About that Keystone pipeline

by: Eric B.

Fri Jan 20, 2012 at 13:30:31 PM EST

The first thing you need to know about the announcement yesterday that the Keystone XL pipeline's permit was denied was that it ultimately came as a political decision. Not by the president, mind you, but by Congressional Republicans who demanded an answer to the permit question in such a tight timeframe that the president, who most indicators had as otherwise supporting it (in fact, it appears that he wanted to wait until after the 2012 to stick it to the hippies), said he had very little recourse but to deny it.

"This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people," Obama said in a statement. "I'm disappointed that Republicans in Congress forced this decision, but it does not change my Administration's commitment to American-made energy that creates jobs and reduces our dependence on oil."

This was essentially the consensus view among the Beltway press, that as part of the payroll tax cut holiday deal that they would hand the president a very narrow window in which to make a permitting decision on Keystone. Their intent, naturally, was to use his rejection as an Election Year cudgel. In fact, the president signaled that the Canadians could reapply for the permit next year, giving the State Department the time they believe is necessary to make it happen.

Please note that this had nothing to do with "the hippies," who continue to notch one of the worst imaginable performance records when it comes to actually executing their agenda and who do it in such a way that they are easy to blame for when things outside their control go wrong.

Bear in mind that this analysis takes place outside the framework of partisan shouting. Based on the accounts available in basically every media outlet, the president wanted to approve the permit but was given too little time to do it right and so had to reject it, which fulfilled part of the Republican plan this year to attack the president on the topic of jobs. The only people who are really arguing that the president caved to environmentalists and cost tens of thousands of American jobs as well as ceding energy security to the Chinese are people who've become entirely partisan. Cue, this morning's editorial in the Detroit News.

For someone whose operating slogan is "We Can't Wait," it's curious that President Barack Obama is willing to wait and wait and wait for the Keystone XL Pipeline project and the 20,000 desperately needed jobs it promises.

The 20,000 number, of course, is complete rubbish, although that's on the low end of the scale for predicted job creation. Some of the talking heads at Fox News were predicted hundreds of thousands of jobs, although at the end of this video courtesy Media Matters, the company that wants the pipeline itself says the number of jobs created would actually be in the hundreds. A few hundred ... 20,000 ... what's the difference?

The Keystone project is the subject of more than 10,000 pages of environmental studies. Every possible route has been explored. The State Department twice ruled the pipeline would have no impact on sensitive environmental areas, and initially recommended approval. But it switched its opinion to align with the president's political strategy.

Not to enrage the state of Nebraska, whose Congressional delegation wanted the federal government to find a different path. So much for state's rights and fighting a federal government forcing its will down the throats of locals, right?

China wants this oil, which would go a long way toward freeing the United States from dependence on petroleum from unsavory places, and is urging an alternate pipeline to the Pacific coast.

And, what we have here is perhaps the most poorly informed, least accurate editorial you're going to read this calendar year. It's not so much that they have committed a gross factual error here. The idea that the tar sands produce oil and not something that has to be first refined into a synthetic form of it, or that China would get all of it, or that the president is handing the Chinese a "strategic advantage" are just simply daft. It's almost as if the only thing the author of this editorial understands about global energy markets is what they've learned off the back of a box of cereal.

You can't really blame the News' editorial page. They don't actually do journalism there, but instead participate in the poorly informed echo chamber that is rightwing politics. Once you understand that their advocacy is intended to substitute noise for insight, you can sleep better knowing that the things published there carry the same amount of reality-based weight as press releases from Mike Rogers' office.