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President Obama right to stand up to House GOP, Big Oil
The same House Republicans who drove the country to the brink of default last summer now want to hold American families hostage to the profits of Big Oil. President Obama is right to stand up to this special-interest pleading and insist on putting our families first.
Time is running out on payroll tax credits and unemployment benefit extensions set to expire at the end of the month. With unemployment at 8.6 percent, Congress must decide whether to do away with benefits that can help families stay afloat while giving our struggling economy a boost.
And yet, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, says the only way he and his fellow House Republicans will extend these credits and benefits is if Obama agrees to fast-track a decision on the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.
Obama said Wednesday he won't accede to that legislative blackmail, because a rush to judgment on the tar sands pipeline could put the health and prosperity of Americans at risk while needlessly endangering our environment. The president has got it right.
The GOP leadership claims on its website that the pipeline “would create over 100,000 jobs.”
No, it will not.
The project would provide, at most, about 6,000 temporary construction jobs, according to independent analysis performed by the U.S. State Department and, separately, Cornell University. For that matter, even TransCanada, the Canadian pipeline company that wants to build the project has said it would create only “hundreds” of permanent jobs in the United States.
It’s the ranches and farms, more than a quarter of a million of them, that provide the real jobs in the Great Plains states the pipeline would pass through.
The pipeline would put all that at risk.
The tar sands produce bitumen, a low-grade crude oil, through a process that is destroying Canada's Boreal Forest, one of the last truly wild places on earth. Already, tar sands producers in Canada have created an industrial wasteland the size of Chicago, stripping out or drilling into native forests, carving out four tons of sand and clay for every single barrel of bitumen they produce, and putting at risk watersheds, animals and an entire way of life for native peoples.
The process, moreover, produces three to four times the pollution that is driving climate change than is caused by the production of conventional North American crude oil. The carbon emissions from tar sands production are so onerous that the process has jeopardized Canada's commitment to addressing the global warming that threatens us all.
TransCanada has routed it smack through the Great Plains, the breadbasket of America.
The pipeline would cross more than 2,000 American waterways, from the Yellowstone River in Montana to Pine Island Bayou in Texas. It would threaten rivers, lakes and streams with the same kind of pipeline accidents that gushed 42,000 gallons of crude oil into the Yellowstone River last summer, and nearly 20 times that much tar sands crude into Michigan's Kalamazoo River the year before.
President Obama wants to put Americans back to work. He's not going to put our farmers, our ranchers, our croplands and our environment at risk, though, for a handful of temporary construction jobs on a project to further enrich Big Oil.
Instead, he's going to assess the Keystone XL proposal based on what's good for the country, exactly as he's required to do under the terms of the Executive Order George W. Bush signed to guide our presidents on the oversight of international pipelines like this one.
In the meantime, it's up to Congress to decide whether the American people are entitled to short-term benefits to help families that are hurting get through tough times. That decision, yes or no, shouldn't be adulterated by special-interest bidding.
Susan Casey-Lefkowitz is director of international programs for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
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