Obama Considers Killing the Keystone XL Pipeline

Obama Considers Killing the Keystone XL Pipeline
What the heck, it’s only jobs and oil.
by John Hayward
11/10/2011

The Keystone XL pipeline project makes a gigantic amount of sense, so of course Barack Obama has been trying to find a way to kill it. It looks like he might settle for putting it off until after the presidential election, which will give the GOP candidate a marvelous issue to run on. As reported by Fox News:

A State Department decision on whether to reroute a TransCanadian pipeline could end up killing the $7 billion project altogether, an energy industry source warned Wednesday.

The source told Fox News that the Obama administration is considering much more than a simple reroute of the Keystone XL project. Instead, 11th hour deliberations are weighing whether to order the State Department to conduct an all-new Environmental Impact Study, which could delay a final decision by two years, well beyond the next presidential election, if not end it altogether.

Under pressure from environmental groups to nix the pipeline from crossing the U.S., the State Department said Wednesday it is weighing all factors before approving the project, which environmentalists say would destroy ecologically sensitive areas.

Those would be the same environmentalists who have been wrong about virtually every project they have opposed, but no degree of inaccuracy is likely to diminish their power. 700,000 barrels of oil a day plus a few thousand jobs are a small price for appeasing them.

A previous State Department study found there would be only minimal environmental effects, but (don’t laugh) the Administration is supposedly concerned about lobbying and conflicts of interest (I told you not to laugh), so they’re going to order up a “separate probe of the review process” to make sure it wasn’t unduly influenced by a lobbyist tied to Hillary Clinton​, and a firm with ties to the company building the pipeline.

OK, go ahead and laugh. Too bad George Kaiser used all those wonderful Obama connections to grab our money for useless solar panel junk, instead of oil we actually need.
____________________________________________

To read another article by John Hayward, click here.