Today I voted no on the Keystone XL Pipeline bill because it is a bad deal for American taxpayers and a disaster for the environment. The bill leaves U.S. taxpayers on the hook to pay for any oil spills because it fails to close a loophole allowing TransCanada Corp. and other companies that produce, ship or refine tar sands oil to skip out on paying into a fund for cleanup costs. The bill ignores the long-term effects of destroying Canada’s boreal forests and overlooks the fact that tar sands oil emits 81 percent more carbon pollution than average crude. And the promise of hundreds of thousands of jobs and lower prices at the pump is false. The pipeline would create fewer than 10,000 short-term jobs; after construction, it would require just 35 permanent workers, hardly enough to justify ripping through more than one thousand miles of U.S. soil and allowing a foreign entity to use eminent domain to take property from American homeowners. As many of you know, I strongly believe in the benefits of infrastructure investment but I cannot support this bill. It is merely a political ploy that’s being driven by deep-pocketed oil companies that stand to make billions of dollars shipping oil overseas, which only drives down manufacturing costs for our foreign competitors.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Nov 2014 18:20:12 +0000
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