Keystone dead; all sides cheer for different reasons.
by David Atkins
Say goodbye to the Keystone pipeline project, at least for now:
President Obama, declaring that he would not bow to congressional pressure, announced Wednesday that he was rejecting a Canadian firm’s application for a permit to build and operate the Keystone XL pipeline, a massive project that would have stretched from Canada’s oil sands to refineries in Texas.
Obama said that a Feb. 21 deadline set by Congress as part of the two-month payroll tax cut extension had made it impossible to do an adequate review of the pipeline project proposed by TransCanada.
Of course, that doesn't mean the project is dead forever. As peak oil causes prices to rise over time, the political pressure to drill every drop of oil on earth will become unstoppable unless technically and economically viable alternatives are developed. That's part of why cutting what little there is in the discretionary budget is so crazy.
For now, though, almost everyone gets what they want: progressives and conservationists get the pipeline blocked. Conservatives get an election-year issue on which to hammer the Obama Administration on rust belt jobs, which is precisely why they gave the Administration an impossibly short timeline in which to approve the project.
Everyone, it seems, but the Administration, which wanted to avoid getting roughed up by swing-state conservatives over it while not infuriating the progressive base too badly. As with so much else, the White House has taken the careful road by slow-walking the pipeline while giving lip-service to an "all-in" approach on energy.
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