Share

McKinley criticizes Obama’s rejection of Keystone XL pipeline

Obama turned down the bid, saying that the Keystone XL pipeline wouldn’t serve the U.S.’s national interests, and that the project was causing political arguments in both the United States and Canada. “This project would lower energy costs and create and sustain jobs in the Natural State and across the country”. We need to be moving towards energy independence and that would have been a big step in that direction. The pipeline was supposed to cross 1200 miles and six states in the U.S and should have moved 800,000 barrels of carbon-heavy petroleum daily from Canadian through Nebraska to refineries in the Gulf Coast, according to the same source.

Advertisement

The pipeline “would not make a meaningful long-term contribution to our economy”, Obama said in a statement. Perdue called it right when he said Obama’s “politically motivated decisions… put special interest groups and his liberal climate agenda ahead of working middle class families”. On the plus side, construction of the pipeline would have created hundreds of temporary jobs and a handful of permanent jobs.

For more than 40 years, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) has been in effect and we have approved more than 25 cross-border infrastructure projects under this environmental law.

The company asked the Obama Administration last Monday to pause the review, seeking to postpone the decision until a new president was elected in 2017. “After a seven-year circus of cowardly delay, the president’s decision to kill the Keystone XL Pipeline is just one more indication of an utter disdain and disregard for salt-of-the-earth, middle-class working Americans”. And that overcharged debate is an issue that President Obama addressed when he made this announcement.

Cochran said the pipeline has broad bipartisan and public support, and the president’s decision is wrong for the American economy.

While senator Jon Tester says he is disappointed with the president’s decision and after dragging his feet for years on the keystone pipeline, the president missed an opportunity to strengthen America’s energy security.

It is also possible that TransCanada could attempt to get back a few of the over two billion US dollars it has already spent developing the pipeline. “You would expect it would continue to operate because it is a very good, new, safe pipeline”, he said.

With the fight over Keystone finally over, McKibben reflected on its start: the moment he heard NASA’s leading climate scientist, Jim Hansen, say that if the pipeline went through, and the world burnt through the oil located in the Alberta tar sands, it would be “game over” for the planet.

Advertisement

Because ultimately, if we’re going to prevent large parts of this Earth from becoming not only inhospitable but uninhabitable in our lifetimes, we’re going to have to keep a few fossil fuels in the ground rather than burn them and release more risky pollution into the sky…

Pipes for Transcanada Corp.'s planned Keystone XL oil pipeline in Gascoyne N.D. in 2014