“Whether or not the United States adds another 1,200 miles of pipe to a national petroleum pipeline network already spanning 190,000 miles was never a factor in any nation’s decision to join the Paris Climate Treaty.”
One of President Biden’s first official acts on Inauguration Day was to rescind the construction permit for the Keystone XL pipeline (KXL).
... contempt for market-driven investment, disdain for American wage earners, and glee in harming industries progressives do not like.
TransCanada Energy Corporation (TC Energy) has been waiting a long time for this rejection.
TC Energy first applied for a permit to build the pipeline in September 2009.
Despite multiple State Department reviews over a six-year period, all concluding that construction of the KXL is the low-carbon option, President Obama rejected the application in November 2015.
President Trump laid the groundwork for reversing Obama’s decision in March 2017, directing federal agencies to expedite environmental reviews and approvals for “high priority infrastructure projects.”
In March 2019, Trump authorized TC Energy to build the KXL.
An Obama-appointed judge tied up the pipeline in litigation in 2018 and 2020.
... the project employed more than 1,000 union workers until the Biden-Harris administration shut it down on January 20.
If completed, the 1,178-mile KXL would have transported up to 830,000 barrels per day of crude oil from Alberta, Canada, to Steele City, Nebraska.
From there, other segments of the Keystone system, completed during 2011-2016, to the substantial benefit of local economies and tax bases, would have transported the oil to Gulf Coast refineries.
President Biden’s revocation of the permit simultaneously scuttled the project labor agreement TC Energy had signed with four U.S. labor unions: the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA), the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the International Union of Operating Engineers, and the United Association of Union Plumbers and Pipefitters (UA).
TC Energy estimated the project would pay $3.4 billion in wages to U.S. and Canadian workers, create “more than 10,000 high-paying construction jobs that will be filled primarily by union workers,” and support tens of thousands of other jobs.
... UA president Mark McManus criticized the Biden administration for putting “thousands of union workers out of work”:
In revoking this permit, the Biden Administration has chosen to listen to the voices of fringe activists instead of union members and the American consumer on Day 1.
... “Keystone XL pipeline of today” is “dramatically different” from the project rejected by the Obama-Biden administration.
Under the project labor agreement negotiated between TC Energy and the unions, TC Energy committed to invest $1.7 billion to operate the pipeline with renewable energy.
TC Energy also pledged to invest $10 million in a “green jobs” training program.
While such tithings are novel, the new KXL is not “dramatically different” from the old because, as mentioned above, the KXL was always the low-carbon alternative.
The Obama-Biden State Department’s environmental assessments repeatedly found that rejecting the pipeline would not stop Canadian crude from reaching U.S. refineries.
Rather, the oil would just flow to U.S. markets by less energy-efficient means—trains, barges, and smaller pipelines.
Blocking the KXL could increase transport-related carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 42 percent.
More importantly, as climatologist Paul C. Knappenberger pointed out, using the Obama EPA’s own climate policy calculator, a model called MAGICC, even if we make the totally unrealistic assumption that all Keystone crude is additional petroleum that would otherwise remain in the ground, running the pipeline at full capacity for 1,000 years would add less than 1/10th of one degree Celsius to global warming.
Climatologically, Keystone XL was, and remains, climatologically irrelevant."
