Obama rejects Keystone XL pipeline plan

Score one for Mother Nature.

On Friday, November 6, President Barack Obama announced that he withdrew support for the Keystone XL pipeline plan. With Vice President Joe Biden and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry standing with him at a press conference, Obama said the pipeline wouldn’t have served the country well.

The pipeline wouldn’t have been a big jobs creator, he said, so Congress should pass an infrastructure plan. It wouldn’t have lowered gas prices, which have recently been falling. Shipping dirtier crude oil into the country wouldn’t have served well the country’s energy needs. Finally, going through with the plan would’ve hindered efforts to stop climate change.

He said the transition to a clean-energy economy will take time, so we’ll still have to rely on gas and oil. Even so, the country is making strides in using clean energy.

A couple of days before, the U.S. State Department told TransCanada, the company that wanted to build the pipeline, that it would not grant a request to suspend review of the project. TransCanada said that it will continue to show that the pipeline would be in the United States’s best interests.

As one would expect, Republican presidential candidates all cried foul, repeating the refrain that the pipeline would create jobs. Still, Obama made the right decision. This country needs to fight climate change, not make it worse or the oil industry richer.

The environment takes precedent here, so any action that can be taken to stop climate change should be.

Follow me on Twitter at @JosephFGargiulo.

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Here’s Obama announcing his rejection of the pipeline plan:

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