For six long years, the Obama administration has been holding up the Keystone XL Pipeline that would bring oil from the Alberta oil sands to Gulf Coast refineries. Approving the project would provide thousands of well-paying construction jobs, boost the economy, help lower the world price of oil (which has been declining sharply on its own in recent weeks—as you have probably noticed at the gas pump), and reduce the influence of Russia and OPEC in world affairs. In other words, Keystone is a win-win-win-win project.
Obama, however, prefers to cater to self-appointed environmental interests that are a major component of his base. They, of course, being uniformly affluent, don’t give a damn about working-class jobs, however well paying. They prefer driving around in their Range Rovers, maintaining more than one large home, jetting off hither and yon, and congratulating themselves on their good stewardship of planet earth. It’s another indication of how much the Democratic Party has become the party of the elite. Siding with the environmentalists, of course, not only injures the American economy, it also injures the Canadian economy and strains our relationship with one of our closest allies and NAFTA partners.
But Canada is a sovereign state. It’s not going to abandon one of its key natural resources because a bunch of over-privileged Americans don’t like its exploitation and go to Obama fundraisers. So Canada is beginning to develop alternatives. One would be to build a 2,900-mile pipeline that would carry a million barrels of oil a day from the oil sands region to the ice-free port of St. John, New Brunswick, on the Bay of Fundy. There it would be refined and then shipped to customers around the world via supertankers.
The oil was always going to reach market one way or another, sooner or later, a fact that the environmentalists and the Obama administration refuse to acknowledge. So the only fruits of Obama’s policy of endless delay will be considerable harm to the American economy and some successful fundraisers. No wonder his Gallop approval rating is down to 39 percent.
