Weber Right, McCaul Wrong

To the Editor:

Judge Weber is to be commended for his both frank and brave opinion regarding President Biden’s decision to shut down the Keystone XL Pipeline which would have only permanently employed a handful of workers after about 10,000 construction workers finished the project. Canada’s heavy tar sand oil running through that pipeline would have only served to further pollute our air and our water and increase global warming at an external cost far greater than any of its alleged internal benefits.

If the GOP Members of Congress, like our own Republican Congressman Michael McCaul, will allow Biden to invest our tax dollars in a green energy economy and infrastructure, then hundreds of thousands of Texas workers with the skills needed to make that investment will be employed in good paying jobs far longer than that pipeline construction and with clean air and water and reduced global warming bringing even greater long run returns on that public investment.

Instead of assailing President Biden’s Keystone XL Pipeline decision, McCaul should be calling upon the Congress to shut down our needless taxpayer subsidy (not to mention the needless bloodletting of our children in the military) of providing international oil companies with free security in the Middle East for foreign oil we no longer need. Given his outcry against Biden, one has to question whether McCaul is more beholden to international oil company lobbyists than his own constituents. If that is the case, then will McCaul have the patriotic courage to develop in an environmentally safe manner our abundant domestic natural gas to run our nation’s trucks and trains and to complement our wind and solar generated electricity where needed and to also export our natural gas to Europe for our mutual economic and national security with the added benefit of bringing Putin’s Russia to its knees?

That annual cost of the taxpayer subsidy in the Middle East is so great that it makes the annual cost of welfare for the poor look like peanuts in comparison. Just a portion of the annual savings generated by eliminating that needless subsidy of international oil companies would be sufficient to fund annual investments in public research and development to control the pollution of our air and water from hydraulic fracturing for natural gas and to create widespread prosperity for Texans in wind and solar and natural gas abundant Texas.

In fact the then remaining residual of those annual savings from eliminating our taxpayer subsidy of international oil companies would be great enough for meaningful annual and long overdue public investments in education and a universal health care system far better prepared to address future world wide contagions than for profit health insurance and pharmaceutical companies and in a new green energy and internet and electric grid infrastructure all needed for genuine economic, environmental, health, and national security.

Will you encourage and support President Biden to take these long overdue actions for the good of your constituents and your country, Congressman McCaul?

John W. Mikus

Fayetteville