Prompted by a question from an audience member during a town-hall style meeting at South Carolina's Benedict College on Friday, President Obama offered some of his most telling and detailed comments to date on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline.
Asked whether he thought the project could ultimately be stopped, the president provided not just an overview of the proposed pipeline, which would deliver a diluted form of heavy oil from tar sands deposits in the Canadian province of Alberta to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast, but also a lengthy meditation on climate science, the threat of global warming, and what he described as the meager economic benefits that the pipeline would ultimately generate.
"Its proponents argue that it would be creating jobs in the United States," Obama said, "but the truth is that it's Canadian oil that’s then going to go to the world market. It will probably create a couple thousand construction jobs for a year or two, but only create about 300 permanent jobs."
Environmentalists oppose the project, the president said, because the harvesting of oil from Alberta's tar sands is "an extraordinarily dirty way of extracting oil." He added that he recently vetoed a Congressional bill that would have eliminated the need for presidential approval of the project — currently required because the pipeline passes over the U.S. border — because it sought to circumvent a State Department review process that the president considers vital to evaluating the overall risks and benefits of the pipeline.
"I haven't made a final determination on it," Obama said, "but what I've said is, we're not going to authorize a pipeline that benefits largely a foreign company if it can't be shown that it is safe and if it can't be shown that overall it would not contribute to climate change."
The warming planet, the president told the group of young college students, is a problem that they will have to contend with in the future. "This will affect you more than old people like me. I’ll be gone when the worst of this hits," Obama said.
Speaking to Reuters on Friday afternoon, Jim Murphy, senior counsel for the National Wildlife Federation, described Obama's comments as "the strongest indication yet that points the needle to the president rejecting the pipeline."
In response to the comments — particularly the president's questions about the pipeline's safety and impact on climate change — Mark Cooper, a spokesman for TransCanada, the company behind the project, sent out a collection of responses to reporters via email.
"We’re confident that somewhere in the five reports and 17,000 pages of U.S. State Department review over the past six-and-a-half years lies the answer to the comments made today," the company said, adding that it believed the pipeline could be built safely and with minimal environmental and climate impacts — a conclusion generally reached in the State Department's final 2014 review. The department is still weighing some countervailing comments from other government agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency.
"Ultimately the U.S. administration has a choice about how and where Americans want to get the oil they need," the emailed statement continued. Oil harvested from Alberta, the company argued, is no more polluting than crude imported into the U.S. from Venezuela and Nigeria — and its comparable even to some heavy crudes obtained from California deposits. "In total the oil sands represents one fifth of one per cent of global [greenhouse gas emissions]," TransCanada said, adding that the pipeline would also help to move the bonanza of oil currently being harvested in America's own Bakken shale formation.
"Keystone XL will benefit Americans in the same way our existing Keystone pipeline and Gulf Coast Pipeline has since 2010," the company concluded, "safely transporting 830 million barrels of oil along with thousands of good construction jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes to states and counties along the route – money for roads, schools and hospitals."
The Obama administration has been weighing the pipeline for the entirety of its two terms so far. Further responding to the Keystone XL question at the South Carolina event, Obama ticked off a litany of concerns associated with climate change, from rising seas, increased droughts and wildfires to migrating diseases, infrastructure stresses, and other potential impacts.
"If you don’t stop it at a certain point, you can’t stop it at all, and it could be catastrophic," Obama said. "And I just want you to understand, what I just described, it’s not science fiction. It’s not speculation. This is what the science tells us."
