President Obama Obliterates Any Republican Hopes That Keystone XL Will Be Approved

President Obama appeared to crush all Republican hope that Keystone XL will ever be approved while he is president during a town hall in South Carolina.

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THE PRESIDENT: Well, for those of you who haven’t been following this, the Keystone pipeline is a proposed pipeline that runs from Canada through the United States down to the Gulf of Mexico. Its proponents argue that it would be creating jobs in the United States. But the truth is it’s Canadian oil that’s then going to go to the world market. It will probably create about a couple thousand construction jobs for a year or two, but only create about 300 permanent jobs.

The reason that a lot of environmentalists are concerned about it is the way that you get the oil out in Canada is an extraordinarily dirty way of extracting oil. And obviously, there are always risks in piping a lot of oil through Nebraska farmland and other parts of the country.

What we’ve done is I vetoed it because the Congress was trying to short-circuit a traditional process that we go through. I haven’t made a final determination on it, but what I’ve said is, is that we’re not going to authorize a pipeline that benefits largely a foreign company if it can’t be shown that it is safe and if it can’t be shown that overall it would not contribute to climate change.
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And you might think, well, you know, getting warmer, that’s no big deal — folks in South Carolina, we’re used to dealing with hot weather; we can manage. But understand that when you start having overall global temperatures go up, even if it means more snow in some places, or more rain in some places — it’s not going to be hotter in every single place, but the overall temperature is going up — that starts changing weather patterns across the globe. It starts raising ocean levels. It starts creating more drought and wildfires in some places.

It means that there are entire countries that may suddenly no longer be able to grow crops, which means people go hungry, which then creates conflict. It means diseases that used to be just in tropical places start creeping up, and suddenly we’ve got a whole new set of, say, insect-borne diseases, like malaria, that we thought we had gotten rid of, now they’re suddenly in places like the United States.

We start running out of water. It puts stresses and strains on our infrastructure. Hurricanes become more powerful when the water is warmer, which means a lot of our coastal cities and towns are put at risk.

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I just want you to understand, what I just described, it’s not science fiction, it’s not speculation. This is what the science tells us. So we’ve got to worry about it — which is part of the reason why we’ve invested in things like green energy — trying to increase fuel-efficiency standards on cars; trying to make sure that we use more solar and wind power; trying to find new energy sources that burn clean instead of dirty. And everybody here needs to be supportive and thinking about that because you’re the ones who are going to have to live with it.

And I’m very proud of the fact that we’ve doubled the amount of clean energy produced since I’ve been President. We’re increasing fuel-efficiency standards on cars, which will save you, by the way, money at the pump. Don’t think that just because gas prices are low right now — that’s nice, it puts some more money in your pocket, but that’s not going to last. So don’t start going out and saying, oh, I’m going to buy a big gas guzzler now — right? Because the trajectory of the future is that gas — oil is going to get more expensive. It’s going to get harder to extract. We’re going to have to transition overtime to a new economy.

Those do not sound like the remarks of a president who is inclined to approve Keystone XL. In fact every time the president has spoken about Keystone, he states that he has not made a final decision, but he makes the exact argument that opponents of the pipeline use.

It is easy to see that there is virtually no chance that Keystone XL will be approved while Barack Obama is president. The president is not giving Republicans a shred of hope. It is obvious that he doesn’t support the pipeline, and his remarks were a destruction of the Republican hope that Keystone will ever be approved.

In other words, President Obama intends to continue to stand up for clean energy, and Democratic values by opposing the Keystone XL pipeline.