Neither the Keystone XL pipeline nor the Mona Lisa have eyebrows, but that’s not where the comparisons stop, according to the American Petroleum Institute.
“One of the world’s most recognized works of art was created by a painter who made his living on temporary jobs,” said an image of the Mona Lisa that the oil and gas group tweeted. A link led to a post on jobs and the Keystone XL pipeline.
image tweeted by the vice president of American Petroleum Institute.
The Canada-to-Texas project’s boosters have touted the 42,100 direct and indirect jobs the pipeline would create during its two-year construction phase. They’ve noted the nature of construction work amounts to stringing together many of these temporary gigs to make a living.
But opponents of the 1,700-mile pipeline have downplayed its jobs effect, noting it would result in 35 permanent posts and only about 4,000 of the temporary jobs would go to construction workers, according to the State Department.
Even President Obama has been dismissive of the $8 billion project’s jobs prospects, saying in July 2013 that “the most realistic estimates are this might create maybe 2,000 jobs during the construction of the pipeline … and then after that we’re talking about somewhere between 50 and 100 [chuckles] jobs in a economy of 150 million working people.”
Still, API and the pipeline’s supporters should be careful of drawing too close a comparison between Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece and TransCanada Corp.’s hoped-for pipeline: While Keystone XL has been under federal review for more than six years, finishing the Mona Lisa took 16.
Or the Sistine Chapel @zcolman #KeystoneXL is probably the Mona Lisa of pipelines http://t.co/LQHbKyjK7K #TimeToBuild pic.twitter.com/eX0qzeJOEi
— Linda Rozett (@lrozett) January 16, 2015
UPDATE: API has also compared Keystone XL to Michelangelo’s painting Sistine Chapel, API vice president of communications Linda Rozett informed the Washington Examiner.
