Obama the Keystone Kop

His dithering kills jobs.

Deroy Murdock
Monday, December 12, 2011

‘Any effort to try to tie Keystone to the payroll-tax cut, I will reject,” President Obama said last Wednesday. “Everybody should be on notice.”

Obama might have had at least a plausible case against the Keystone XL Pipeline if it had been the first one to cross from Canada into the United States. Whether you agreed with the president or not, he credibly could have argued that protecting America’s pristine habitat is so important that we should not lay a pipeline to carry 1.1 million barrels per day of friendly oil across America’s northern frontier to refineries on Texas’s Gulf Coast.

Unfortunately for Obama, he comes to this debate at least 61 years late. The Interprovincial Pipeline (now called Enbridge) was built in 1950, to carry crude oil from Edmonton, Alberta, to Superior, Wis. Canadian natural gas first passed into America via a pipeline under the Detroit River in 1895. Today, scores of pipelines traverse the U.S.–Canadian border, as this map shows:



This map includes pipelines carrying all sorts of fuels, from crude oil to natural gas to refined products. (The map appears in an excellent presentation by Canadian scholar Vivian Krause, who has documented the connection between major left-wing American foundations and the Canadian Left’s fight against developing that country’s oil sands. I hosted an appearance by Krause before journalists in New York City last July.)

Actor Robert Redford recently stated that “the Keystone XL pipeline is an accident waiting to happen.” This is a truism. Each and every one of these pipelines is an accident waiting to happen, as is the pipe that carries natural gas right into your home. Would you like it removed?

“All of the pipelines in that map are accidents waiting to happen, as are the power lines that crisscross the country,” writes Robert Rapier at OilPrice.com. “For that matter, the cars we drive are accidents waiting to happen. And accidents will happen. Oil and gas leaks occur every year. That is part of the price we pay for the energy we use. The fact that the Keystone pipeline could have a leak isn’t unique; it is just like all the other pipelines already running beneath our feet.”

Americans rely on pipelines to keep a modern economy moving. Without pipelines, millions of jobs that depend on these substances would vanish as soon as they stopped flowing.

Looking specifically at oil, at least twelve major pipelines cross the Canadian frontier into the United States. As this map from the American Petroleum Institute indicates, oil and refined-product pipelines run throughout American soil in every direction. Thus, the Keystone XL pipeline would disrupt the status quo about as much as adding one more spaghetto to a crowded bowl of spaghetti.



Amazingly enough, while claiming to be the new savior of the middle class, Obama would prefer that they live without a payroll-tax cut rather than allow a pipeline to bring friendly oil into the U.S., increase energy supplies (from a NATO country, no less!), decrease energy costs, and lighten OPEC’s boot on America’s neck. If Keystone XL is the price to pay, Obama also would prefer that the unemployed see their benefits expire. And Republicans are cold and heartless?

Even worse, Obama won’t make a decision actually to approve or kill the pipeline. He claims the project needs further research, even though the federal government has studied it for two years. All Obama has done is delay a decision until after 2013, comfortably allowing him to wobble between environmentalists who want to terminate the pipeline and several labor unions that savor the idea of 20,000 blue-collar jobs in the construction and oil sectors. Obama needs the greens and the unions to get reelected — so he wants to keep them in suspense until after November 2012. Rather than lead, which America elected him to do, Obama votes “present” — as he did 129 times in the Illinois state senate.

Republicans and free-marketeers should use these maps and facts to expose Obama’s opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline as job-killing, national-security-threatening tomfoolery.