The Keystone XL Pipeline project, delayed once again by the Obama administration for further environmental study, will in no way damage the nation's ecology, a Newsmax panel concludes.
"There's nothing left to study. It won't have a negative effect on the environment,'' economist and University of Maryland professor Peter Morici told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV.
"I don't know why environmentalists are against this other than that they're against everything . . . This is starting to be silly," he said Monday.
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Morici said the argument that the project will not create employment is wrong.
"To say that the pipeline isn't going to create jobs is not merely ignorant . . . There's ignorance, there's willful ignorance and there's willful and destructive ignorance — this is an example of willful and destructive ignorance," he said.
"Not only won't this thing hurt the environment, but we're going to lose jobs . . . The last I heard, refinery jobs pay real good. There's only one problem, it's really hard to find a guy with an Obama button working on an oil rig, that's the problem here."
Seton Motley, founder of Less Government, agreed that the nation's environment is safe.
"There's so many pipelines crisscrossing in the United States, it's like being at a Grateful Dead concert, so I don't see how this one additional pipeline is going to be at all damaging to the environment," he said.
"This is almost exclusively an opportunity for vulnerable Democrats in energy-productive states, and frankly, any Democrat running for office, [because] it gives them an opportunity to bash the president.
"They need to distance themselves from him on Obamacare so they can yell about something else and show some room between themselves and the president on something else."
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