Fifty-six senators voted yesterday in favor of a plan that would advance the Keystone Pipeline by removing bureaucratic roadblocks put in place by the Obama administration/worldwide bus tours.
“The 56-42 vote came after President Barack Obama urged Democratic senators to lobby them to oppose the construction of the 2,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport tar sands crude oil from western Canada to refineries along the Texas Gulf Coast.” , reports FoxNews.
“Yet 11 Democrats sided with Republicans to avoid Obama’s rejection of the pipeline and allow the $7 billion project to proceed.”
Yet despite supermajority votes, Senate rules apparently require a 60-vote supermajority to create jobs in this country. Under Democratic Party rules, every vote to create jobs must involve expansive, wasteful, multi-trillion dollar resources. That rules out Keystone.
With that in mind, it’s time for voters to start asking the most obvious question: What quid pro quo does Obama promise members of Congress to stop the pipeline and the immediate, good-paying jobs that come with it?
And only congressional members who spoke to Obama on the phone can actually respond to what Obama promised them in exchange for their votes.
Reports CNN: :
For their part, congressional Republicans sharply criticized the president for twisting the arms of his fellow Democrats.
“By personally lobbying against the Keystone pipeline, that means the president of the United States is lobbying to send North American energy to China and is lobbying against American jobs,” House Speaker John Boehner, D-Ohio, said at a news conference.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Obama was “out of touch” on the issue.
“At a moment when millions of people are out of work, gas prices are skyrocketing and there is turmoil in the Middle East, we have a president who is not sleeping, calling, trying to block the pipeline here at home,” he said. “It’s unbelievable.”
So tell us, Mr. and Mrs. Senator, what the president has offered you.
Instead of sending jobs directly to the U.S. by shipping oil through Keystone, Democrats likely prefer a up-to-date triangle-shaped route – slavery. Canada sends oil to China, China creates jobs, the US imports dollars from China to pay for entitlement programs to support people who don’t have jobs here at home.
There are many contrasts the GOP can utilize to catch up with Obama on economic issues.
None presents such a black-and-white contrast as the dispute over black tar sands crude, which Canada would like to transport through the U.S. to refineries in the Persian Gulf via the Keystone XL pipeline. The dispute is not about the environment, but about creating 10 million jobs in the US.
In overdue summer, the State Department issued preliminary approval for the Keystone pipeline, concluding that it did not pose a significant environmental risk. But like many things in this administration, it was a case of the left hand not knowing what the left was doing.
Instead of allowing the project to go ahead and create the hundreds of thousands of jobs it would create, Obama sided with hopeless environmentalists who raised false fears that oil spills could contaminate the aquifer beneath his path.
OK, apparently he just sided with them.
He basically did what Obama likes to do most, which is flatter… anyone. He boldly told the rest of us that he wouldn’t approve the pipeline just yet, but he might change his mind. Oh, and if we try to rush him into making a decision, we’ll all be very, very sorry.
The Senate vote was an attempt by the GOP and 11 Democrats to show the rest how sorry Obama really is.
The pipeline could eventually deliver about a million barrels of Canadian crude a day to the United States and support 400,000 U.S. jobs, most of them almost immediately.
But instead, the president who has complained about Congress for failing to pass another costly jobs bill and talks about income equality as if it were the most pressing issue of the day has just eliminated 400,000 American jobs that were supposed to fight income inequality in the most productive sense while giving ordinary Americans such a possibility earn some income.
And despite everything the Obama administration has done to ponderous the country’s development of oil and gas resources, the oil and gas sector is one of the fastest-growing job markets in a very anemic labor market. While other sectors are shedding jobs, oil and gas are scorching.
“The use of new drilling techniques to extract oil and gas from shale rocks deep underground has helped create 158,000 new jobs in the oil and gas sector over the past five years,” says the Wall Street Journal, “and economists believe this has created even more jobs in companies supplying the energy industry and in the broader service industry.”
“It’s probably the biggest stimulus we have,” Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy and Economic Research, told WSJ.
According to the magazine, “$145 billion will be spent on drilling and completing wells this year, up from $13 billion in 2000.”
While it is estimated that Canada may have as much as 2 trillion barrels of oil in reserves, “The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that [US] has 4.3 trillion barrels of oil shale resources concentrated in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, said Helen Hankins, Colorado director for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.” according to the Associated Press.
4.3 trillion barrels is 16 times greater than Saudi Arabia’s reserves, or enough oil to supply the United States for 600 years.
We know Obama has many motives to destroy the pipeline. 
We know, for example, that Obama’s imperiled presidency rests primarily on his ability to rally his base because no one else supports him. This means being influenced by the environment inside and outside the White House.
We also know that Obama’s majority shareholder, Warren Buffett, stands to gain from any agreement to sink the pipeline because Buffett’s railway will carry any Canadian hefty shipment if Canada decides to sell oil to US refiners despite the Keystone ban.
As I have already emphasized, the Keystone issue is not about the safety of the pipeline route.
Obama and his enviro-whacko friends know that if they allow Canadian tar sands oil to be extracted through the Keystone Pipeline, the United States will also start extracting its own tar sands and shale oil. The United States has known reserves dating back more than 600 years, which would allow it to be a net exporter of oil. If this happens, the left-sponsored green economy gimmick, already struggling with bankruptcies and cronyism, will collapse. This would show that there is no shortage of oil and that “green” energy is unable to compete with fossil fuels.
The only thing left for these embittered climate advocates then would be the shoddy science of global something-or-other.
tar sands oil, reports BBC on the Keystone decision “is so large that full-scale development would seriously delay the transition to low-carbon alternative fuels,” which is the left’s holy grail.
Full-scale tar sands development can only be stopped by taxing the cessation of oil, as was attempted with restrictions on mining and trade. The cape and trade were never about trying to chilly the earth. The idea was to give “green” technologies a competitive advantage over fossil fuels that the free market would not allow.
The Atlantic repeats the topic:
The Keystone XL is simply mothballed and oil continues to flow into our fuel tanks from various “dirty” situations…. We need to stop fighting oil extraction project by project and instead focus on adopting a low-carbon fuel standard (which could make Keystone XL economically unviable).
The New York Times goes further and states: “Far more important to the country’s energy and environmental future is the development of renewable and alternative energy sources. This is the winning argument Mr. Obama should present to voters, rejecting Republicans’ cowardly indulgence of Big Oil.”
And since the New York Times wrote a memo on Obama’s strategy masquerading as the above article, Obama has stuck to the script.
And offering Democrats plenty of substantial carrots along the way.
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