Editorial: Obama's Carbon Scam Jeopardizes Keystone Jobs

The president said Tuesday the pipeline from Canada should be built if the State Department finds it will not add to carbon pollution and is in our national interest. But State already has — twice. 'Allowing the Keystone pipeline to be built requires a finding that doing so would be in our nation's interest," the president said in his speech on climate change. "And our national interest will be served only if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution." As with Benghazi, President Obama must not talk to the State Department much. For in March, for the second time, the department, tasked with ultimate approval of Keystone XL because it crosses an international boundary, said Keystone XL will have no net impact on so-called greenhouse gas emissions. The State Department found it "very unlikely" that the pipeline would affect water quality in any of the four aquifers through which it crossed. It also concluded that along one part of the proposed route, in the case of a large-scale oil spill, "these impacts would typically be limited to within several hundred feet of the release source, and would not affect groundwater." There would be no greater danger than that posed by any of the more than 50,000 existing miles of safely operating pipeline already crisscrossing the U.S., including Nebraska and the Ogallala Aquifer...more