On The Record

"It's very good for Canadian oil companies and it's good for the Canadian oil industry [Keystone XL pipeline], but it's not going to be a huge benefit to U.S. consumers."
"Those are temporary jobs. There is probably some additional jobs that can be created in the refining process down in the Gulf (area). Those aren't completely insignificant, but when you consider what we could be doing rebuilding our roads and bridges around the country, something the congress could authorize, we could probably create hundreds of thousands of jobs or a million jobs."
"[If the project proceeds it should not add to the problem of climate change] which I think is very serious and does impose serious costs on people, some of them long term. If we got more flooding, more wildfires, more drought, there are direct economic impacts on that."
U.S. President Barack Obama

"It makes no business sense for our customers to have us build this infrastructure to reduce their transportation costs and improve the efficiency for delivering this oil to their refineries and then turn around and pay to export it overseas."
"[Keystone  is] not an export pipeline system -- period."
TransCanada Corp. statement

It has been known for quite some time now that President Obama has no wish to sign off on the $8-billion US Keystone XL project, which just happens to be the pet project of American environmental groups. Better to assign blame for carbon greenhouse gases emissions emanating from some source outside the U.S. than those within.

So all the fracking that's going on to release shale oil and gas in the U.S. isn't in their crosshairs so much even though it remains unknown what the long term effects, much less accidents of geology could manifest through the high-pressure water, sand and chemicals finding their way into aquifers and abandoned well sites could develop into.

Much less the emissions from all those coal-fired plants in the United States spewing carbon and particulates into the atmosphere. China's infamous atmospheric fog of carbon-emitted smog violating the quality of life for urban Chinese living in their megacities where huge coal-firing chimney stacks belch their black fumes and dirt into the atmosphere creates a picture of a nation wedded to energy at any cost, but the United States isn't far behind; it is, after all, the world's second-largest source of carbon emissions.

All those roads and bridges that President Obama waxes enthusiastic about rebuilding are there because of a vehicle-based economy, where transportation of people, goods, resource extraction, manufacturing and any number of activities related to a thriving economy are themselves based on energy production; they run on fossil fuels, and without availability of those fossil fuels those productive transportation routes are unfeasible.

The electric cars so beloved of environmentalists whom President Obama champions may present as an alternative to smog-causing gasoline-consuming vehicles, but that too is an illusion; the energy that those electric cars operate on comes from energy produced by coal-firing sources. President Obama insists it is his wish that should the Keystone project proceed (should he be unable to stop it if Congress pulls its weight), that it not add to the critical climate change problem.

Mostly, he's referring to the oft-repeated claims that Alberta-based oil extraction is not 'clean', costly to extract, and more injurious to the atmosphere, completely ignoring new techniques that make all those concerns moot, and at the same time overlooking the relatively small impact that the extraction claims on the atmosphere. The world's largest emitter of carbon is China, accounting for a whipping 25% of global emissions, but the U.S. is right behind at 16%, with Canada at 1.48%.

The President is very well aware that the U.S. buys more Canadian oil and gas than from any other exterior source, and it does so at a bargain price, denying the Government of Canada its full share of global pricing, a situation that would no longer prevail with the pipeline in place. And, as TransCanada Corp. points out in its rejoinder to the President's contentious statements, the pipeline as an investment is not only one meant to profit Canada, but the United States, its largest trading partner, as well.

While the pipeline was designed for the transport of Canadian oil, it also was designed with U.S. oil transport in mind. Oil from the Bakken fields in North Dakota. Moreover, what President Obama calculatedly chooses not to acknowledge is that the U.S. State Department calculates the pipeline will have the effect of creating 42,100 direct and indirect jobs in the United States.

In playing to the environmental lobby in the United States, the president is crafting his legacy as a champion of the environment, and that's not a bad thing. In so doing, however, he has deliberately overlooked American extraction processes and energy sources rather than focus on them since to do so might harm the U.S. economy.

It's just so much simpler to appear to focus on environmental issues through blaming another country and that is a bad thing. Particularly when reality must be contorted to achieve the end.

Countries by carbon dioxide emissions in thousands of tonnes per annum, via the burning of fossil fuels (blue the highest).