Keystone XL: Forget for a minute the sheer stupidity of stopping a pipeline that creates jobs at no cost to U.S. taxpayers. The harm done to Canada merits some attention as well.

Depending on your point of view, Barack Obama’s decision last week to block the Keystone XL pipeline is a triumph for radical greenies, a job killer, a potential boon to China or a cynical political ploy.

Actually, it’s all of these. One thing it’s not is good for Canada. That fact deserves more play than it’s getting. Canada doesn’t deserve to be the victim, as it is now, of election-year American politics.

There’s good reason why Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper (as his office put it) “expressed his profound disappointment” when President Obama told him about the Keystone XL decision.

Pipeline projects like this one are beneficial to the U.S., but for Canada they are more crucial. They give that nation a way to profit from Alberta’s vast tar-sands oil reserves, which are far larger than what our northern neighbor needs for its own uses.

Without a way to get that oil to seaports, refineries and global shipping, Canada is cut off from the world’s markets. It might as well leave most of the oil in the ground.

That’s exactly what environmental movements on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border want to see. For them, the Keystone XL issue is not about which route the pipeline would take from Canada to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast.

Even rerouted around the Ogallala Aquifer, it still would be wrong from their point of view. They oppose Keystone XL because it would boost the extraction and consumption of oil.

Thanks to a sympathizer in the White House, the environmentalists won at least a temporary victory last week. TransCanada Corp., the company that would build Keystone XL, can reapply for the cross-border permit that Obama denied it, and it seems intent on doing so. But the delay — until at least next year — also gives time for opponents to regroup. What once looked like almost a sure thing is not so anymore.

In Canada, Harper’s Conservative government is pro-oil and pro-pipeline. In fact, it wants two pipelines to be built from the Alberta oilfields. One is Keystone XL. The other, Northern Gateway, would cross the Rockies to the British Columbia coast, where crude would be shipped to China. So even without Keystone XL, Canada has a Plan B to ship its oil, and China stands to benefit at the expense of U.S. refiners and consumers. That much has been widely noted.

Article source: http://news.investors.com/Article/599156/201201261856/stopping-keystone-xl-no-way-to-treat-canada.htm

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