Obama stops 20,000 shovel-ready construction jobs

President Obama used to be fond of "shovel-ready projects." He's also demanding that Congress pass his jobs bill immediately because 9% unemployment is a crisis, and, by the way, he's for making the U.S. less reliant on energy from tyrants. So how about putting 20,000 Americans to work on a North American energy project that's as shovel-ready as they come? Sorry, Mr. Obama is voting present.

The $7 billion project is TransCanada's Keystone XL, a 1,700-mile underground pipeline that would deliver 830,000 barrels of heavy crude oil a day from Alberta to refineries in Oklahoma and Texas. TransCanada filed an application to build the pipeline in September 2008 with the State Department, which must approve it because the pipeline would cross the 49th parallel. In April 2010 and again this August, State produced multivolume environmental impact statements that concluded the pipeline would have "no significant impacts" on the environment. That should have ended the matter.

But the President's environmentalist friends have decided to make Keystone a test of his green virtue. "We'll see if [Mr. Obama] is an oil guy or a people guy," eco-agitator Bill McKibben recently warned at an Occupy Wall Street event, and the Sierra Club has threatened that it won't "mobilize the environmental base" in 2012 if he approves the project. Various Hollywood worthies have marched in front of the White House in protest.

And, what a surprise, suddenly the government is finding new reasons to delay its decision. The State Department's inspector general announced Monday that he is ordering a special review to examine alleged irregularities in the drafting of the impact statements. Then yesterday the White House said it would postpone any decision in order to "undertake an in-depth assessment of potential alternative routes in Nebraska." Expect that assessment to arrive after November 2012.

The Administration is taking cover behind some not-in-my-neighborhood gripes by Nebraska politicians. But those politicians seem to have no problem with some 25,000 miles of pipeline that already crisscross the Ogallala Aquifer that is supposedly at the center of the Administration's concerns.

As for the claim that extracting bitumen from the Alberta tar sands is a carbon catastrophe, if the Keystone XL project doesn't go forward TransCanada will simply load the oil on railroad cars for trans-shipment from British Columbia to other countries, like China. Maybe there's an impact statement to be done on that carbon footprint.

We're guessing this decision to abdicate was really made by President Plouffe, as in David Plouffe, the White House political aide who seems to be running most of the executive branch these days. The Keystone cop-out couldn't be a clearer expression that this Administration puts its anticarbon obsessions—and Big Green campaign donors—above job creation and blue-collar construction workers. He's President of the 1%.

Source: The Wall Street Journal