With Keystone snub, Obama aims for more leverage on climate

Tester has been calling on President Obama to approve the Keystone XL pipeline since 2010.

“Although (TransCanada has) been trying to keep the Keystone pipeline alive, really their attention is diverted onto other projects; there is more emphasis on Energy East and other elements”, Julie Brough, vice president at investment managers Morgan Meighen & Associates, which owns TransCanada stock, said. There would have been a considerable number of jobs involved in building the pipeline, but a State Department study found that the project would have created only 35 permanent positions.

The president also backed up his decision with environmental concerns, which are perhaps the strongest force driving the controversy of this issue.

Whatever your feeling about the petro-economy, the safer route for oil is, and has been for a long time, pipelines.

The answer, of course, is that environmentalists decreed Keystone a symbol of global climate change and fought it as if it were the pipeline to the planet’s watery doom. Many domestic refineries have been optimized to handle the type of heavy crude oil produced from Canada’s oil sands, and it is prohibitively expensive to switch them back to handle the lighter domestic crude being extracted from our onshore shale plays.

ROTT: And with the world set to meet about climate change in Paris in just a few weeks, showing just how serious the U.S.is about addressing climate change, even through symbolic gestures, could lead to far more substantive results down the road.

“The pipeline would not make a meaningful long-term contribution to our economy”, Obama told a press conference on Friday. The proposed project was incompatible with solving climate change.

Indeed, Obama acknowledged that the pipeline has become politicized way out of proportion to its benefits or drawbacks. “In no way was the pipeline in America’s national interest”.

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.

In a statement, TransCanada President and CEO Russ Girling said that he was “disappointed” with President Obama’s decision, and said that “misplaced symbolism” and “rhetoric” had won out over “reason” and “science”.

“For Montana, an on ramp at Baker is a big deal, and that means more grain cars available, more jobs, and for our country, moving towards energy independence”.

But for now, the demise of the Keystone XL pipeline is much like the ongoing diminishment of coal as the nation’s primary fuel for power generation – it’s a case of public policy reflecting economics rather than driving it.