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. Harper’s 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 wasn’t 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 one’s 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 Canada’s land-locked Alberta oil sands hold roughly 168 billion recoverable barrels of heavy crude known as bitumen. America gobbles up almost all of Canada’s 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 Harper’s view, jeopardizing Canada’s 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. That the U.S. couldn’t be counted on to take Canada’s oil came as a shocking epiphany, said a former senior government adviser with knowledge of the call who asked not to be identified because the person isn’t authorized to speak publicly.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-24/how-obama-shocked-harper-as-keystone-frustrator-in-chief.html
This story gives interesting insight into the Canadian/American political and economic relationship and Keystone's effect on it. Keystone might also represent a missed opportunity. Since denying the Keystone pipeline won't stop the tar sands oil (bitumen) from being developed, indeed moving it by rail will increase emissions, perhaps we should press Canada to offset some of the damage in other ways. Canada has been on the receiving end of criticism for it's "dirty oil" business and environmental practices. Would a better solution not be to cooperate on an environmental plan that allows for Keystone, but in such a way that creates a positive environmental impact through changes in their environmental laws.
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