Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) and Alberta Premier Jason Kenney together used a May 17 Capitol Hill hearing to eviscerate President Joe Biden’s policies on energy production.
The first topic was Biden’s economically and environmentally senseless killing of the Keystone XL pipeline. [bold, links added]
In answer to the senator’s questions, Kenney said that killing the pipeline will make it more difficult and expensive to move Canadian oil to U.S. refineries; the oil that is still moved will instead be forced to go by train or truck, which is “less environmentally friendly.”
When asked by Barrasso if Biden’s decision “increased costs, harmed the environment, and added to our supply-chain troubles,” Kenney said, “I think that’s a reasonable conclusion.”
Kenney said in his testimony that Keystone would have been able to move 830,000 barrels of oil per day, with contracts already in place for 800,000.
Barrasso noted that is “significantly more than the 670,000 barrels a day of oil we imported from Russia in 2021.” Kenney agreed that if Keystone had been built, Canada would have been able to “replace that Russian oil.”
Barrasso then noted that, strangely, “President Biden has pleaded with OPEC and Russia to increase oil output and has worked to remove sanctions on oil exports from Venezuela and Iran.”
Asked what he thought of that, Kenney said, “We find it inexplicable that the government of the United States has been more focused on encouraging additional OPEC production than Canadian production.”
Let’s, uh, drill down on this. The irrefutable fact is that Canadian production developed by U.S. refineries would support considerable jobs and cost savings for both.
Add that to Biden’s seeming obsession with blocking production on U.S. land and waters, an obsession so strong that he is refusing to issue a legally mandated new five-year plan for lease sales, and it starts to seem this president lives in some sort of bizarro world in which he favors foreign production by dictatorial regimes with weaker environmental regulations over domestic production by U.S. workers observing some of the strongest environmental regulations on Earth.
It’s almost as if Biden wants to undermine U.S. interests. But that would be giving him credit for having a clue in the first place.
Read more at Examiner
