Say yes to pipeline

The comparison of a proposed 1,700-mile oil pipeline from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Texas coast to the Obama administration’s green energy agenda plays out like a Monty Python sketch.

Most of President Obama’s fantastical green-energy boondoggles are thinly disguised taxpayer handouts to big Democratic campaign donors to create temporary jobs that vanish when the subsidies run out. These schemes have the long-term effect and stated purpose of driving energy prices higher and holding back economic growth.

In contrast, the Keystone XL pipeline would be built by private industry, using more than $2.5 billion in U.S.-made steel pipe, and create at least 5,000 multi-year construction jobs, most of them in the United States. All the proponents want from Uncle Sam is for the president to say, “OK, build it.”

Yet so beholden is the president to his “progressive” constituency that he can’t bring himself to approve the project, even as he tours the country, ballyhooing yet another plan to hike taxes to “create jobs.”

Environmentalists fear the pipeline could cause an ecological disaster. That’s what they said about the Trans Alaska Pipeline, which was built 40 years ago through far more difficult mountain and permafrost terrain, using more primitive monitoring and safety technology than is available today, and which has operated for decades without disaster.

Besides, Canadian “tar sands” oil is going to go somewhere. Do we want to allow private industry to create more jobs refining it in Texas, reducing America’s dependence on volatile and hostile foreign producers, or would we rather the Canadians turn to Plan B and pipe their oil to the Pacific Coast, then ship it to China via tanker, the most ecologically hazardous method of transport currently available?

By the way, whose power plants burn cleaner, America’s or China’s? And where do the prevailing winds carry the smoke and soot from China’s more primitive plants?

The Los Angeles Times reported Monday the administration may come up with a way to delay a decision until after next year’s election by insisting the Canadians, over whom Washington has no jurisdiction, come up with a way to produce the oil without “generating greenhouse gases.”

Or, in other words, “Learn how to speak Chinese.”

Any economic recovery requires energy, and the cheaper the better. America is awash in cheap coal and natural gas and could easily add this source of cheaper oil, as well. Yet instead of simply stepping aside and letting private industry goose our economy, the president and the Senate leadership now block coal-fired plants, oil drilling and this pipeline.

Other nations can authorize in weeks projects that Washington now routinely stalls for years. Delays imposed by an absurd three-year review process already have cost the backers of this $7 billion project an estimated $1.9 billion.

OK this pipeline, Mr. President. Do it now.