By Rich Lowry
Wednesday, January 20, 2021
Poor Justin Trudeau. The Canadian prime minister must
have been relieved to be done with President Donald Trump, only to learn that
Joe Biden plans to tell Canada to pound sand as one of his first priorities.
According to reports, Biden wants to cancel the Keystone
XL pipeline immediately, a pointless and economically destructive gesture meant
to appease his party’s climate fanatics.
The multi-billion-dollar project to run from Alberta to
Nebraska was first proposed years ago in the naive faith that two adjoining,
friendly countries could cooperate on a big, mutually beneficial infrastructure
project.
That was before the Keystone XL became a hate totem for
the Left, which makes it sound like the pipeline might be the tipping point
toward inevitable planetary destruction, among its myriad other alleged sins.
President Barack Obama denied a cross-border permit for
the project in 2015. President Trump quickly reversed course. And now Biden is
likely going to reverse Trump’s reversal.
It’s a symptom of our time that a major investment that
deserves some stability in American decision-making has become a shuttlecock
between outgoing and incoming administrations — and been caught in a
nightmarish trap of litigation and red tape all the while.
It’s not clear why adding a new pipeline to an existing
network built in previous phases of the Keystone project would be thought such
a heinous environmental crime (Keystone XL is the fourth phase). Nor why this
particular leg of pipeline is considered so threatening in a country that
already has a couple of million miles of pipeline.
The charge is that Keystone XL, by making it easier for
Canada to export its “dirty” oil from the oil sands of Alberta, will herald the
beginning of a fossil-fuels apocalypse.
But we already consume lots of petroleum from the oil
sands. According to the Canadian government, 97 percent of its proven reserves
are located in the oil sands, and the oil sands account for more than 60
percent of the country’s current oil production.
Canada is the third-largest exporter of crude oil in the
world, and 98 percent of that goes to the United States, accounting for almost
half of our imports of crude oil.
In a more rational time, it was considered a good thing
to get oil from a country that isn’t located in the Middle East, isn’t a
petro-dictatorship, and isn’t hostile to the United States.
Canada also is a responsible, environmentally conscious
country unlike, say, Venezuela. It is true that extracting crude from the oil
sands is somewhat more energy-intensive than other forms of extraction, but it
is foolish to pretend that this extra increment of CO2 is the difference-maker
in the future of the planet.
Regardless, this energy isn’t simply going to stay in the
ground. It will be extracted and sent somewhere by some means. Currently, much
of it is being exported to the United States via rail. This is a more
energy-intensive mode of transport than pipeline, yet the same people worried
about marginal additional CO2 emissions aren’t agitating to get it out of
railcars and into pipelines.
The enemies of Keystone XL have used litigation to tie up
the project, even though it has passed multiple massive regulatory reviews.
When it seemed it could finally get underway in earnest, here comes Joe Biden
to put the kibosh on it again.
This is another sign that Biden’s version of moderation
is giving the Left what it wants, only in a piecemeal fashion. He will surely
be more polite to Canadian leaders than Trump was, but this is a blow to a
Canadian government that thought it could rely on us to act rationally and
shows that union workers take a backseat in the Democratic Party to noisy
adherents of fashionable causes.
If Biden really wants to restore our alliances, telling
our friendly neighbor to the north to “drop dead” is a funny way to do it.
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