How Obama Shocked Harper as Keystone's Frustrator-in-Chief
On Thursday, Nov. 10, 2011, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, seated in his Ottawa office across from Parliament Hill, took an urgent call from U.S. President Barack Obama. Harpers advisers were listening intently around a muted speakerphone in an adjoining room.
The State Department, Obama said, would be making an announcement later that day putting the Keystone XL pipeline project on hold. There was no choice, according to the president. Nebraska wanted the route changed to protect a key aquifer under millions of acres of prime farmland. This would necessitate a new environmental assessment. He assured Harper the call wasnt a game changer; neither a yes nor a no, just a delay.
Harper was far from assured -- he was irritated. The project had already undergone three years of study and was, so the Canadians believed, on the cusp of approval. Delay, he told Obama, served no ones interest.
By the time Harper hung up, according to people with knowledge of the episode, he had sized up the potential economic calamity for Canada and its oil ambitions. Western Canadas land-locked Alberta oil sands hold roughly 168 billion recoverable barrels of heavy crude known as bitumen. America gobbles up almost all of Canadas oil exports. An energy research group in Calgary had run the math: If Keystone died, it could cost Canada C$632 billion ($573 billion) in foregone growth over 25 years -- 94 percent of it from the economy of Alberta, the province Harper calls home.
So here was Obama, in Harpers view, jeopardizing Canadas welfare by throwing a sop to his anti-Keystone environmental supporters. He had blinked and might well blink again. A year or two could be three or four. Or never.
Continued at Link:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-24/how-obama-shocked-harper-as-keystone-frustrator-in-chief.html
truedelphi
(32,324 posts)The new EIR comes out saying the project is a go.
I guess the delay is better than a full steam ahead approach.
The Obama I voted for in 2008 would outright nix the project.
At least, events over the last five years have prepared me for this.
proverbialwisdom
(4,959 posts)louis-t
(23,295 posts)through this country is that Canada won't allow it to go to their coasts.
truedelphi
(32,324 posts)Why? because it is important to stress the Jobs Jobs Jobs this would bring to people int he states that get the Pipeline.
Plus the issue of honorariums for Hillary Clinton and Obama.
Bill Clinton got some $ 100K per speech in front of Corporate Podium when he left office.
That set the standard pretty high. With inflation, the payments have to go higher, I guess.