Keystone XL Not Good for Much But a Laugh

House Speaker John Boehner has been speaking alright. For polluters. (Official U.S. House Portrait)
Shovel-ready jobs.  America needs them.  But we also need shovels for the imaginary job claims of the Koch brothers, the oil lobby and now House Speaker John Boehner.

The speaker is adamant about doing Big Oil a big favor for the holidays and forcing a rider to unrelated middle class tax relief.  To sell a project that NWF’s senior Vice President Jeremy Symons said amounts to the “next oil disaster,” the Speaker has adopted the rhetoric of his pals in the polluter lobby who would be enriched by building a dangerous tar sands pipeline called Keystone XL.

In a press conference this week, Symons said:

“A year after the BP disaster in the Gulf, Speaker Boehner is ready to create America’s next oil disaster by bypassing regulators and rushing a project. Tar sands oil is corrosive and more dangerous to pipelines than regular oil, and tar sands pipelines are leaking across the nation at an unprecedented rate. The first keystone tar sands pipeline is only a year old and it has already leaked 14 times. Transcanada has agreed to re-route around the fragile Sand Hills, but the pipeline will still cross the Ogallala Aquifer and put this vital clean water supply at risk.”

The pipeline will also explode carbon emissions that are heating the planet, kill wildlife, and crush U.S. efforts to get off of dirty fuels.

Ah, but we get jobs, right?  Not so much.  The industry will say anything to have their payday, anything but the truth that is.

The one actual job study not funded by polluters was done by Cornell University’s Global Labor Institute. Their conclusion: Keystone XL is likely to kill more jobs than it creates.

Ok, so we will get something like 50 steady jobs from this pipeline, but as Cornell asks, at what cost to our economy.  Canadian tar sands are the most expensive source of oil on the planet, and a long-term addiction to tar sands oil will drain out economy of a trillion dollars that we need to keep here in America.

No one did a better job in shoveling the industry’s rhetoric back in their faces than Stephen Colbert, who strung together a string of Fox News clips that bluster bigger and bigger job lies.  Finally, Colbert tops them all, saying there will be ‘billions of jobs!’

Take ActionBig Oil has big plans to jeopardize America’s clean energy future by expanding the production of tar sands oil–one of the most destructive, dirty, and costly fuels in the world. Urge your members of Congress to stop the Keystone XL pipeline.