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Forbes
Keystone XL Amounts To America's
Pipeline Vs. President Obama's
Cronies
The
implacable foes of the Keystone XL pipeline, a $5.2 billion
proposal to transport petroleum from the oil sands of Canada to U.S.
Gulf Coast
refineries, see little but greed behind the project.
They’re
right that the fate of the pipeline is closely tied to
moneyed interests—but not in the way they would like you to believe.
The
project guarantees thousands of middle-class jobs. But
President Obama had blocked the project. Why? According to
environmental
publication Inside Climate News: to placate “wealthy donors he can
count on to
help him get what he wants.”
Consider
billionaire Obama donor Tom Steyer, who has formed a
political action committee to lobby against Keystone XL. Steyer wrote
an open
letter in June warning “Obama to reject pipeline or face backlash,”
according
to the Washington Post. (The Post, by the way, supports Keystone XL,
faulting
environmentalists for fighting the wrong war.)
Steyer
portrays himself as a climate activist and
environmentalist. Yet his fortune is tied to investments in the oil and
gas
industry. One of the biggest holdings of Steyer’s hedge fund, Farallon
Capital
Management, is Kinder Morgan—an oil and gas pipeline company that owns
or
operates 80,000 miles of pipelines and 180 terminals in North America.
Kinder
Morgan KMI +0.85% is proposing to expand TransMountain
pipeline, a competitor of Keystone XL. “If Keystone XL is killed, it
will leave
TransMountain as the only game in town for transporting [Alberta] oil
directly
from the oil sands to export terminals,” reports Investor ‘s Business
Daily.
Read
the rest of the article at Forbes
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