(TheLibertyRevolution.com)- In a study released last month, the Department of Energy admitted that President Biden’s executive order killing the Keystone Pipeline cost the US economy 59,000 jobs and $9.6 billion in economic growth.
The proposed 875-mile Keystone pipeline would have transported up to 830,000 barrels of oil a day from the Canadian border to Steel City, Nebraska where it would have linked up with existing US pipelines to American refineries.
After Biden denied the permit needed to begin Keystone’s construction, Republican Senators Steve Daines and Jim Risch introduced legislation requiring the Department of Energy to issue a report on how many construction jobs were lost as a result of Biden’s action. And on December 23, months after the study was required to be released, the DOE finally got around to releasing it.
According to the study, in addition to the 50 permanent jobs that were lost when the project was killed, Biden’s move deprived another 59,468 Americans of two-year temporary jobs.
In a statement released by Senator Daines’ office last week, Senator Risch blasted the president for costing “thousands of jobs” and, worse, moving the United States “further away from energy independence and lower gas prices at a time when inflation and gas prices are drastically impacting Americans’ pocketbooks.”
In addition to killing the Keystone pipeline, the Biden administration also rolled back key reforms to the federal permitting process, driving up the cost of every infrastructure project tied to the federal government.
The 1970 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) empowered environmental activists to stop federal infrastructure projects in federal court, whether their cases were meritorious or not, causing significant delays.
In July 2020, the Trump administration enacted reforms to the NEPA process that required all NEPA reviews to be completed within two years and set strict page limits on reports. The Trump reforms also removed requirements that federal projects had to consider climate change and other indirect environmental impacts in environmental regulatory assessments.
But these reforms were killed by the Biden administration.
