GOLDSTEIN: Keystone killer Joe Biden now wants more of Canada's oil
Article content
U.S. President Joe Biden’s brain must be an irony-free zone.
Having killed the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office on Jan. 20, 2021, he’s now looking for ways to increase shipments of Canadian oil to the U.S..
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal Tuesday, “Biden administration officials are seeking ways to boost oil imports from Canada … but … they don’t want to resurrect the Keystone XL pipeline that Biden effectively killed on his first day in office … deliberations are in early stages and no clear-cut solutions have emerged.”
Ideas being considered are shipping oil by rail to American refineries — more expensive, more polluting and less safe than by pipeline — in concert with increasing the flow of oil through Canada’s existing pipelines.
The Trudeau government has said it’s looking to increase Canadian oil production by about 200,000 barrels per day, plus the equivalent of 100,000 barrels per day of natural gas, to help replace Russian oil and natural gas globally.
Biden’s problem is that he’s trying to do two incompatible things simultaneously.
He wants to lower U.S. greenhouse gas emissions as part of his “green” agenda, which means raising the price of gasoline, while reducing the price of gasoline for American drivers as the Democrats face looming mid-term elections, which means increasing greenhouse gas emissions.
He’s caught because global energy needs have changed dramatically since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March, 2020, exacerbated by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine six weeks ago.
Whatever dreams Biden, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and European leaders may still entertain about powering their nations with wind turbines and solar panels in a decade or two, the world has changed.
What their countries need now are vast and secure supplies of oil and natural gas as they attempt to power themselves out of global recession caused by the pandemic, while also dealing with the global energy security threat posed by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, given that Russia supplies 45% of Europe’s natural gas imports and 10% of the world’s oil.
That’s why Biden has been begging corrupt oil giants like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela to increase oil production after he killed Keystone, which former U.S. president Donald Trump revived in 2017.
That happened after Biden’s former boss, U.S. president Barack Obama, killed Keystone in 2015, after seven years of dithering, even though his own State Department told him twice that since the demand for oil wasn’t going away, transporting it by pipeline would produce fewer emissions than by rail.
Only 8% of the Keystone XL extension — which both former prime minister Stephen Harper and Trudeau supported — had been built when Biden scrapped it last year.
That makes it doubtful it would have been ready to transport oil today, even if Biden had revived it.
Nor would Keystone XL have been a cure-all for U.S. or global energy security — increasing Canadian oil exports to the U.S. by 830,000 barrels a day, a fraction of total exports of four million barrels a day.
But it could have been one part of the solution to reducing the world’s reliance on Russian oil and natural gas, as opposed to the current magical thinking in North America and Europe that we can do it by building more wind turbines and solar panels.
Just for starters, neither can provide base load power to the electricity grid on demand.
Postmedia is committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion. Please keep comments relevant and respectful. Comments may take up to an hour to appear on the site. You will receive an email if there is a reply to your comment, an update to a thread you follow or if a user you follow comments. Visit our Community Guidelines for more information.