President Joe Biden's Energy Department quietly admitted that canceling the Keystone XL pipeline caused lost revenue and jobs, the Conservative Brief reported. Biden nixed the project through executive order on his first day in office.
The Keystone XL pipeline was years in the making, beginning in 2008. A Canadian energy company sponsored the project that would not only have created jobs but also would have secured energy independence in America.
Regardless of those facts, Biden was eager to cancel the project and overturn former President Donald Trump's energy agenda. Critics at the time pointed to the lost jobs, revenue, and diminished energy independence.
However, the administration scoffed at those points at the time, including mentioning that the jobs created would be temporary. Now the Department of Energy released a report last month with its year-end analysis that demonstrates how right his critics were.
The DOE claimed that "the high-end figure overstates jobs" lost, but some estimates found between 16,149 to 59,468 jobs evaporated because of the cancellation. The report also acknowledged that the pipeline, which would pipe oil from Canada down to the Gulf of Mexico, would have added approximately "$3.4 Billion (or 0.02 percent) to the United States Gross Domestic Product."
That flies in the face of Biden's claim in his executive that building the pipeline "disserves the U.S. national interest." Biden's concern was more that "its construction and operation would not be consistent with U.S. climate goals, and it would undermine the global energy and climate leadership role of the United States."
It seems that the woke environmental agenda won out in the end, and Americans lost. Energy prices are soaring in part because of the valid perception that the administration is not interested in easing the burden.
It's not so much the pipeline itself but rather the message its cancellation sent to the market. "Biden’s reversal of the cross-border permits for the pipeline kicks off a regulatory onslaught on the petroleum industry’s value chain, with unprecedented breadth, assertiveness, and tangible investment impacts," Robert McNally, a former adviser to President George W. Bush and president of energy consulting firm Rapidan Energy Group, said.
"Though this reversal won’t damage the oil industry much, and it isn’t absolutely essential to American oil right now, there are long-term consequences to this decision," he added. This prescient prediction came shortly after Biden's inauguration in February 2021.
"Oil’s next price boom will scramble industry and political priorities," McNally continued. "The price and supply security of oil will go right to the top. Oil is, after all, the lifeblood of modern civilization," he added.
"And our dependence on oil is going nowhere fast, no matter how fast electric vehicles arrive." McNally then predicted exactly the crisis faced today, where reliance on foreign oil has translated to problems at the pump for ordinary citizens.
The DOE report is a stunning admission, including the loss of jobs. However, the labor unions most impacted have been silent on this issue, no doubt because there's a Democrat in the White House, Fox News reported.
"The Keystone XL pipeline project will put thousands of Americans, including Teamsters, to work in good union jobs that will support working families," former general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Jim Hoffa, said in August 2020 when the deal was finalized. "We believe in supporting projects which prioritize the creation of good jobs through much-needed infrastructure development."
America is more reliant on foreign oil, billions of dollars poorer, and out of thousands of jobs. Somehow, even with these admissions in the report, Biden still seems to be getting a pass.
