Time to finally free America from corrupt oil regimes

The world’s top environmental policymakers have finally put their heads together and announced something that makes for sound environmental policy.

The Keystone XL pipeline would funnel crude oil from Canada to the U.S.’s gulf coast refineries. The pipeline would stretch 1,700 miles and carry as much as 700,000 barrels of oil a day from tar sands in Alberta to refineries in Texas.

Unfortunately, on Nov. 10, the U.S. State Department announced that it would be delaying its decision on the pipeline until 2013, conveniently after the presidential election. The Obama administration has once again put politics before the welfare of our nation.

This initiative could significantly diminish our dependence on foreign oil from the Middle East and Venezuela. However, instead of allowing the proposal to go forward, President Obama intends to delay it. He claims that the reasoning behind suspending the project is to give its developers time to devise a blueprint around Nebraska’s Sandhills, a region that supplies water to eight neighboring states.

It’s not difficult to read the tea leaves here. Obama has allowed special-interest groups to dictate his decision-making. The majority of these environmentalist groups are simply wolves in sheep’s clothing.

These aren’t big-money men, so why would the president be so concerned with their issues? It’s blatantly clear that the decision to delay the Keystone pipeline is purely political, and the president is using environmentalists as the scapegoat.

On the website of the TransCanada Corporation, which will build the pipeline, there is an independent study that states that Keystone’s construction “will create 20,000 high-wage manufacturing jobs in American and an additional 118,000 indirect jobs in the supplier and service sectors during construction.” It’s estimated that the project could contribute an additional $149 billion to the U.S.’s gross domestic product between 2011 and 2035.

Given our country’s current economic state, we can hardly afford to pass up any project that creates thousands of jobs.