Smoke Screens And Enormous Lies, Boehner And The XL Pipeline

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TransCanada has threatened to go to the Chinese with their oil, piping it over the Rockies to the port in Vancouver, BC. Republicans would have you believe that once there, all the oil would be destined for overseas consumption. That’s possible, but it is a pretty silly argument considering there are US refineries just to the south of Vancouver in the Puget Sound. Additionally, if the oil is piped to the Gulf Coast, the destination would still be shipped to foreign markets. In the mean time the effort to see the oil head south continues.

House Republicans and the Tea Party nation are screaming up a storm about all of the jobs that are not being created without this project. They’re pointing at the Obama administration, claiming that the President is standing in the way of thousands of US jobs and lower energy costs for the American consumer. All lies.

Estimates vary on how many jobs are at stake, depending on which right wing mouth piece you listen to. The US Chamber of Commerce claims 250,000. According to gas bag Rush Limbaugh the project will create 200,000 jobs. For his part, House Speaker Boehner put the number at 100,000 during a Meet the Press appearance on January 22nd. The American Petroleum Institute has the highest figure I could find claiming 435,000 lost jobs.

So what is the real number? According to TransCanada, the company which stands to make multiple billions off of the pipeline, that number is 20,000. While that is dramatically less than the numbers put forward by John Boehner and magical rightwing number generators, it is still quite a few jobs by most measures. It sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? Not everyone agrees however. According to the US State Department analysis, half of these jobs are actually in Canada. Furthermore, TransCanada counted the jobs twice. The 20,000 total comes from 10,000 temporary employees working each year, for two years, to complete the project. They doubled the number, apparently to make it look good.

With half of these jobs being north of the border, a real estimate of temporary jobs created in the US is closer to 5,000. A very in-depth report by Cornell University puts the realistic number as low as 2,500 actual US jobs. After construction, these jobs disappear. The number of permanent jobs in the US directly involved in the maintenance and operation of the pipeline is much lower. In an interview with CNN on November 11th of last year, Robert Jones, Vice President of TransCanada gave his best wild-ass-guess, “[We’re] probably looking at…from Montana to Houston, I don’t know, [job creation] in the hundreds.”

There is no questioning that these jobs would have real paychecks that Americans would be happy to have, but with a total of only a few hundred permanent jobs for US workers, it’s important to look at the costs of these jobs. At one point, regions of the upper Midwest paid higher prices for their fuel than other areas of the country because oil had to be trucked from the Gulf coast to the refineries in the north. That changed in recent years with the increase of oil flowing out of the sands of Alberta.

If the pipeline is completed, this cheap source of crude will be taken away. According to Canada’s National Energy Board, it is expected the cost of crude in 15 states will increase by an annual total of between $2 and $4 billion. The real cost to consumers is an increase of 10-20 cents per gallon over current prices. That is a lot of money to ask of residents of the upper Midwest for an addition of permanent jobs totaling “in the hundreds.”

“Every barrel of oil that comes out of those sands in Canada is a barrel of oil we don’t have to buy from a foreign source,” ~ Rick Perry

If TransCanada can get its crude to a port, it will then be available to sell it on the global market at a considerably higher price. Once on the Gulf Coast this oil will be of very little benefit to the US public. The tar oil will trade at the same prices as oil from any other source, including oil from the Middle East. The quantity projected is insignificant enough that its addition to the world supply will not reduce prices globally or domestically.

With all this evidence, it’s clear this has nothing to do with creating jobs in the US, as John Boehner would have you believe. It also has nothing to do with reducing energy costs for US citizens, which it won’t. In fact, one likely reason that Boehner is so willing to lie to you and the American public about the job numbers and energy supply is that he stands to make a boat load of money should this deal go through. He owns stock in Canadian oil companies.

In his 2010 financial statement, Boehner shows, for one, ownership of between $15,000 and $50,000 in Canadian Natural Resources, a major player in the Canadian tar sands industry. Strangely, if you look at his reported assets for 2009, before approval of the pipeline was being discussed, the Speaker did not own any Canadian oil stocks.

Coincidence?

Republicans are now trying to push this project forward by stripping the US State Department of it’s authority to be the permitting agency. Although Obama would still have the ability to veto the bill, that move would be sold to the willing as an example of the President standing in the way of US Jobs. Don’t be fooled! Know full well, this is nothing more than a political favor for Big Oil to the north and a deal that would make the Speaker of the House a handy profit.

Greenpeace recently sent a letter to the Security and Exchange Commission asking them to investigate congressional leadership and TransCanada on the grounds that they used inflated numbers in an effort to deliberately mislead the American public. Let’s hope the SEC does the right thing and initiates an investigation.

John Boehner, you lie and you suck.

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Written by: Dave Grimmer on February 18, 2012.
Last revised by: Justin "Filthy Liberal Scum" Rosario