Keystone pipeline: An Obama cop-out?

last updated 8 January 2015

President Obama claims to care about creating jobs, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. But the only job he seems to care about is his own. That’s why he decided last week to postpone until 2013 a ruling on the $7 billion Keystone XL oil pipeline, which would have produced 20,000 jobs for U.S. workers. The administration claims the delay is needed to examine the environmental impact of the 1,700-mile pipeline, which would carry 900,000 barrels of crude a day from Canada’s tar-sands deposits to Texas refineries. But this “Keystone cop-out” has nothing to do with the environment. Obama punted this decision until after the 2012 election because he wants to retain the support of “Big Green campaign donors,” who threatened to desert him if the project were approved. Once again, this president has demonstrated his central flaw: “weakness under pressure,” said Jonathan Tobin in Commentaryâ€‹Magazine.com. Whenever there’s a controversy, he chooses to kick the can down the road.

Obama showed true leadership by saying “no to Big Oil,” said independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in the London Guardian. This project would have pumped vast amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, as tar sands must be crushed, steamed, and diluted in water before they release oil—a process that uses far more energy than conventional oil production. And “piping corrosive tar sands is risky.” The original route proposed by oil giant TransCanada would have passed over Nebraska’s Ogallala aquifer, which provides drinking water to 1.5 million people. TransCanada now says it would divert the pipeline around the aquifer, should it ever get the go-ahead.

But stopping Keystone XL won’t save the environment, said David Frum in the Toronto National Post. “This is a big planet full of oil,” and if the U.S. doesn’t buy its oil from Canada, it will simply buy it somewhere else. Canada, meanwhile, will sell its tar-sands oil to other energy-hungry countries, like China. Besides, “clean energy” projects also face strong opposition, said Michael Levi in The New York Times. Local homeowners are trying to block a large windmill project off the coast of Massachusetts “on the grounds that it will ruin spectacular ocean views.” Solar plants would cover vast swathes of desert with panels, and people object to that, too. So if it’s not tar-sands oil, and it’s not wind or solar, just how again are we going to keep the lights turned on?