Embrace Keystone XL Pipeline, Says... Bill Clinton?

Wow, looks like Bill is at least a little bit to the right of Barack on this one:

Bill Clinton says it’s time to build the Keystone XL pipeline.

Speaking at an Energy Department conference in Maryland on Wednesday, the former president said he was surprised the project has gotten as gummed up as it has, laying the blame on pipeline builder TransCanada.

“One of the most amazing things to me about this Keystone pipeline deal is that they ever filed that route in the first place since they could’ve gone around the Nebraska Sandhills and avoided most of the dangers, no matter how imagined, to the Ogallala [aquifer] with a different route, which I presume we’ll get now, because the extra cost of running is infinitesimal compared to the revenue that will be generated over a long period of time,” he said.

“So, I think we should embrace it and develop a stakeholder-driven system of high standards for doing the work,” Clinton added.

Okay, Bill is both right and wrong above. He’s right that it’s time to just build the pipeline. But it’s not the company’s fault that Obama has been playing politics with approval. I’m sure that if they’d chosen a different route the extreme greenies would have found some other reason to oppose it, and Obama would have played the same political games as a sop to his base.

Speaking of offering a sop to the greenies, Bill has to or risk losing invitations to DC dinner parties:

Meanwhile, Clinton said he worries that increased domestic oil and natural gas production could allow many in the U.S. to lose interest in investing in other, newer cleaner forms of energy.

“There are some hazards to the innovation project, right now. We have massive new recovery technologies in oil and gas which could lead us down the primrose path of thinking [that] we don’t have to keep using less energy and developing clean energy and technologies,” he said.

“A lot of people are saying, ‘Let’s just go for this and nothing else,'” he said, after discussing the oil production in places like the Bakken Shale in North Dakota.

Nice straw man there, Bill. Tell me, who are these “people” who are saying “let’s just go for this and nothing else,” and how many constitute a “lot”? Strangely, you seem unwilling to give specifics about it. In fact, conservatives support everything from coal to nuclear power, because we know that oil reserves are finite. But while we have those oil reserves, by all means, let’s use them until other technologies are ready for prime time.

However, for his support, tepid though it is, of Keystone XL, I’ll give him one tepid kudo.