Obama administration rejects Keystone pipeline
WASHINGTON — President Obama announced Friday that his administration has rejected the Keystone XL Pipeline project after more than six years of review.
"The State Department has decided that the Keystone XL pipeline would not serve the national interest of the United States," Obama said in a 10-minute announcement at the White House with Secretary of State John Kerry and Vice President Biden. "I agree with that decision."
But even as he rejected it, Obama downplayed the importance of the decision, saying the project had an "over-inflated role in our political discourse." The pipeline, he said, was neither a "silver bullet for the economy" nor "the express lane to climate disaster."
Obama combined his statement on the Keystone rejection with a comment on Friday's positive jobs report, saying the latter proves that the economy is expanding and that the pipeline would make little difference.
"So while our politics have been consumed by debate over whether or not this pipeline would create jobs and lower gas prices, we have gone ahead and created jobs and lowered gas prices," he said.
Prep for the polls: See who is running for president and compare where they stand on key issues in our Voter Guide
Republicans blast Obama's rejection of Keystone pipeline
Obama said he spoke Friday morning to Justin Trudeau, the newly elected Canadian Prime Minister who had supported the project. "While he expressed his disappointment, given Canada's position on this issue, we both agreed that are close friendship on a whole range of issues, including energy and climate change, should provide the basis for even closer coordination between our countries going forward."
He also confirmed publicly for the first time that he will attend the international climate conference in Paris in three weeks, and said the United States must lead by example. "If we're going to prevent large parts of this Earth from becoming not only inhospitable but uninhabitable in our lifetimes, we're going to have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground rather than burn them and release more dangerous pollution into the sky," he said.
The final determination on Keystone comes 2,604 days after Transcanada first applied for State Department approval to build the 1,179-mile cross-border pipeline from Alberta or Nebraska. Earlier this week, the State Department rejected the company's request to delay a final determination.
The State Department had received more than 5 million comments on the proposal. Under an executive order signed by President George W. Bush, the application triggered reviews by the departments of State, Defense, Justice, Interior, Commerce, Transportation, Energy, Homeland Security, and the Environmental Protection Agency. The final decision rests with the Secretary of State unless any agency disagreed, in which case the final determination is made by the president.
Most agencies had no objections, with the Interior Department and the EPA expressing the strongest concerns. In the end, Kerry said all eight agencies consulted on the State Department determination agreed.
Kerry's determination was signed on Tuesday, but announced Friday. "The critical factor in my determination was this: moving forward with this project would significantly undermine our ability to continue leading the world in combating climate change," Kerry said in a written statement.
As those reviews dragged on, Congress passed a bill in February that would have short-circuited that review and approved the pipeline. Obama vetoed that bill, saying it undercut the established procedure and didn't allow for a thorough determination of whether the pipeline is in the national interest.
Transcanada said it remains "absolutely committed" to the project. "We will review our options to potentially file a new application for border-crossing authority to ship our customer's crude oil, and will now analyze the stated rationale for the denial," said company CEO Russ Girling.
Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, thanked Obama "for protecting the health of the American people and the health of the planet by rejecting the ill-advised Keystone tar sands pipeline, which would have brought the filthiest oil known to humankind into our country in large amounts."
But while lauded by environmentalists, labor unions called the decision "shameful."
"President Obama today demonstrated that he cares more about kowtowing to green-collar elitists than he does about creating desperately needed, family-supporting, blue-collar jobs," said Terry O’Sullivan, the general president of the the Laborers’ International Union of North America.
Republicans touted the project as a job creator, often making claims it would create as many as 42,000 jobs. But the vast majority of those jobs were temporary or supplier jobs. Once built over two years, the pipeline was expected to employ less than 50 people.
The decision sets up what could be a key issue in the 2016 campaign, as Republicans tie the decision to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state who began the review and opposes the project. As Obama spoke, Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio vowed to re-instate the pipeline if he wins the White House.
"The Obama administration's politically motivated rejection of the Keystone XL Pipeline is a self-inflicted attack on the U.S. economy and jobs," said former Florida governor Jeb Bush, R-Fla.