Democracy in America | Keystone XL and the president's veto

Fuelling anger

The political energy wasted on this project far outweighs its economic significance

By D.K. | WASHINGTON, DC

BARACK OBAMA has vetoed only three bills in his time in the Oval Office: less than almost any president in recent history (see chart below). His veto of a bill authorising the Keystone Pipeline yesterday suggests that number will be rising fairly swiftly. With Republicans now in control of both houses, Mr Obama will be faced with far more decisions like this. The politics is simple: the Republicans want to trap the president into rejecting as many popular ideas (or at least ideas that Republicans like) as possible.

The Keystone Pipeline makes for an odd case study. The amount of political energy expended on it far outweighs its economic significance. Republicans made it one of their first priorities in Congress. Democrats are also obsessed with it. In December Mary Landrieu near enough staked her career as a lone Senate Democrat from the Deep South on getting it approved (she lost Louisiana's run-off election). On the other side of the argument, senators such as Barbara Boxer of California have joined environmentalists in claiming that the project is “extra lethal”.

In reality, the Keystone Pipeline is a very modest piece of infrastructure. Supporters argue that it will create lots of jobs, but a State Department report estimated that the project will need only 3,900 full-time construction workers. Most of these jobs would be in places such as Montana, which does not have an unemployment problem. More work will be created through the indirect stimulus of spending, but even optimistic estimates put this figure at around 30,000 or so jobs—or barely a tenth of the number currently being created by the American economy every month.

On the other hand, arguments that the pipeline will be an ecological disaster also overstate things. Certainly, the extraction of Canadian oil from tar sands in Alberta involves serious environmental degradation, and building the pipeline will indeed help to encourage this by lowering the costs of transporting such dirty oil. But the oil is for the most part already being extracted, and much of it is being taken to market by train. Worse, trains, unlike pipelines, have a tendency occasionally to derail and catch fire. In 2013, more oil was spilled from rail cars in the United States than in the previous four decades combined. In the absence of any other action to prevent the exploitation of Canadian oil, a pipeline may at least better protect the extracted oil and the land through which it is transported.

The trouble with the project then is that it has become a political weapon. Unlike bigger topics such as immigration reform, or battling the Islamic State, this one is relatively uncomplicated and the dividing lines are clear. Republicans can thus use it to whack the president for his supposed failure to create jobs, without upsetting anybody or showing up the fractures in their loose coalition. For Mr Obama, it is a chance to appease environmentalists in his base. And so the debate will go on. The best hope for the rest of us is that the fall in oil prices makes extracting Canadian oil unprofitable and the whole thing goes away.

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