Thanks to the two-month payroll tax cut extension deal passed by Congress last week, sometime next February President Obama will have to make another difficult decision on the Keystone XL pipeline. The tax cut legislation gives Obama two options: 1) approve the project; or 2) deem the pipeline “not in the national interest” thus killing the project and thousands of privately-financed new jobs.
Obama faced a similar choice this summer when the State Department finished their first environmental impact study of the project. At first, reports out of the White House indicated that Obama was going to approve the project. But after protests outside the White House by environmental groups, Obama tried to punt on making the decision till after the 2012 election. He called for a second environmental study that identified a route through Nebraska that did not go over the Ogallala Aquifer. This process was supposed to take months.
