Now far be it from us to declare that the President does not have the right to stop the pipeline – but listen to his reasons for stopping it, according to Secretary of State John Kerry: “The critical factor...was this: moving forward with this project would significantly undermine our ability to continue leading the world in combatting climate change.” Now please read that again, carefully, and notice what the Secretary did not say. He did not say that “the critical factor” for stopping the pipeline was that it would combat climate change; or that it would protect the environment – no, he said that the most important consideration was that America no longer could be the world leader in combatting climate change. In other words, to distill this to its essence: President Obama’s ego and pride are more influential than the economy or science or energy independence.
The Secretary said more. He said that the Keystone pipeline would not lead to lower gas prices; that its long term effect on our economy would be “marginal” and that “it would not be the economic driver it is heralded to be.” The President vetoed Keystone because it might create only (and here’s the number from Mr. Kerry’s State Department) “One-tenth of one percent of the nation’s total employment”. Do the administration spokespeople have any idea what they are saying? In October 2015, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 149,120,000 Americans had jobs. One percent of that would be 1,491,200 jobs, so a tenth of that would be 149,120 jobs. We can guarantee that none of the President’s “stimulus” projects created anywhere close to 149,000 permanent jobs – some created one or two (and we mean single digits – not thousand) – and the stimulus was at a cost of millions of dollars from the US Treasury. But Keystone is privately funded. It wouldn’t cost the Treasury anything.
So much for the economic aspect, now let’s go to the environment. This is what the President said: “If we are going to prevent large parts of the Earth from becoming not only inhospitable but unihabitable, then we are going to have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground rather than burn them.” He has forgotten that without fossil fuels and internal combustion engines, we would – literally – be in the “horse and buggy era,” and we would be dealing with a very different kind of pollution. And unless we burn a lot of wood (we don’t think it's a fossil fuel, but it is carbon-based, and think of the air pollution!), we would not be able to heat our homes; and without fossil fuels we wouldn't have electricity or air conditioning – you know, those things that make places “hospitable” and “inhabitable."
There are over 2.5 million miles of pipelines in America, and 185,000 miles of them transport crude oil. If they are such a threat, its a wonder the President hasn't ordered them dug up, abandoned or destroyed. He stopped the construction of a new pipeline. We hope the next item on his agenda is not the destruction of the old ones.