Keystone Pipeline to be Nixed (Updated)

Fox News just said the decision from the Department of Energy on the Keystone XL Pipeline, which would take oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, will be “No.”

DoE says 60 days is not enough time to complete the environmental impact statements, and therefore the answer is no.

There’s no confirmation yet, but it’s unsurprising: why would the administration ever want to do anything to get us off Middle Eastern oil and create jobs?

Update (Bryan): Ed Henry tweets that the XL will be killed in an announcement this afternoon. If true, this will go down as one of the more foolish decisions this president has made. The science in support of the pipeline’s safety is solid. Nixing the pipeline forces Canada to look for another market for its oil, and China is more than happy to provide that market. The decision unnecessarily harms our relationship with our northern ally and sends the message that the United States still is not serious about reducing its dependency on unstable and hostile sources of the oil that we need to power our economy. The president would rather lose money on boondoggles like Solyndra than make a sound decision to expand our nation’s reliable sources of energy and create stable, high paying jobs.

Since I am criticizing the president, I suppose Andrew Sullivan and Newsweek will call me dumb. So be it. But this foolish president is on the verge of killing thousands of jobs in an election year, harming our relationship with an ally, while doing nothing about our dependence on unreliable sources of oil, all for no good reason.

Update (Bryan): Obama’s own jobs council is more sensible than the Department of Energy, arguing in its report that the US should adopt an “all-in” approach and should increase domestic drilling.

The report does not specifically mention the Keystone XL oil pipeline, but it endorses moving forward quickly with projects that “deliver electricity and fuel,” including pipelines.

“The Council recognizes the important safety and environmental concerns surrounding these types of projects, but now more than ever, the jobs and economic and energy security benefits of these energy projects require us to tackle the issues head-on and to expeditiously, though cautiously, move forward on projects that can support hundreds of thousands of jobs,” the report says.

The report retreats slightly from an interim report released in October that addressed the Keystone XL pipeline directly. The interim report appeared to offer cautious support for Keystone, calling on officials to “balance” environmental protections while realizing what it called the benefits of the pipeline.