Obama Administration Rejects Cross-Country Oil Pipeline

(Newsroom America) -- The White House on Wednesday said it will reject a 1,700-mile oil pipeline that would have transported crude from Canada to refineries in Texas because Republicans did not give the administration enough time to find a new route.

Deputy Secretary of State William Burns, in making the announcement, said the firm seeking to build the $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline, TransCanada, would be able to reapply with a new route that avoids an ecologically sensitive area in Nebraska, the National Journal reported.

The paper said the Obama administration's decision was a political reaction to Republicans' attempt to force the White House to make a decision on the pipeline sooner than 2013, the time frame set by the State Department last year after caving to pressure from environmental groups who claim the pipeline would destroy key ecosystems.

Republicans, meanwhile, fired back, saying the decision to reject the pipeline with high unemployment was unwise.

"President Obama is about to destroy tens of thousands of American jobs and sell American energy security to the Chinese," Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, said, ac. "The president won’t stand up to his political base even to create American jobs. This is not the end of this fight."

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who is running for the GOP presidential nomination, added, "The president's focused more on the next election than on the next generation."

Obama has been beset by two opposing forces within his Democratic base - labor unions, who want the project to move forward for the jobs it will create, and environmentalists who say emissions from Canadian tar sands oil deposits would harm the environment.

The White House must now deal with the fallout from its decision, which must be transmitted to Congress within 15 days, in an election year where Americans are focused much more on jobs and the economy than any other issue, the paper noted.

"This is the last day to own this issue on their terms," Kevin Book, managing director at ClearView Energy Partners, an energy consulting firm based in Washington, D.C., told the paper. "The administration gets to explain their choice before it gets explained for them."

© 2012 Newsroom America.

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