Keystone XL pipeline, Alberta Oil Sands, Obama's War on Oil

Keystone XL pipeline, Alberta Oil Sands, Obama's War on Oil

Obama is set on slaying demon Alberta oil

Author
By Bogdan Kipling

Washington, D.C. – The time has come to stop waiting for the Keystone XL pipeline and start brushing up on ancient Rome.

President Barack Obama as good as crucified the demonized pipeline from Alberta to Texas that would carry oil sands crude to refineries specifically designed to process it.

Mr. Obama hammered in the nails last Friday when he “indefinitely” postponed the decision whether to let the Canadian pipeline cross the United States border.

Ancient Rome—rife with caprice and systemic corruption—where an Emperor planned to elevate his horse to the rank of consul.

There is no wishing it away: American governance has taken a nosedive in recent years – and not only with respect to this TransCanada Pipelines Ltd. Keystone project.

Examples exist across the spectrum of public policy, but only one is needed to make the point.  Mr. Obama is famous at home for ignoring the law if it stands in the way of his endeavors. He simply sets aside the law to implement his darling policies.

ObamaCare – the Affordable Health Insurance Act of 2010 is the living demonstration of how it works: To get patients and their doctors into the harness of his signature legislation. If the efforts require that the law and provisions specifically enumerated in the legislation be pushed aside, Mr. Obama’s word is ’so be it.’

Mine is a reading of how the political climate in Washington fits Mr. Obama’s practical governing style and at the same time reflects his deepest convictions. ObamaCare is all about his legacy and the November congressional elections. The insurance program must be made to at least appear to be a success; the Keystone must be stopped to be his environmental monument.

The Keystone XL is a much studied project. Proposed a long time ago, it   was ready for the presidential permit when Mr. Obama first took office in January 2009.

But he would not have it even after Hillary Clinton,  Obama’s secretary of state, approved the international pipeline on the grounds that it was in the national interest of the United States to have a safe oil supply from Canada.

The excuse was old, tried and true: need for more study of the pipeline’s environmental safety. The real reason, it appears, was Mr. Obama’s conviction that the Keystone would keep the United States “addicted” to oil as America’s primary source of energy.

Mr. Obama came to office determined to “kill” coal and oil and made no secret about it. In that sense, Americans, and everybody else, should have known what lay ahead.

Mr. Obama, it has emerged, takes his own rhetoric seriously and his own words confirm it: Though at that point he had only secured the 2008 presidential nomination and it would be ten weeks before voters had their say, Mr. Obama proclaimed his nomination alone was the moment when oceans stopped rising and the planet began to heal.

Well, if that isn’t superhuman hutzpah, I don’t know what is. But I defer to Charles Krauthammer, the Harvard-trained psychiatrist who found his true calling in journalism and conservative thought. The Washington Post columnist and Fox News commentator has repeatedly addressed Mr. Obama’s high self-esteem that, to a reader, is indistinguishable from self-exultation.

At the shortest,  Mr. Obama’s conduct with respect to the XL Keystone has stopped surprising two years ago and I no longer see political calculations as his real reason for spiking the pipeline. What I see is blind belief that the Canadian pipeline as a symbol of evil.

The revealing point here is that the president of the United States must know the Alberta oil sands crude is already feeding the Gulf of Texas refineries, getting there by highway and rail tankers.

Both transportation modes are infinitely more dangerous to life and the environment.

Democratic Senators facing reelection in November have joined Republicans in demanding that Mr. Obama remove the block he has put in the Keystone’s path.

But nothing seems to matter, not even the loss of the Democrats’ majority in the Senate.  Mr. Obama is set on the slaying demon Alberta oil, and that’s the way it is.