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anceling the Keystone XL Pipeline cost the United States tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in economic activity, the Biden administration belatedly confessed last month.
According to Fox News, the Department of Energy (DOE) released a report “in late December without any public announcement” stating that the pipeline project “would have created up to 59,000 jobs and would have had a positive economic impact of up to $9.6 billion.”
Unfortunately, President Joe Biden, bowing to radical environmental activists, canceled the project’s permits on his first day in office, drawing criticism not just from Republicans but also from his erstwhile labor-union allies, who did not appreciate his destruction of thousands of anticipated union jobs.
Just how many jobs Keystone XL would have created has long been in dispute. TC Energy, the Canadian firm that operated the pipeline, initially claimed it would create 20,000 jobs, a figure then-President Barack Obama disputed, saying the number was “maybe 2,000 during the construction of the pipeline” and 50 to 100 permanent jobs thereafter. Around the same time, the State Department forecast the project would create 42,000 direct and indirect jobs during construction and nearly 4,000 direct jobs. “The project labor agreement that TC Energy signed in August 2020 with four labor unions promised the pipeline would create 42,000 American jobs and provide $2 billion in total wages,” reported Fox News. The Biden administration, which had every incentive to lowball its estimate of jobs lost to the pipeline’s cancellation, actually came in with by far the highest projection of all. No wonder it kept its report under wraps until after the midterm elections.
