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Fuel Freedom Staff

Obama, Congress draw battle lines on Keystone XL

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On the same day two Republican senators introduced a bill authorizing construction of the Keystone XL oil-pipeline extension, the White House said President Obama would veto such a bill if it reached his desk.

“If this bill passes this Congress, the president wouldn’t sign it,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Tuesday.

Republicans took over control of the Senate as the 114th Congress was sworn in Tuesday. The GOP, and some Democrats, have supported the pipeline project for much of the past six years that it’s been in limbo, and the party wasted no time in sponsoring a bill to pressure the Obama administration to approve it: Sens. Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, and John Hoeven, Republican of North Dakota, introduced the Senate bill, and a committee hearing is scheduled for Wednesday.

The House is expected to begin deliberations on its own Keystone bill on Friday.

The last time the House passed an authorization, in November, it was blocked from proceeding by Senate Democrats. But with fewer numbers, the measure has a greater chance of passing this time.

However, the Senate needs 67 votes — two-thirds — to override a presidential veto. As BusinessWeek reported, Hoeven says he has 63 votes in favor of approval, four shy of a veto-proof majority.

Reaction to the White House announcement ran the gamut. House Speaker John Boehner, Republican of Ohio, said in a statement:

On a bipartisan basis, the American people overwhelmingly support building the Keystone XL pipeline. After years of manufacturing every possible excuse, today President Obama was finally straight with them about where he truly stands. His answer is no to more American infrastructure, no to more American energy, and no to more American jobs.

By contrast, environmental activist Bill McKibben, writing in The Guardian, praised the effort that led to the veto threat, considering the pipeline once was considered a shoo-in for approval.

Keystone’s not dead yet – feckless Democrats in the Congress could make some kind of deal later this month or later this year, and the president could still yield down the road to the endlessly corrupt State Department bureaucracy that continues to push the pipeline – but it’s pretty amazing to see what happens when people organize.

The State Department has concluded that the 1,179-mile pipeline extension, which would carry oil-sands crude from western Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, wouldn’t significantly add to carbon emissions, but the project would create only 35 permanent U.S. jobs.

Regardless of what happens between Congress and Obama, the final decision on Keystone rests with the State Department, which reports to the president. State has responsibility because the pipeline, to be built by TransCanada Corp., would cross the Canada-U.S. border.

The Post added:

“I think the president has been pretty clear that he does not think that circumventing a well-established process for evaluating these projects is … the right thing for Congress to do,” Earnest said.

Obama rejected a Canadian firm’s application to build the pipeline in 2012.

At a year-end news conference in December, Obama sought to downplay the benefits of the pipeline. He said the benefits for U.S. citizens and workers from the pipeline would be “nominal.”

“I think that there’s been this tendency to really hype this thing as some magic formula to what ails the U.S. economy,” Obama said.

Fuel Freedom Staff

Naomi Klein: 4 reasons Keystone matters

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Environmental writer and activist Naomi Klein writes in The Nation that the conventional wisdom, at least among supporters of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, is that the project didn’t really matter. Even if it were scuttled, TransCanada, the company hoping to build the pipeline extension from tar-sands oil in western Canada to Nebraska, would find another way to get the oil to market, either by way of another pipeline across Canada or by rail.

But opposition to the project has put pressure squarely on President Obama, Klein writes.

His decision is no longer about one pipeline. It’s about whether the US government will throw a lifeline to a climate-destabilizing industrial project that is under a confluence of pressures that add up to a very real crisis.

Klein, author of the new book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, then outlines four ways in which the Keystone XL debate does, indeed matter.

Read it and tell us what you think.

Fuel Freedom Staff

Vox answers ‘9 questions about KXL you were too embarrassed to ask’

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Great, informative piece by Vox.com about the Keystone XL pipeline, which the U.S. House approved yet again Friday.

The Vox post answers “9 questions about the Keystone XL pipeline you were too embarrassed to ask.”

There’s even music!

President Obama is described as possibly leaning toward skepticism about the project, saying in an ABC interview: “Understand what this project is: It is providing the ability of Canada to pump their oil, send it through our land, down to the Gulf, where it will be sold everywhere else. It doesn’t have an impact on US gas prices.”

Is that true? As with many aspects of the KXL debate, it depends on whom you ask, and what data set you consult.

Here’s what an op-ed in the Great Falls (Montana) Tribune said in October:

Canada’s National Energy Board anticipates 15 Midwestern states will experience a 10 to 20 cent per gallon increase in gasoline prices if KXL is built. It would happen because an oversupply of Canadian crude now refined for U.S. domestic use will be diverted to KXL for export.