Many to Benefit from President’s Ruling, but Not Us

This column by ACRU Senior Fellow Robert Knight was published January 23, 2012 in The Washington Times.

Checking his sundial and solar-powered calendar, Barack Obama has decided that he did not have enough time to study the impact of the $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline from Canada, so he killed it.

Seriously. That was the excuse for halting a project that could have created 20,000 jobs, brought 830,000 barrels of oil a day to Texas refineries and helped free America from unstable dictators’ stranglehold on our energy supply.
This from the man who had to hurry, hurry, hurry and jam the 2,700-page Obamacare bill down America’s throat so, as then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “you can, uh, find out what is in it.” He’s also the same guy who, in March, went to Brazil, cup in hand, asking the Brazilians to hurry up and develop their offshore oil so we could buy some.

The State Department said this about the Keystone XL pipeline, which has been on the drawing board for three years: The decision was “predicated on the fact that the department does not have sufficient time to obtain the information necessary to assess whether the project, in its current state, is in the national interest.”

Heck no. We all want gasoline to hit $8 a gallon before we do something constructive. We’re always being told we don’t pay as much per gallon as the Europeans do and that this should somehow bother us. Well, perhaps it does bother some people (not me), but not enough for them to go out and buy a self-igniting Chevy Volt for 40 grand from Government Motors.

Mr. Obama naturally blamed Republicans in the House, who, having learned that Mr. Obama planned to put off a decision on the pipeline until 2013 – after the election – tucked a 60-day deadline into a bill.

It’s clear that killing the pipeline isn’t remotely in the interests of the United States of America, or Canada. But the question is, who benefits?