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Townhall
Finance...
Presidential
Pork Kills Keystone
by John
Ransom
March 10, 2012
56 Senators
voted in favor of a plan yesterday that would allow the Keystone
pipeline to go
forward by cancelling the bureaucratic roadblocks put up by the Obama
administration/world-wide bus tour.
“The 56-42
vote came after President Barack Obama called Democratic senators to
lobby them
to oppose the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry tar
sands oil
from western Canada to refineries along the Texas Gulf Coast,” reports
FoxNews.
“Even so,
11 Democrats sided with Republicans to sidestep Obama’s rejection of
the
pipeline and allow the $7 billion project to go forward.”
Yet,
despite the majority vote, Senate rules apparently require a 60-vote
supermajority
to create jobs in this country. And according to Democrat Party rules,
any vote
to create jobs also has to have a massive, wasteful, multi-trillion
dollar
appropriation attached to it. This rules out Keystone.
With that
in mind, it’s time for voters to begin to ask the most obvious
question: What
quid pro quo is Obama promising members of Congress, to stall the
pipeline and
the immediate, well-paying jobs that go along with it?
And only
the congresstrons who were on the phone with Obama can really answer
what Obama
promised them in return for their votes.
Reports
CNN:
For their
part, congressional Republicans blasted the president for twisting the
arms of
fellow Democrats.
“By
personally lobbying against the Keystone pipeline, it means the
president of
the United States is lobbying for sending North American energy to
China and
lobbying against American jobs,” House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio,
said at a
news conference.
Senate
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, said Obama is “out of
touch” on
the issue.
“At a
moment when millions are out of work, gas prices are skyrocketing, and
the
Middle East is in turmoil, we’ve got a president who’s up making phone
calls
trying to block a pipeline here at home,” he said. “It’s unbelievable.”
So tell us,
Mr & Mrs. Senator what the president offered you.
Instead of
shipping jobs directly to U.S. by shipping oil through Keystone, the
Democrats
presumably prefer the new triangle-slavery route. Canada ships oil to
China,
China creates jobs, US imports dollars fromChina to pay for entitlement
programs to support people who don’t have jobs here domestically.
There are
many contrasts that the GOP can use to go after Obama on the economy.
None
present such a black and white contrast as the dispute about the black,
tar-sands crude that Canada would like to ship through the US to
refineries on
the Gulf via the Keystone XL pipeline. The dispute isn’t about the
environment,
is about creating 10 million U.S. jobs.
The State
Department gave preliminary approval to build the Keystone pipeline
late last
summer, saying that it posed no significant environmental risks. But
like a lot
of things with this administration, it was a case of the left hand not
knowing
what the left-wing was doing.
Instead of
allowing the project to go through, along with the hundreds of
thousands of
jobs it would create, Obama sided with whack-job environmentalists who
raised
bogus fears that oil spills could pollute the aquifer that lies
underneath its
path.
Ok, he only
apparently sided with them.
He actually
did what Obama likes to do best when pandering to… whomever. He bravely
told
the rest of us that for right now he wouldn’t approve the pipeline, but
he
might change his mind. Oh, and if we try to rush him to make a
decision, we’ll
all be very, very sorry.
The Senate
vote was an attempt by the GOP and 11 Democrats to show the rest us
just how
sorry Obama really is.
The
pipeline could ultimately supply about a million barrels of Canadian
oil to the
US per day and 400,000 US jobs, most of them almost immediately.
But
instead, the president, who has been railing against Congress for not
passing
another expensive jobs bill, and talks about income equality like it’s
the most
pressing issue of the day, just killed 400,000 American jobs that would
battle
income inequality in the most productive sense by providing ordinary
Americans
with the opportunity to earn some income.
And despite
everything the Obama administration has done to slow down domestic
development
of oil and gas resources, the oil and gas sector is one of the fastest
growing
jobs markets in a very anemic job market. While other sectors are
shedding
jobs, oil and gas is hot.
“The use of
new drilling techniques to tap oil and gas in shale rocks far
underground
helped add 158,000 new oil and gas jobs over the past five years,”
writes the
Wall Street Journal “and economists think that it has created even more
jobs in
companies supplying the energy industry and in the broader services
industry.”
“This is
probably the biggest stimulus we have going,” Michael Lynch, president
of
Strategic Energy and Economic Research told the WSJ.
According
to the Journal “$145 billion will be spent drilling and completing
wells this
year, up from $13 billion in 2000.”
While it’s
estimated that Canada may have as much as 2 trillion barrels of oil in
reserves, “the U.S. Geological Survey estimates the [US] has 4.3
trillion
barrels of in-place oil shale resources centered in Colorado, Utah and
Wyoming,
said Helen Hankins, Colorado director for the U.S. Bureau of Land
Management”
according to the Associated Press.
4.3
trillion barrels is 16 times the reserves of Saudi Arabia, or enough
oil to
supply the US for 600 years.
We know
that Obama has multiple motives for killing the pipeline.
We know for
example that Obama’s imperiled presidency rides on his ability, first,
to rally
his own base, since no one else supports him. That means pandering to
the
enviro-whackos in the White House and beyond.
We know too
that Obama majority shareholder Warren Buffett stands to benefit from
any
agreement to scuttle the pipeline because Buffett’s railroad will end
up
carting any Canadian heavy if Canada decides to sell oil to US
refineries
despite the Keystone ban.
As I have
pointed out all along, the Keystone issue isn’t about the safety of a
pipeline
route.
Obama and
enviro-whacko friends know that if they allow Canadian tar sands oil to
be
developed via the Keystone pipeline, that the US will also start to
develop
their own tar-sands and shale oil. The US contains well over 600 years
of known
reserves and that would allow the US to be a net exporter of oil. If
that
happens, the green economy ruse that the left has sponsored, already
reeling
from bankruptcies and cronyism, would collapse. It would show that
there is no
shortage of oil and “green” energy can not compete with fossil fuels.
The only
thing left then for those bitter climate clingers would be the shoddy
science
of Global Something-or-Another.
Oil from
tar sands, reports the BBC on the Keystone decision, “is so plentiful
that
full-scale development would seriously delay the transition to
low-carbon
alternative fuels,” which is the holy grail of the left.
Full scale
development of tar sands can only be stopped by taxing oil out of
existence,
like was tried with cap and trade.
Cape
and trade was never about trying to cool the earth. It was about giving
“green”
technologies a competitive advantage over fossil fuels that free
markets won’t
concede.
The
Atlantic echoes the theme:
The
Keystone XL is merely on hold, and oil from all sorts of other “dirty”
situations continues to flow into our gas tanks…. We need to stop
fighting oil
development project by project -- and instead focus on passing a Low
Carbon
Fuel Standard (which could make the Keystone XL economically unviable).
And the New
York Times goes further, stating: “Far more important to the nation’s
energy
and environmental future is the development of renewable and
alternative energy
sources. This is the winning case that Mr. Obama should make to voters
in
rejecting the Republicans’ craven indulgence of Big Oil.”
And since
the New York Times wrote the Obama strategy memo disguised as the op-ed
above,
Obama’s been sticking to the script.
And
offering Democrats lots of big carrots along the way.
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and other articles at Townhall Finance
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