A summary of McNutt’s commentary is available on Science magazine website, but subscription is required to access the whole article:“I drive a hybrid car and set my thermostat at 80°F in the Washington, DC, summer,” McNutt wrote. “I use public transportation to commute to my office, located in a building given ‘platinum’ design status by the U.S. Green Building Council.

“The electric meter on my house runs backward most months of the year, thanks to a large installation of solar panels,” McNutt wrote. “I am committed to doing my part to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and minimize global warming.

“At the same time, I believe it is time to move forward on the Keystone XL pipeline to transport crude oil from the tar sands deposits of Alberta, Canada, and from the Williston Basin in Montana and North Dakota to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast,” McNutt wrote.

In a Feb. 20 article in the National Journal, more of McNutt’s editorial is quoted, including her stating that the pipeline could be safer and more regulated than transportation of crude oil by rail or truck.

“No  method for moving hydrocarbons can be considered completely fail-safe,” McNutt is quoted as saying in the article. “At least the current permitting process can, and should, be used to ensure that Keystone XL sets new standards for environmental safety.

“There is no similar leverage on the truck and rail transportation options, which produce higher GHG emissions and have a greater risk of spills, at a higher cost for transport,” McNutt wrote.

When interviewed for a National Public Radio article on Feb. 21, McNutt said Canadian crude oil would be used one way or another.

NPR’s Morning Edition host David Greene asked McNutt why she had changed her mind.

“Just because there hasn’t been a pipeline really did not stop the development of the Canadian tar sands,” McNutt said.

“They were going to be developed anyway, you’re saying?” Greene said.

“Yeah,” McNutt said. “In fact, they are developed anyway.

“Rather than putting the oil in a pipeline, they are now putting the oil on trucks and railway cars, and trucks and trains actually use more fossil fuels themselves to get that crude oil to market than a pipeline,” McNutt said.

Greene then stated that the pipeline “might be the cleanest of the options.”

“Not only the cleanest, but potentially safer, because the pipeline is still to be permitted. Environmentalists can demand the pipeline be the safest ever engineered,” McNutt said.

Wait.  You mean to tell me  that moving fuel through pipelines rather than over roads is potentially less environmentally “dirty” than using fleets of trucks and trains to move the same stuff?

Balderdash.  And just because you cited your environmentalist bona fides up front doesn’t make you any less a traitor to the movement to snuff out cheap energy — the very stuff that allows us to gain world affluence and so keep a large imperial standing army designed to rape and pillage foreign lands and the noble savages that live peacefully in them.

I predict an IRS audit in your future, Ms McNutt.  If that is indeed even your real name.

Sounds to me like you’re a stooge for the right and BIG ENERGY.  You’re a puppet of the 1%-ers, the kind of fat cats who fly around in private planes and keep multiple mansions and yachts.

But only the bad kind — those who don’t profess to a certain public self-loathing by way of keeping all that shit even as they denounce others for having it.  It’s okay to fly your dog in a helicopter or keep fleets of SUVs and take innumerable vacations all over the world just so long as while you’re doing so, you’re scolding the little people for their wasteful ways.

Just as it’s okay to eat that Kobe beef burger and cavier just so long as, before you take your first bite, you tell a school kid he can’t have potato chips and needs to suck it up and eat a sliced bell pepper, instead.