According to a study issued last month by his own Energy Department, President Joe Biden’s decision to reject the Keystone Pipeline on his first day in office cost the US economy 59,000 jobs and $9.6 billion in economic growth.
The projected 875-mile pipeline would have connected existing pipelines to American refineries and safely transported up to 830,000 barrels of oil per day from the Canadian border to Steel City, Nebraska.
Keystone Pipeline Costs Thousands Of Jobs
Far-left environmentalists who want to raise the cost of gas for working people fought the project for years before Biden eventually denied the last permit required to start construction.
Sens. Steve Daines (R–MT) and Jim Risch (R–ID) passed a bill mandating the Energy Department to publish a report on how many construction jobs were lost as a result of Biden’s denial of the permit, which was then followed by Biden’s denial.
The Energy Department ultimately released the analysis on December 23, months after it was due to be made public. It revealed that 59,468 two-year temporary jobs and 50 permanent positions were lost when the project was abandoned.
The Keystone XL project, according to the Department of Energy (DOE), would have generated between 16,149 and 59,000 jobs and a positive economic impact of between $3.4 and $9.6 billion, according to a report released in late December without any public notice.
Three thousand nine hundred direct employment and 21,050 total jobs would be produced throughout the construction, which was anticipated to take two years, according to a prior federal report released in 2014.
Infrastructure Costs
But immediately after assuming office in January 2021, Biden rescinded the pipeline’s permits, effectively shutting the project down.
This refusal of the Keystone XL permit is not the only thing Biden has done to make infrastructure construction in the United States more difficult. The federal permitting procedure has also undergone significant rollbacks under his administration. Every infrastructure project funded by the federal government will now cost more money.
The National Environmental Policy Act, passed in 1970, gives environmental activists the authority to sue the federal government to halt any federal infrastructure project. Whether or whether they have a valid argument, they can easily create protracted delays.
Since NEPA’s passage into law, the cost of building interstates has tripled, ranking the United States as one of the world’s least effective investors in infrastructure. The typical environmental evaluation mandated by NEPA now lasts thousands of pages and takes an average of four and a half years to complete.
The Trump administration made modifications to the NEPA process in July 2020, mandating all NEPA reviews to be completed within two years and putting tight page restrictions on the reports.
In addition, these amendments abolished mandates that government projects include climate change and other indirect environmental implications in their environmental regulatory assessments.
Regrettably, the Biden administration undid these reforms. Democrats may claim to be the party of “supply-side liberalism,” but unless they seriously consider allowing reform, they will never be able to lower the cost of infrastructure in this nation.
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