Here's an old SAT-style analogy for you: Oreos are to someone who wants to lose five pounds as this weekend's major oil spill is to ____ .
Stumped? Try putting "the Keystone XL pipeline" in the blank. Now do you get it? Both Oreos and oil spills, explains Fox Business reporter Tracey Byrnes, are "distractions."
On Monday's edition of Varney & Co., Byrnes and guest host Charles Payne explained why we shouldn't pay attention to the 170,000 gallons of heavy oil that's currently threatening wildlife and blocking off a major shipping channel: “Anytime we hear these kind of things, it feels like another impediment to growing out our fossil fuel industry, another thing for environmentalists to rally around, although we know accidents are bound to happen,” Payne said.
Because you just know that when the solar industry starts experiencing all of those devastating, um, sun spills, we'll all react the same way.
Added Byrnes, in enthusiastic support, “Just do the Keystone Pipeline already! Create all these jobs. [You know, all 35 of them.] Enough of the nonsense, these are all distractions.”
Yes, distractions. “Much like anybody who wants to lose five pounds has a Oreos in front of them," Byrnes elaborated. "Just get rid of the Oreos, and you’ll be fine. Same thing. Do the pipeline.”
Where the analogy fails, of course, is that while the out-of-sight, out-of-mind strategy works for junk food, Keystone will likely have the opposite effect: more oil means more ships needed to transport it. And that will only up the odds of us experiencing what Fox calls "distractions" -- and what others prefer to refer to as "environmental catastrophes."
Watch the clip here:
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