Supporters of the pipeline have argued that the oil would be produced even if the pipeline weren’t built – instead, it would just be shipped by a more expensive method, probably train.
Advertisement
While Keystone was symbolic, it was also a real project, a legitimate proposal for the efficient transport of a valuable and critical resource so it could enter the global market. We need a Keystone moment “now” here in Westchester.
The President asserts that Keystone XL would not increase our energy security, because we’re producing more domestic crude oil and using less.
This symbolic move stymies a project with a net positive impact on the US economy – and another step toward energy security in a troubled world.
Once the environmental impact statement was accepted by the new president, he or she could simply declare that Obama was wrong about the effect the pipeline would have on US leadership with respect to emissions. The project would have created several thousand temporary construction jobs but fewer than 50 permanent jobs. Obama is concerned most of all about optics, and he (and Secretary of State John Kerry) saw this rejection as the ideal lead-in to a global conference on climate change that begins later this month in Paris. The state Department of Environmental Protection should not grant Pilgrim permits if it decides to move forward.
“President Obama has chosen to place politics over substantive policy that only serves to advance the agenda of well-funded radical environmentalists”, Sean McGarvey, president of the North America’s Building Trades Unions, said in a statement Friday.
The full text of the deal, which is opposed by many key figures in the Democratic Party, including 2016 presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton, finally was released last week.
March 1, 2013 – The State Department issues an environmental review that raises no major objections to the Keystone XL oil pipeline and says other options to get the oil from Canada to Gulf Coast refineries are worse for climate change. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) called it “sickening”.
However, despite all of his high talk during the election campaign about how Harper failed to get pipelines built, Trudeau has still failed to really articulate how he will ensure that will happen. It would have locked in, for a generation or more, massive development of among the dirtiest fuels on the planet-posing a serious threat to our air, land water, and climate.
Jackie Forrest, vice-president of ARC Financial Corp., says the low price for oil has forced the cancellation of about 17 projects so far this year.
Advertisement
Obama has made climate change a top priority of his second term with executive orders aimed at reducing the production and burning of carbon-based fuels, especially coal, while steering billions of dollars to alternative fuels. She said, “President Obama’s promotion of the TPP undermines his stated dedication to curbing global warming”.
