valley News editors and reporters.
“And tar sands is a whole new level of extraction that will make contributions to our greenhouse gases that will destroy us.”
The two-term Democrat has been calling for the Obama administration to deny the project a presidential permit since at least 2011, but Shumlin is now also the chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, and the Keystone project is politically popular in some states.
In fact, 65 percent of Americans, including a narrow majority of Democrats, said they supported the project, according to a Washington Post-ABC poll released in early March.
But Shumlin said it’s important to not burn “dirty fuel.”
“You can find Democratic governors that disagree with me, I guarantee you that, but I feel strongly that this is a place where we’ve got to draw a line,” Shumlin said.
Meanwhile, Shumlin is more bullish on proposals to transport electricity generated from Canadian hydro power through Vermont to southern New England and New York.
Asked if he would insist that such lines be buried through Vermont to have his blessing, Shumlin said “in most cases” the proposals already factor the costs of burying lines into their price.
“Listen, this is what I know — if we are going to address climate change in any significant way, which we must, it makes sense for us to find ways to bring green, clean renewable hydro power in from Canada to New England,” he said.
As for burying lines under Interstate 91, Shumlin said, “I would love for the federal highway infrastructure to be a corridor for transmission, it would solve a lot of problems, but there’s real federal hurdles to do that. It doesn’t mean it can’t be changed, but currently it’s very difficult to do.”
