Keystone Decision Another Failure of Leadership
President Obama is having a field day campaigning against a Congress he says is not doing enough to create jobs -- despite the fact that House Republicans have passed more than 20 jobs bills that are now languishing in the Democratic Senate. However, when presented with a golden opportunity to create 20,000 jobs and decrease America's reliance on foreign oil, President Obama punted.
The Keystone XL pipeline would span 1,700 miles and bring 830,000 barrels of heavy crude oil per day from Alberta, Canada, to refineries in Oklahoma and Texas. The $7 billion project was first submitted to the State Department for review in 2008 and has undergone exhaustive environmental impact studies, which concluded that the pipeline would have "no significant impacts" on the environment. With all the procedural hurdles out of the way, Keystone is the very definition of a shovel-ready project. The pipeline would create jobs in both construction and energy production, and it would bring nearly 1.3 million barrels per day of additional oil into U.S. markets -- along with all the national security and economic benefits associated with decreased dependence on Middle Eastern oil.
Yet the Obama administration recently announced it was putting this surefire job-creating project on hold in order to conduct yet more environmental studies on an alternative route. This bewildering decision is "catastrophic," according to former U.S. ambassador to Canada David Wilkins. "This route has been studied and studied and studied," Wilkins stated. "It’s the longest permitting process in the history of the world, I think. It sends a bad message that we’re not open for business.”
It also sends a message that the president is putting politics over governance. It's no coincidence that the decision to postpone this crucial project came after the reliably liberal Sierra Club announced that it would not "mobilize the environmental base" in 2012 if the president allowed the pipeline to proceed. Even without the extensive government reports declaring the project environmentally safe, environmental concerns about Keystone don't hold up. The Ogallala Aquifer about which the administration professes such sudden, ardent concern is already covered by 25,000 miles of pipeline. Even left-leaning labor leaders don't buy the president's explanation. The general president of the Laborers' International Union of North America declared, "The administration chose to support environmentalists over jobs -- job-killers win, American workers lose." Newspaper editorials across the country are also crying foul, describing President Obama's decision as a "poorly disguised political punt, " (Houston Chronicle), "more evidence that the president is now in campaign mode," (Detroit News) and a "stupefying" example of "political cynicism" (Las Vegas Review-Journal).
Meanwhile, House Republicans are pressing ahead with yet another bill promoting energy jobs. The legislation we'll vote on in the coming weeks would open up more domestic oil and natural gas production and put the savings toward infrastructure improvements. This commonsense policy would create jobs, lower energy costs, and decrease reliance on foreign oil -- just like the Keystone pipeline would have done. If President Obama and the Democratically controlled Senate can be persuaded to stop playing politics, they will let this legislation through. And they will let the Keystone pipeline proceed.