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.
But Obama’s environmental activist supporters never cared about the aquifer. They want to stop the pipeline no matter how safe it is. The pipeline will connect Alberta’s tar sands oil fields with refineries in Texas. Producing oil from tar sands is an energy intensive process that environmentalists believe will speed up global warming. They want that oil to stay in the ground forever.
So how is Obama going to re-solve this political problem? He’s going to kill the project and blame Republicans for forcing him to do it. White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer telegraphed the move when the House first passed the provision. He tweeted: “The House bill simply shortens the review process in a way that virtually guarantees that the pipeline will NOT be approved.”
This is pure spin. The State Department has already completed a full environmental impact study as required by law. And now, as Mark Tapscott noted this morning, the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality has made Obama’s punt harder. The NDEQ announced yesterday that they have already identified a new route for the pipeline that would not threaten the aquifer. Problem solved. No further study needed.
