Another sign that end times are near. The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal editorial pages agree on the Keystone XL pipeline rejection. WAPO editors:
Wednesday’s rejection, TransCanada promised to reapply — so the administration has again punted the final decision until after the election.
We almost hope this was a political call because, on the substance, there should be no question. Without the pipeline, Canada would still export its bitumen — with long-term trends in the global market, it’s far too valuable to keep in the ground — but it would go to China. And, as a State Department report found, U.S. refineries would still import low-quality crude — just from the Middle East. Stopping the pipeline, then, wouldn’t do anything to reduce global warming, but it would almost certainly require more oil to be transported across oceans in tankers.
And from the WSJ:
The central conflict of the Obama Presidency has been between the jobs and growth crisis he inherited and the President's hell-for-leather pursuit of his larger social-policy ambitions. The tragedy is that the economic recovery has been so lackluster because the second impulse keeps winning.
Yesterday came proof positive with the White House's repudiation of the Keystone XL pipeline, TransCanada's $7 billion shovel-ready project that would support tens of thousands of jobs if only it could get the requisite U.S. permits. Those jobs, apparently, can wait.
Comments
This yutz blows through a trillion of our dollars on fake "shovel ready jobs", blows billions of our dollars on worthless solar crap and electric cars no one will buy and finally, when a privately funded REAL shovel jobs opportunity drops into his freaking lap, he blocks it and defers to his ideology again.
You gotta really love this guy to look past this one, even the unions lose on this one. But the AGW nutjobz and the environutz are happy.
I'm not sure where the "tens of thoudands" figure comes from. The Keystone site claims that construction of the pipeline would only generate 13,000 jobs - but I'm not sure we want to get all that excited over jobs that will mostly go to Canadians, and are only expected to last 2 to 3 years.
When you have construction workers leaving their families behind, how many ever return to their family? It'll cost us a bundle of tax money for the AFDC and other government aid for the single parent families thus created.
The Cornell University Global Labor Institute says there will be perhaps 50 permanent US jobs created. I don't know if that number is correct, but I can't find any other estimates on permanent US jobs crreated. If we are paying $1 million/year in welfare costs for every job created, it's obviously not worth it. Is that figure high? Low? I have no idea; it's just a number I plucked out of thin air. But as a conservative, I think we ought to know what the foreseeable consequendes are; it's bad enough that we have to deal with the unforeseeable ones are.