For the first time in recent memory, I literally sprayed coffee onto my computer screen on the morning of Feb. 4, when I came across the following headline on The Hill’s E2 blog: White House Vows to Keep Keystone Call Above ‘Political Influence’. In all the years I’ve been involved in the energy world (and I’m old, so it’s been a lot of years), the statement by White House spokesman Jay Carney that produced that headline may well be the single most disengenuous statement about any energy-related topic that’s come along.
Indeed, later the very same morning, former Energy Secretary Steven Chu essentially put the lie to the Administration’s contention by telling a press conference in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago “I don’t have a position on whether the Keystone pipeline should be built. That is for the secretary of State and the president. But I will say that the decision on whether the construction should happen was a political one and not a scientific one.” Obviously, someone failed to deliver the morning’s talking points memo to Sec. Chu.
A confused professional protester brings the wrong sign to an anti-Keystone rally.
Look, regardless of what one’s position happens to be related to whether or not the northern extent of Keystone XL pipeline should be completed, it is about three years too late to be trying to keep a straight face while claiming politics aren’t a factor in this decision. Because the truth is, through five – count ‘em – FIVE separate Environmental Impact Studies (EIS), thousands of media articles, dozens of presidential statements and speeches, and untold numbers of protests, marches and disingenuous demonstrations on the subject, opponents to this pipeline project have yet to raise a single, solitary legitimate reason why it should not move forward.
The truth is that, had Keystone XL been subjected to the normal, non-political decision-making that is typical of any other proposed pipeline project, it would have been approved resoundingly shortly after the completion of the first EIS early in the President's first term, and most likely would have by now been fully constructed and placed into service. But Keystone has obviously not been subject to the normal decision-making process, and thus, even after the State Department’s most recent declaration on January 31 that the project would have no detrimental environmental impacts, President Obama appears to be still desperately casting about in search of some – any – legitimate justification for cancelling the project.
Not only is politics a “part” of this decision-making process, it is in fact the only remaining consideration, an undeniable, braying cat that Sec. Chu let out of the proverbial bag at his press conference.
And the political considerations for the President are pretty self-evident. The 'environmental' left has long been a loyal voting and funding constituency, and many of the leaders and organizations who inhabit that realm of the political spectrum decided a few years ago to make opposition to Keystone XL a high-profile part of their agenda. This decision came about after climate alarmist James Hansen authored this piece, in which he falsely assumes that the Canadian Oil Sands oil to be carried by Keystone XL to U.S. refineries would cease to be produced if the pipeline weren’t completed. This utter nonsense has been debunked a thousand times over since, but that has not stopped fellow alarmists like Bill McKibben and other environmental radicals from continuing to parrot this and myriad other false claims that have been grabbed out of the air or concocted out of whole cloth.
Some of them apparently have even come to believe their own false propaganda, which would explain why so many reacted with such fury after the release of the State Department’s Jan. 31 report. To them, the report – and all the other reports before it that have relied on actual science instead of political talking points – represents a betrayal by a President and an Administration that they believe should also simply parrot their false talking points, and rely on their concocted assertions as if they were all the proof needed by law and regulation to halt the Keystone project.
After all, they must think, the Huffington Post published this farcical screed by Robert Redford on Feb. 3, so it must be true. Besides, who knows more about this stuff than Sundance? Ok, I’m kidding….well, half kidding, I guess.
So President Obama is now faced with a strictly political choice where Keystone XL is concerned, because despite all of his efforts to delay, distract and deflect on behalf of his most loyal political constituency, no one in or out of his Administration has been able to provide him with a single fact-based, legitimate justification for cancelling this project, or even for delaying it a day further. He can either do the right thing that the laws of this country require him to do, or he can ignore science, facts and legal considerations and decide the fate of the Keystone XL on politics and politics alone.
Because as his own former Secretary of Energy pointed out, politics is all he has left.
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