Obama Must End Keystone XL Obfuscation Now

By Craig Rucker and Duggan Flanakin || Four-plus years into the Obama Administration, the President continues to hide behind administrative agencies and “studies” regarding his true intentions on the Keystone XL Pipeline. This vital link between Canadian oil and U.S. refineries would bring jobs and prosperity to hundreds of thousands of people in both countries – and greatly reduce our reliance on imports from unstable, unreliable, unfriendly nations.

The State Department recently issued a report which urged approval for Keystone XL and found that the pipeline would cause no meaningful harm to the environment.  Yet the endless delays continue. The latest was a tedious claim by the U.S.  Environmental Protection Agency that extensive environmental impact studies to date are still insufficient.

Many in Congress are fed up with obstructive delays and are now considering “The Northern Route Approval Act,” which would expedite approval of the final phase of pipeline construction, by declaring that no Presidential Permit is required for TransCanada’s application (filed on May 4, 2012) to construct the portion from the Canadian border to Steele City, Nebraska.

The final environmental impact statement issued by the Secretary of State, along with other completed studies, should be sufficient to satisfy the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act, National Historic Preservation Act, and the Endangered Species Act.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service should also cease obstructing the pipeline. The Service has long ignored the slaughter of thousands of bald and golden eagles, hawks, falcons, whooping cranes and other bird and bat species by wind turbines. It has even proposed to give turbine operators 30-year “incidental take” permits for such species.

To many, it seems incongruous, even outrageous, that boring beetles, an insect slightly impacted by a pipeline would receive greater protection than vital bird and bat species that are routinely maimed and killed by wind turbines. Those latter wildlife impacts are even less defensible considering that $26 billion in Energy Department subsidies and loan guarantees for renewable energy projects since 2009 have created only 2,298 permanent jobs, at a cost of $11.45 million per job, according to the Institute for Energy Research.)

Roadblocks are everywhere. Had this bureaucratic morass existed in the 1960s, the United States would have never been able to put a man on the moon. Similar bureaucratic actions and seemingly endless environmentalist lawsuits against the Trans-Alaska Pipeline finally convinced Congress to pass legislation putting an end to those delays.

If he truly cares about American jobs, it is time for President Obama to expedite approval of Keystone. Any further delay would send a clear signal to the nation, and to Canada, that he will never approve the project and has no real interest in creating jobs and getting our economy back on track. The charade would be over.  The President who promised to bankrupt coal companies would go on record as trying to bankrupt oil companies and keep Americans in unemployment lines.

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Craig Rucker is the executive director and co-founder of the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT). Duggan Flanakin is director of research and international programs for CFACT.

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