Politics

Attn, Obama: Three Reasons to Build Keystone XL Pipeline

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So a bill to push the Keystone XL Pipeline failed to get enough support in the Senate yesterday. It's likely that when the new, GOP-controlled Congress takes over in 2015, something similar will sail through and President Barack Obama will veto or otherwise quash plans to build the thing.

A year and change ago, Reason TV released "3 Reasons to Build the Keystone XL Pipeline." Take a look above and go here for a full writeup.

Vote or no vote, veto or no veto, this much is pretty clear: There's something seriously wrong when the government is able to stymie the building of a private project. Yes, there are eminent-domain abuse issues surrounding some aspects of the pipeline and those should be dealt with. But there's simply no good argument for the government holding up things. This isn't about jobs (the numbers, real and imagined, in those sorts of scenarios are always guess work and it's not the government's job to create jobs anyway) and it's not about the environment (the Canadian petroleum products are going somewhere, so the idea that not building the pipeline will reduce global warming or whatever is simply cant). But given their willingness to support any sort of taxpayer-funded boondoggle (and the temp jobs those useless projects generate), the liberal Democratic opposition to building the pipeline is really just bald hypocrisy.