President Obama OBLITERATES Any Republican Hopes That Keystone XL Will Be Approved [View all]

Transcript:

THE PRESIDENT: Well, for those of you who haven’t been following this, the Keystone pipeline is a proposed pipeline that runs from Canada through the United States down to the Gulf of Mexico. Its proponents argue that it would be creating jobs in the United States. But the truth is it’s Canadian oil that’s then going to go to the world market. It will probably create about a couple thousand construction jobs for a year or two, but only create about 300 permanent jobs.


The reason that a lot of environmentalists are concerned about it is the way that you get the oil out in Canada is an extraordinarily dirty way of extracting oil. And obviously, there are always risks in piping a lot of oil through Nebraska farmland and other parts of the country.


What we’ve done is I vetoed it because the Congress was trying to short-circuit a traditional process that we go through. I haven’t made a final determination on it, but what I’ve said is, is that we’re not going to authorize a pipeline that benefits largely a foreign company if it can’t be shown that it is safe and if it can’t be shown that overall it would not contribute to climate change.
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And you might think, well, you know, getting warmer, that’s no big deal — folks in South Carolina, we’re used to dealing with hot weather; we can manage. But understand that when you start having overall global temperatures go up, even if it means more snow in some places, or more rain in some places — it’s not going to be hotter in every single place, but the overall temperature is going up — that starts changing weather patterns across the globe. It starts raising ocean levels. It starts creating more drought and wildfires in some places.


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