The White House formally threatened a veto of the House version of a surface transportation bill, opening the question of whether any long-term bill will get signed before March when current funding on roads and bridges expires. Between the terrible House version and the Senate’s, it’s choosing between one with a bunch of disastrous elements, and another which has none of those but which is too small for the task at hand.

The Keystone XL pipeline will now either receive or be denied its construction permit by February 21, according to the schedule worked out in the two-month stopgap deal to extend the payroll tax, unemployment insurance and the doctor’s fix. But the ultimate fate of tars ands oil may not be decided for years.

The likely outcome on Keystone XL fits a narrative for the GOP. So they want to see the President cancel the pipeline to make it a campaign issue. The counter-argument for the Democrats is that the demand by House Republicans to give an answer within 60 days on a pipeline whose route remained in flux killed the permit. So this becomes your run-of-the-mill he-said/she-said, and the pipeline doesn’t get built. My understanding is that it would not impact the possibility of the pipeline being approved after the elections, when more time is given to the environmental impact. So that’s a fight environmentalists will still have to wage.

Enbridge, a competitor to TransCanada, announced plans to purchase a controlling interest in an existing pipeline that runs from the Gulf of Mexico to Cushing, Oklahoma, and to reverse it, in an effort to transport tar sands oil to Gulf Coast refineries.

President Obama, asked about the Keystone XL pipeline in a local news interview, took full responsibility for making the decision. He related a full understanding of the public health risks, though he limited that to the immediate risks of a pipeline spill, rather than the extraction and burning of tar sands oil in general.

There are two flashpoints coming up on the Keystone XL pipeline: Nebraska is holding a session today to consider how it might force the pipeline sponsors to reroute the pipeline away from the giant Agallala Aquifer. On November 6, Bill McKibben’s group has organized an effort to surround the White House in protest.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu is a scientist and a scholar. He surely knows the effects of production of tar sands oil on climate change. He knows that it takes a massive amount of energy to do the strip mining necessary to extract tar sands oil. He knows about the potential for environmental damage from a 1,700-mile pipeline to distribute that tar sands oil from the source in Alberta, Canada to refineries in Texas. He’s a smart man.

But he happens to work for an Administration that supports the tar sands pipeline.

The story is basically this. Oil production is static, if not falling, and emerging markets are increasing and broadening their wealth, leading more and more Chinese and Indians and Indonesians and Brazilians to desire a higher standard of living. Invariably this means oil demand goes up. Therefore, when global GDP growth increases, demand for oil and then the price of oil increases.

And around the world, but especially in a country like ours that’s extremely dependent on oil, this creates a price shock and a reduction in growth. The political cartoon of this would be a man named “economic growth” jumping to the ceiling and consistently hitting his head on “the oil supply.” So we’re in a constant cycle of low growth and stable oil prices, followed by higher growth and oil shocks, which knocks the economy back to lower growth.

As expected, the State Department essentially gave its environmental blessing to the Keystone XL pipeline today, which would stretch nearly 1,700 miles from Alberta, Canada to Texas, and which would deliver as much as 700,000 barrels of noxious tar sands oil every day. This is not a final approval on the project, but getting a favorable environmental impact study (EIS) is a necessary hurdle before final approval.

The next couple months will be consumed with discussion about the Catfood Commission II, and their efforts to reach a $1.5 trillion or higher deficit package. This will frustrate any attempt to pivot to jobs. But as long as that’s known, activists and organizations can point out best practices on that committee while trying to force the conversation in a different direction.

One way to do that is to consistently point out that job creation is the best and most robust way to ensure any deficit reduction, and that reducing the deficit with 9% unemployment is a near-impossibility. Another way is to point out how much deficit savings can be gained merely by engaging in the vitally necessary actions of protecting the earth from climate change.