An Opportunity Lost

Breitbart.com is reporting today that the Canadian government has approved plans for the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project, which will move 600,000 barrels a day of Alberta oil to the pacific coast town of Kitimat, British Columbia, where a new state-of-the-art super tanker port facility will be built to ship the oil to thirsty Asian ports. Obviously, this will create a large number of jobs for Canadians. I don’t begrudge the Canadians the economic boom that will be the result of this decision, but it is frustrating to me that America had the first chance to enjoy the economic boom the Keystone XL Pipeline would have brought. That chance is gone, and the oil will be used to build the Canadian and Chinese economies instead of the American economy. The environmental impact is no less than it would have been if America built the Keystone Pipeline, but because of President Obama’s continuing putting off of the project, America has lost the opportunity to have a reliable energy source close to home.

The article reports:

Rather than purchasing crude from a friendly and allied neighbor, the United States will most likely need to continue its reliance upon hostile sources like Venezuela. Energy analysts had hoped that construction of Keystone could have replaced almost half of the current U.S. daily crude purchases from that volatile, anti-American dictatorship, depriving Venezuela of the resources it relies upon to stay in power and fund its Cuban allies. 

Refusal to approve Keystone has forced suppliers to deliver their flammable crude via thousands of trucks and railcars traveling on America’s highways and railroads, rather than in a pipeline.  

The negative economic growth in the first quarter of 2014 is not the result of weather–it is the result of the bad economic policies of the Obama Administration. We need a Congress with the backbone to institute good economic policies regardless of what the President does.