The Cost Of Keystone XL's Murder: $175 Billion (And Counting)

by JASmius



Just a reminder of what Barack Obama and his greenstremist minions have cost us, both in economic activity, needlessly high gas prices, and unnecessary oil imports from some of our worst enemies:

The Keystone XL pipeline has the potential to bring huge gains to the United States, including energy independence, increased security and jobs. The $8 billion, 1,179 mile line, to be operated by Canadian firm TransCanada, would run from Montana to Nebraska and deliver an estimated 830,000 barrels a day of crude to refineries located along the gulf coast. At today’s price of crude at $51.76, this would gross over $42 million dollars a day or roughly $15 billion per year.

TransCanada has waited since September 2008 for authorization of the pipeline. With crude oil prices at a ten year low, approximately $175 billion in economic activity has been unrealized due to the delay.

The U.S. would benefit significantly from increased oil imports from Canada as it would lessen our reliance on imports from more unstable areas of the world such as the Middle East, Russia and Venezuela.

According to the Energy Information Agency, the U.S. imported approximately nine million barrels per day of petroleum in 2014 from eighty countries with the bulk of its oil imports from Canada, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Russia.

Since 2009, the U.S. has paid over $1 trillion to these top five countries with just over half of it going to Russia, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. [emphases added]

Time was when that arrangement would have been considered a bad thing.  But not anymore, I guess.  Even though Keystone XL is not an "environmental threat," even though it would created thousands of actual "good jobs and good wages," even though it would bolster American energy independence and lower gasoline pump prices, Barack Obama and the Left continue to stand stubbornly in the way, in the extremist throes of their pagan, anti-energy zealotry that maintains that only actual energy sources - i.e. fossil fuels and nuclear energy - are "evil" and "threats" to be stamped out, and non-energy "sources" - gentle breezes and sunbeams - must be our ONLY sources of energy, even though they only produce enough to keep lights on in "blue" enclaves and nowhere else.

And that is, after all, all the leftwingnuts care about.