In one of many of its executive overreaches, the Obama administration last year rejected an application by TransCanada Pipeline Co. to build the Keystone XL pipeline.
At the time, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said, "There's probably no infrastructure project in the history of the United States that has been as politicized as this one." Surely he is correct, yet it was President Obama and his extremist buddies that politicized what should have been a rigorous, yet routine assessment of the proposed pipeline.
After all, U.S. regulators had approved two similar, large cross-border pipelines that transport exactly the same type of oil that the Keystone XL pipeline would have carried from the same region in Alberta, Canada, to the U.S., wrote Kristine Delkus, general counsel at TransCanada, in Thursday's Wall Street Journal.
The Bush administration had approved the original Keystone pipeline in 2008, and President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had approved competitor's Enbridge pipeline in 2009. Each of those permit reviews took about two years, Delkus wrote.
The administration's decision to deny Keystone XL rested entirely on the president's belief that his international reputation and negotiating leverage on climate leadership required the symbolic act of denying the Keystone XL pipeline, Delkus wrote.
Keystone XL would have been a North American investment of $8 billion, transported millions of barrels of oil safely and efficiently through underground pipelines as opposed to more risky and less efficient rail, and employed thousands in construction jobs, in addition to supporting hundreds of jobs at Gulf Coast oil export terminals.
"America is now a global leader when it comes to taking serious action to fight climate change," the president said in his Keystone rejection. "And frankly, approving this project would have undercut that global leadership."
The administration's decision on Keystone was unjust, unlawful and unreasonable, and it costs the U.S. jobs and investment. Yet now the administration is adding insult to injury, as it is helping Kenya finance an $18 billion, 559-mile oil pipeline that would stretch from northern Kenya to a port on the Indian Ocean.
"It would run through the Great Rift Valley, an environmentally sensitive area that is a crucial habitat for endangered species and a source of essential tourist revenue," wrote Kelly McParland in the National Post.
"So what's the difference between a Kenyan pipeline and a Canadian pipeline?" McParland asks. "It would appear that politics is the key, as it most assuredly was in Obama's rejection of Keystone ... The emissions really has nothing to do with it, as it never did."