Senators get it right on Keystone

Cheers to Montana Sens. Max Baucus and Jon Tester for pushing for legislation that would call on President Barack Obama to approve the Keystone XL Pipeline as soon as possible, for the sake of jobs.

But it doesn’t appear approval will come any time soon from Obama, who cavalierly dismissed the number of jobs the pipeline would create in a speech last week. The president claims the pipeline would generate “about 2,000 construction jobs and maybe 150 permanent jobs.”

This goes beyond a low-ball estimate and into the territory of the completely misleading propaganda that is constantly spewed by a cabal of climate alarmist organizations that are hell-bent against any and all fossil fuels.

What the president is claiming is that it will take just 2.5 construction workers to build every mile of the 835-mile pipeline, and he is completely dismissing other jobs that would be related to the project.

A report from Obama’s own State Department estimates it will involve 4,000 annual construction jobs and it might be able to support an additional 42,000 jobs in other fields. Why wouldn’t he cite those numbers?

Consider that the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline, which is almost the same length, created tens of thousands of jobs and increased the population of its southern terminus at Valdez by 7,000.

We know how activity in the Bakken oil field, even though most of it is in North Dakota, has economically radiated across the state of Montana. Oil-rig activity involves all kinds of support far away from the rigs, from trucking to construction to service industry jobs.

But Baucus and Tester choose not to get into a tussle over exactly how many jobs Keystone would create.

“Jobs are jobs and we can’t afford to be turning them down,” Baucus said. “The president’s own State Department has released three studies showing there will be no harm to the environment. There are no more excuses left. The Keystone Pipeline should be built today, and we will keep beating the drum until it’s approved.”

Indeed, there are no excuses left, except in the minds of environmentalists who have no regard for the cost of energy and all regard for curbing carbon, no matter the economic impacts. They are fighting on all fronts, resisting new coastal shipping terminals that would accommodate increased fuel exports; they are at complete war with coal, and their opposition to Keystone is an attempt, along with legislative and legal maneuvering, to stymie extraction of oil from Canada’s tar sands.

But it doesn’t stop there for environmental elitists who are pushing levers at the highest levels in their war on carbon, even if it is detrimental to some of the poorest people on Earth.

Last month, the U.S. Export-Import Bank and the World Bank announced they would restrict financing for coal-fired power plants except in “rare circumstances.”

That effectively halted financing for a 1,200-megawatt coal-fired plant in northern Vietnam, a country that currently has about one sixth of the generation capacity of Germany even though the two have comparable population sizes. Groups that oppose the Vietnamese plant include Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace USA, Pacific Environment, the Center for International Environmental Law and the Center for Biological Diversity. Some of those names should sound familiar, because they’ve had a hand in thwarting timber sales right here in Northwest Montana.

They claim they have the higher moral ground because they are “saving the planet,” but really they are an industry that financially thrives on continuous environmental conflict. There is nothing moral about denying poor people the economic opportunities that come with affordable energy, or killing jobs, whether they are related to Appalachian coal mines, Montana timber sales or the Keystone XL Pipeline.

Editorials represent the majority opinion of the Daily Inter Lake’s editorial board.