Keystone: The meaning of Obama’s ‘no’

last updated 8 January 2015

President Obama’s decision to block the Keystone XL pipeline is “an act of national insanity,” said Robert Samuelson in The Washington Post. The proposed 1,700-mile pipeline, designed to carry 1 million barrels of oil a day from Canada to refineries in Texas, would have created about 10,000 American jobs and reduced our nation’s dependence on oil from the Middle East. But “as a sop tossed to the environmentalists,” Obama has temporarily rejected Keystone, while cynically suggesting that a modified route for the pipeline might be approved—after the 2012 election. Officials in Beijing are “cheering for Obama’s supposed concern for the environment,” said the Washington Examiner in an editorial. The energy-hungry Chinese are already negotiating to get Canada’s tar-sands oil, and while the president plays political games, China is also hard at work developing offshore oil reserves with Brazil and Cuba. So why is Obama helping China expedite America’s decline?

That’s what Big Oil would have you believe, said The New York Times. But the reality is that much of the tar-sands oil sent to Texas refineries would be “destined for foreign export,” not American gas tanks. In addition, studies show that extracting and burning this carbon-heavy crude adds 15 percent more greenhouse gases to the environment. Then there’s the possibility that the pipeline could spill oil into Nebraska’s Ogallala Aquifer, which supplies drinking water to eight Midwestern states. Obama’s decision “doesn’t mean the pipeline is dead and buried,” said Ezra Klein in WashingtonPost.com. He only rejected an arbitrary deadline set by congressional Republicans. TransCanada will now reapply with an alternate pipeline route that doesn’t endanger the Ogallala.

If environmentalists think they won this battle, said Lisa Margonelli in TheAtlantic.com, they’re fooling themselves. By opposing drilling off our coasts, in the Arctic, and now in Canada’s tar sands, environmentalists have essentially “off-shored our oil production” to Angola, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, and other countries with lax environmental laws. So “dirty” oil from all around the world “continues to flow into our gas tanks.” In the end, it’s “how much oil we consume, not where we buy it from,” said Michael Levi in WashingtonPost.com. Yet for both environmentalists and conservatives, Keystone became a major symbolic issue. Too bad this battle distracts the country from issues “that matter more’’—America’s long-term energy security, and the need to find real replacements for fossil fuels.