President Barack Obama on Friday finally and appropriately rejected the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.
The 1,200-mile project would have spanned six states and endangered America’s largest underground fresh water aquifer. And for seven years now, it has been a political football during presidential and congressional elections – pitting oil companies and Republicans against environmentalists and liberal activists.
All of this to move more than 800,000 barrels a day in Canadian oil sands carbon-heavy petroleum through Nebraska to refineries in the Gulf Coast, from whence the oil would then be shipped overseas for use.
America would merely be a pass-through, and the pipeline would produce a few thousand temporary construction jobs over two years, then about 35 permanent maintenance jobs.
FILE – In this Oct. 2, 2015, file photo, President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington. Americans are souring on Obama’s approach to fighting the Islamic State, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll that also found deep pessimism about U.S. prospects for success in Afghanistan and uncertainty about Obama’s plan to leave thousands of troops there when he leaves office. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File) But Republicans loved it: the Kochs held some of the largest Canadian tar sands leases.
On the liberal side of the fence, the pipeline represents everything wrong with a fossil fuel energy policy – especially at the time when America most needs to be a global leader in moving away from energy that worsens climate change. The process of extracting tar sand, oil produces about 17 percent more planet-warming greenhouse gases than the process of extracting conventional oil. As Obama said Friday: “Frankly, approving this project would have undercut that [climate] leadership.”
The president also called the political fight over Keystone “over-inflated” on both sides of the argument.
“All of this obscured the fact that this pipeline would neither be the silver bullet to the U.S. economy proclaimed by some, or” the death knell to climate proclaimed by others,” Obama said. “While our politics have been consumed by a debate about whether or not this pipeline would create jobs or lower gas prices, we’ve gone ahead and created jobs and lowered gas prices.”
He’s right, of course. But don’t expect the issue, the oil lobby or GOP pandering to go away.
Perhaps instead our lawmakers and our jobs-makers will hear what else the president said.
“If Congress is serious about wanting to create jobs, what we should be doing is passing a bipartisan infrastructure plan that in the short term could create more than 30 times the jobs the pipeline would, and in the long run, would benefit our economy and our workers for decades to come.”
Here, here.