Brad Wall puts focus on Energy East pipeline after Keystone XL rejection

March 1, 2013 – The State Department issues an environmental review that raises no major objections to the Keystone XL oil pipeline and says other options to get the oil from Canada to Gulf Coast refineries are worse for climate change. While we are in fact producing more domestic oil and improving our fuel efficiency, those two facts have little bearing on whether a new pipeline is needed. “There is no good reason for the administration to block this project”.

“President Obama has chosen to place politics over substantive policy that only serves to advance the agenda of well-funded radical environmentalists”, Sean McGarvey, president of the North America’s Building Trades Unions, said in a statement Friday. The permitting process for new infrastructure projects was not designed as a tool for global climate negotiations. “We do not want to go back to being dependent on OPEC”.

To the editor: Now that Keystone is out of the way, maybe instead of an oil pipeline, we can build a network of water pipelines distributing this resource to any needy area in our nation.

Why did it take President Barack Obama seven years to reject the Keystone XL pipeline? Obama stood up to protect us from climate change and accelerate the transition to clean energy. Actually, putting a price on carbon pollution, a step thwarted by the Republican-controlled Congress, would be a far better way to demonstrate American leadership than the symbolic move of killing a pipeline project. However, the Senate failed to approve it by a single vote (59-41).

However, TransCanada – along with the American people – faces no real prospect of reversing Obama’s economy-adverse decision. “It’d have about an $8 billion economic impact”. Premier-elect Justin Trudeau also supports the pipeline.

Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., agreed with Rounds, calling the pipeline a “common-sense project” that would provide 3,000 to 4,000 jobs to South Dakotans during the project’s construction phase.

The constitutional theory of executive power is supposed to allow the president to make value judgments and political decisions different from a predecessor’s.

Brad Wall is once again reiterating that a focus needs to be put on the Energy East pipeline with the rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline in the U.S. The scientific analyses of the project’s environmental impact statement concluded that carbon emissions would be small and the risk to the High Plains groundwater supply low. We travelled to Washington, DC on at least three occasions to join protests against the pipeline, including calling on the Canadian embassy in August 2011 to demand that they stop lobbying for the pipeline, participating in the Surround the White House action in November 2011, and the Forward on Climate protest in February 2013.

The Administration’s decision is likely to be challenged in court.