Fact Checking the GOP Keystone Propaganda Machine

The Keystone XL pipeline is on the top of the 114th Congress' agenda and the GOP propaganda machine is in full swing. 

On Sunday, Senator John Barrasso (R-Wyoming) appeared on Meet the Press where he told host Chuck Todd that the Keystone bill would be the first legislation to land on President Obama's desk this year and that the President should sign it because it would mean 42,000 new jobs.

"(Obama's) own State Department said it's 42,000 new jobs," Barrasso said.  "He's going to have to decide between jobs and the extreme supporters of not having the pipeline."

what eye thynk:  Fact-checking would seem to be in order here. 

Jobs:
The Republican claim of 42,000 jobs is a classic case of cherry-picking the numbers and  leaving out the parts that make their argument a bit less compelling. 

1. The State Department did NOT, in fact, state that Keystone would create 42,000 new jobs.  It DID say that the project would "SUPPORT" 42,000 direct and in-direct jobs--99 percent of which would be temporary, ending when the pipeline was completed in approximately two years.  
2. The State Department DID estimate that, once the pipeline was completed, it would result in only 35 full-time jobs and 15 temporary contractors.
3. TransCanada, the company that wants to build the pipeline, estimated that the project would create no more than 2,500 to 4,650 temporary construction jobs that would last approximately 24 months.

Currently, the U.S. is adding 50,000 jobs per week, so as Philip Bump of the Washington Post noted, "Even if the 42,000 figure were hard, fast, and long-term, the effect on the national economy would still be modest.  But that figure isn't hard, fast, or long-term." 

But it does make better television than admitting the real figure is 35.

The Environment:

The Republican party likes to call opponents of the pipeline environmental "extremists," because, well, science--and the Koch brothers--are involved. 

Last March, FactCheck.org, an independent project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, published a pretty good analysis of all aspects of the pipeline.  I don't pretend to understand everything I read, but their pipeline conclusions seem pretty compelling.

(In fairness, their analysis also cited safety issues with shipping tar sands oil through the U.S. by rail--issues, however, those could be resolved with more stringent regulations.)

Re: emissions  

1. "Well-to-tank" figure--The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service found that producing and processing oil from tar sands produces 70-110 percent more greenhouse emissions than the average fuel now used in the U.S. 
2. "Well-to-wheel" figure--The CRS found that getting tar sand oil out of the ground and into our cars results in 14-20 percent more greenhouse emissions.  The State Department's final report put that figure at 17 percent.
3. Translating those figures for the common man, the CRS said that oil flowing through the Keystone XL pipeline "would result in an increase in U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases equivalent to adding somewhere between 770,800 and 4.3 million passenger vehicles."

Re: safety

1. According to the Department of Transportation, over the past decade, an average of 4.1 million gallons of "hazardous liquids" have been spilled each year. These spills have resulted in more that $263 million in annual property damage.
2. In 2010, Enbridge Oil, another Canada oil company, saw one of their pipelines rupture dumping more than a million gallons of oil into Michigan's Kalamazoo River--the same type of tar sands oil TransCanada wants to send through our heartland. Enbridge is still struggling to complete that clean-up after missing a December 31, 2013 deadline.
3. In 2011 alone, TransCanada reported eleven oil spills along their pipelines; however, they claim that Keystone will be safe.  They acknowledge there will be "minor" environmental disruptions but say they are outweighed by economic factors.
4. In 2013, voters in British Columbia rejected a proposed tar sands pipeline in their territory citing environmental and safety concerns.

TransCanada's claim that Keystone will be safe may look good on paper, but there is no evidence to support it.  Looking at TransCanada's and the Canadian oil industry's record in general, it is inevitable that Keystone will eventually suffer a rupture.  Will TransCanada still see it as "minor" when the rupture results in the contamination of our Ogallala Aquifer?  How many acres of farmland does the U.S. have to lose before they would call it a "major" disruption?

And whose "economic factors" are they talking about?  Canada oil will be extracted in Canada by Canadian workers before flowing through the U.S. to ports along the Gulf of Mexico, where it will be loaded on Canadian oil tankers to be shipped elsewhere for processing.   The only "positive" U.S. economic factors I can see are the profits that will find their way into the pockets of the Koch brothers, who own a large stake in TransCanada, and people like Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) who began purchasing shares in Canadian oil companies in 2009, just as the Keystone debate was heating up.  

It appears that the Republican party wants the U.S. to take an environmental risk that some of Canada's own citizens have rejected, so that Canada oil companies (and a select few wealthy Americans) can increase their net worth--all so the U.S. can add 35 permanent jobs.  At the risk of being called an "extremist," I'm going to go out on a limb here and say this is a bad deal for the United States.