Thanks again! I don't know anything about this project in particular, and perhaps like the people I am frustrated at, perhaps I am oversimplifying and assuming it is good because it is efficient... Who knows!

Thank you for your kind, thoughtful, intelligent response. Let me try again without the recrimination. I'm an electrical engineer with my US green building council certification. I'm very interested in developing a green future. I support a carbon tax. I also believe that we need to tax industry to make them pay for their negative externalities. I'm not an economist but it's a term that I have heard here or there. Basically a negative externality is when you dump garbage in a river. It's free to you. But you make the community pay for your laziness. By external people are trying to say that The people who do the damage are not the same people who feel the damage. So I do believe that government needs to construct a framework where polluters pay for the damage they do. I have to say all of that because you're not going to like what I say next. But I need you to understand that I hope you don't dismiss me as a person who doesn't care about the environment. My concern is environmentalist often cause harm when they oppose improvement because the improvement isn't perfect. For me, the clearest example is opposition to liquid natural gas. Before I transition to my current job, I was in the LNG industry. Basically 10 of the largest boats produce more pollution than almost all of Europe's vehicles put together. These massive super tankers use bunker oil as their fuel. Bunker oil is the worst stuff on Earth. However, it's a cheap way of moving large boats. I was part of a project that was putting in LNG infrastructure so boats could be retrofitted to burn l&g instead of bunker fuel. Now LNG is not perfect. However everyone on the planet should agree that LNG is better than bunker fuel. However, environmentalist try to stop the project and they do stop LNG projects all over the planet because they are two idealistic and don't want gradual improvement. They want perfection. They go so far as to want perfection even when there is no green method of moving boats. They are working on batteries large enough or powerful enough to move super tankers but they just do not exist. Therefore, you have to choose between bunker fuel and LNG. Or you could be a hypocrite and just not want to send grain to Africa or South America. Because the only way of moving massive amounts of grain to Africa or South America is with very large boats. So my problem is when people don't think through the consequences of their idealistic goals. So back to Texas and their pipeline for getting oil out to the tankers. This is an improvement in efficiency. If we don't want to export oil and gas, we should just ban it, but we shouldn't require oil and gas companies to operate in a inefficiently. As an engineer, I hate inefficiency. Environmentalists tend to oppose oil and gas improvements in efficiency even when they would reduce the carbon output. Environmentalist often say anything in oil and gas company does is bad. However, I have a massive problem with that... If we don't want to export oil and gas, we should just regulate it so much that it will not be able to compete. We should just tax it so much and plant trees to offset the neck negative externalities until it goes out of business. However, we should not oppose construction projects that improve efficiency.

Our prices do not have anything to do with how much oil we store in the ground.

We don't need to cut off the supply. We need to cut off demand. It is ridiculous all the people who drive cars that use gas say we should stop producing oil. The production by those evil oil and gas companies isn't the problem. You have met the enemy. The enemy is ourselves. The enemy is looking at us in the mirror. Buildings produce more global warming than transportation. Do you work or live in a building? Cows and agriculture produce more global warming than transportation. Europe, Africa, and South America all need energy. People may starve. It's not a joke. It's not a time for everyone to share their feelings and thoughts who have never thought about it and had to deal with how the world is instead of just how they wish the world were. People in Pakistan have no energy because they are getting priced out of the markets because of the Russia/Ukraine situation. And you demand that we cut off the supply, without thinking about the consequences, because voters that use oil and gas in their cars and homes are hypocrites, and demand that politicians live in a make-believe world, in which food just magically appears because spoiled western hypocrites think tractors can operate on dreams and fairy dust. Is it better that poor Asians, Africans, and South Americans get 100% of their energy from Russia, Saudi Arabia, or the US? OPEC is run like a diamond monopoly, and they artificially raise the prices, kill gays, and objectify and dominate women. Why don't we tax THE USE OF OIL AND GAS, not the production? Shouldn't we demand to know that people who say we should not produce oil and gas put their lives where their mouths are and prove to us that they do not live in houses or use transportation? Or explain why South America should get oil and gas from Russia than us?

We don't need to cut off the supply. We need to cut off demand. It is ridiculous all the people who drive cars that use gas say we should stop producing oil. The production by those evil oil and gas companies isn't the problem. You have met the enemy. The enemy is ourselves. The enemy is looking at us in the mirror. Buildings produce more global warming than transportation. Do you work or live in a building? Cows and agriculture produce more global warming than transportation. Europe, Africa, and South America all need energy. People may starve. It's not a joke. It's not a time for everyone to share their feelings and thoughts who have never thought about it and had to deal with how the world is instead of just how they wish the world were. People in Pakistan have no energy because they are getting priced out of the markets because of the Russia/Ukraine situation. And you demand that we cut off the supply, without thinking about the consequences, because voters that use oil and gas in their cars and homes are hypocrites, and demand that politicians live in a make-believe world, in which food just magically appears because spoiled western hypocrites think tractors can operate on dreams and fairy dust. Is it better that poor Asians, Africans, and South Americans get 100% of their energy from Russia, Saudi Arabia, or the US? OPEC is run like a diamond monopoly, and they artificially raise the prices, kill gays, and objectify and dominate women. Why don't we tax THE USE OF OIL AND GAS, not the production? Shouldn't we demand to know that people who say we should not produce oil and gas put their lives where their mouths are and prove to us that they do not live in houses or use transportation? Or explain why it is better for South America to get oil and gas from Russia than us?