Keystone

It’s interesting the President Obama’s decision to vote “present” on the Keystone pipeline has dropped from the news. As usual, the media would prefer not to prolong stories that reflect poorly on their annointed politician. After all, in a time of unprecedented joblessness for the "99 percent," it’s really very difficult to explain how a project that would lead to thousands of “shovel ready” jobs for “hard-working” Americans could be shelved in an effort to placate the radical environmental lobby.

But that’s not really what happened. By voting present, i.e., by delaying a decision, Barack Obama guaranteed that the Greens would support his 2012 campaign monetarily. But at the same time, the promise that the pipeline might be approved guaranteed that the labor unions, who are unequivocally in favor of it, would also contribute millions to his re-election. Always follow the money.

But the world moves on. A few days ago, Canadian Natural Resources Minister, Joe Oliver, wrote an “open letter” in Canada’s Financial Post . In the aftermath of Keystone, he writes:

Canada is on the edge of a historic choice: to diversify our energy markets away from our traditional trading partner in the United States or to continue with the status quo.

Virtually all our energy exports go to the United States. As a country, we must seek new markets for our products and services and the booming Asia-Pacific economies have shown great interest in our oil, gas, metals and minerals. For our government, the choice is clear: we need to diversify our markets in order to create jobs and economic growth for Canadians across this country. We must expand our trade with the fast-growing Asian economies. We know that increasing trade will help ensure the financial security of Canadians and their families.

But it appears that the same forces that threaten to derail our national efforts to attain energy independence, to build better infrastructure, and to introduce new technologies are at work in Canada. Oliver continues:

Unfortunately, there are environmental and other radical groups that would seek to block this opportunity to diversify our trade. Their goal is to stop any major project, no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth. No forestry. No mining. No oil. No gas. No more hydroelectric dams.

These groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda. They seek to exploit any loophole they can find, stacking public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill good projects. They use funding from foreign special-interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest. They attract jet-setting celebrities with some of the largest personal carbon footprints in the world to lecture Canadians not to develop our natural resources. Finally, if all other avenues have failed, they will take a quintessential American approach: Sue everyone and anyone to delay the project even further. They do this because they know it can work. It works because it helps them to achieve their ultimate objective: delay a project to the point it becomes economically unviable.

Anyone looking at the record of approvals for certain major projects across Canada cannot help but come to the conclusion that many of these projects have been delayed too long. In many cases, these projects would create thousands upon thousands of jobs for Canadians, yet they can take years to get started due to the slow, complex and cumbersome regulatory process.

Sound familiar?

The Green Movement claims to sit on a higher moral plane—“saving the planet” is, after all, a calling that few can criticize. But in reality, they are just another lobbying group that reflexively argues against forestry, mining, oil production, hydroelectric energy, nuclear energy, even solar and wind energy. They are the 21st century’s Luddites.

But worse, their moral hubris seems to discount the very real needs of the 99 percent—you know, the 99% who need jobs and (in the near term) affordable gasoline so they can get to those jobs, the 99% who need affordable electricity rates so they can keep the lights on in their homes, the 99% who purchase fuel oil so that their home can stay warm in the winter.

So while Barack Obama and his Green friends give speeches about saving the planet, combating “climate change,” and controlling the rapacious corporations who rape the land and its people, the 99% remain jobless and broke. No worries … there’s no story there, let’s all just move along.