The Obama administration's
refusal to move forward on the Keystone XL pipeline is a sign that the president cares more about the backing of powerful environmental lobbyists than creating jobs in America according to one congressman.
Rep. Bob Latta of Ohio, a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, told J.D. Hayworth, and John Bachman on "America's Forum" on Newsmax TV that with respect to the Keystone pipeline he "came to the conclusion that this president is going to go with… the environmentalist over labor" at the expense of the health of the domestic economy.
"What he's actually doing is he's hurting the United States because we're looking at a pipeline that would be about 1700 miles long, a $7 billion dollar private project by TransCanada," Latta said. "The State Department even said that we're probably looking at least some 40,000 jobs during that time frame of construction to get this thing built, which would bring 830,000 more barrels of oil floating in the United States that we'd be refining, that we'd be doing something with and Americans would have jobs with.
"Listening to the Canadian ambassador on Friday, they are totally upset with this administration because this has been year after year after year that they're not taking any type of action except always delaying it and the Canadians don't have much of a choice here. Pretty soon, they might have to build a pipeline to the east coast of Canada, of course bypassing the United States and you know, again hurting Americans."
Story continues below video.
In addition to sacrificing thousands of jobs, Latta said that by continuing to drag his feet President Obama is also preventing the U.S. from becoming energy independent and benefiting from a global climate in which Europe is looking for alternatives outside of Russia from which to purchase energy.
"When you look at the rest of it, it's really sacrificing North American energy and independence for the United Sates," Latta said. "The president has had a pretty much failed foreign policy, you can see what's happening in Crimea and the Ukraine and when I've spoken with foreign ambassadors from Eastern Europe, they would love to be able to buy LNG [liquid natural gas] from the United States and say that we don't want to buy Russian energy, they want something from America.
"When the United States now is the largest country in the world and being able to produce natural gas — we're going to pass Saudi Arabia in oil production in 2020 — why don't we want to become the world's number one producer of energy and at the same time making sure that America is secure and safe and say that we don't need to buy oil or any other energy from any place else from the world except from North America?
"You know, this is mind boggling."
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.