On December 4, the Dakota Access Pipeline project was put on hold when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers denied a construction permit through Lake Oahe, North Dakota, part of the 37 miles of the roughly 1,170-mile-long pipeline under Army Corps jurisdiction. Barring a reversal of Army Corps’ decision by President-elect Donald Trump when he takes the oath of office on January 20, the project must be rerouted around the lake. Trump is on record as supporting the project but has yet to issue a statement on the permit rejection.”
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“The denial by the Army Corps of Engineers of the right of way for the Dakota Access pipeline is with little doubt another case of President Obama’s over-reach. There is no technical, scientific, or engineering reason that this pipeline would create any problem for the landscape, environment, or natural resources. Therefore one must conclude that it is Obama’s death rattle attempt to continue to block capitalistic progress in our nation up until his last day in office. It clearly makes the case for President-elect Trump to begin undoing, on his very first day in office, the damage Obama has created.”
Jay Lehr
Science Director
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
312/377-4000
“President Obama continues to punish Rural America with his anti-energy policies.”
“Denying the pipeline, which is needed to transport approximately 470,000 barrels of oil per day from North Dakota to Illinois, is emblematic of the disdain and disregard President Obama has shown for Middle America throughout his presidency.”
“Rural Americans need jobs in agriculture, forestry, mining, and oil and natural gas production because these jobs typically pay much higher wages than other jobs typically available to them. The Obama administration has threatened to make life harder for rural America at nearly every turn through over-regulation, such as his proposed Water of the United States rules, and fighting pipelines and oil and natural gas development whenever possible.”
“It’s no wonder rural America turned out en masse in November to thumb their nose at the sitting president.”
Isaac Orr
Research Fellow, Energy and Environment Policy
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
312/377-4000
“The Obama Administration’s stopping completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline is part of a longstanding policy to thwart use of our abundant, inexpensive, and geographically distributed fossil fuels and replace them with unreliable, expensive, and vast-land-requiring solar, wind, ethanol from corn, other biofuels, etc.”
“American taxpayers are big losers from all these disruptions. It costs at least $10 a barrel more to ship North Dakota oil by rail compared to pipelines; so the 500,000 barrel per day pipeline would have saved consumers $5 million daily or $1.8 billion annually. Destruction to property and payments for law enforcement has to be additional hundreds of millions. On top of this madness, pipeline transportation is far safer than any other means. Everyone must have forgot the rail tankers that exploded in Canada a few years ago that destroyed a downtown Quebec Province city.”
James H. Rust
Professor of nuclear engineering (Ret.), Georgia Tech
Policy Advisor, The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
312-377-4000
“President Obama has again shown his extreme disdain for the rule of law by directly intervening in the Dakota pipeline process. The Army Corps had already approved the route, permits have been obtained, federal courts have said the pipeline route and plan was safe, had the necessary approvals and should go forward saying the law was clear, the protesters had no standing or good argument to prevent the pipeline. Yet, neither the state nor the Obama administration have removed the illegal protestors, and have during the interruptions caused by the protests worked behind the scenes to block the final permit from the Army Corps despite its own assessment the route was safe and in the best interest of the country and the environment.”
“Ironically, the environment will suffer if this decision is upheld because oil will continue to be shipped via rail and trucks which annually spill far more oil into the environment than pipelines – pipelines having proven to be the safest way to ship oil. My suspicion is Obama’s crony friends who make money shipping oil via rail, who would lose business to the pipeline, influenced the president. In addition, his decision plays well, at least until the next administration, to Obama’s radical environmental allies, to whose tune he seems to dance.”
H. Sterling Burnett
Research Fellow, Environment & Energy Policy
The Heartland Institute
Managing Editor, Environment & Climate News
[email protected]
312-377-4000
“Undoubtedly playing a role in the Obama administration’s decision to not approve permits for completion of the Dakota Access pipeline was a petition against the project signed by almost half a million people. The petition to President Barack Obama from CREDO Action, a project of San Francisco-based CREDO Mobile, started:
“‘The Dakota Access pipeline would fuel climate change …'”
“This is a grave mistake. Even if the Dakota Access pipeline does increase the development and consumption of oil from the Bakken oil fields in western North Dakota, the impact on climate is almost certainly negligible. Indeed, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) demonstrates that the science backing activists’ claims about the climatic impact of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from our hydrocarbon fuel consumption is seriously flawed. The NIPCC summarizes:
“‘Earth’s climate has both cooled and warmed independent of its atmospheric CO2 concentration, revealing the true inability of carbon dioxide to drive climate change throughout the Holocene [the geological epoch we are currently in]. Conditions as warm as, or warmer than, the present have persisted across the Holocene for decades and centuries even though the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration remained at values approximately 30% lower than those of today.'”
Tom Harris
Executive Director
International Climate Science Coalition
Ottawa, Canada
Policy Advisor, Energy and Environment
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
312/377-4000
“This news is a reminder that we, thankfully, have less than two months to go in the most anti-energy administration in American history. A project that is 90 percent complete, not sitting on any tribal land, and which was already previously approved by the United States Army Corps of Engineers this past July is now being blocked for no other reason than because it has become the Cause-of-the-Month for professional progressive activists and President Obama has decided to throw them a bone on his way out the door. January 20 cannot arrive soon enough.”
Tim Benson
Policy Analyst
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
Jay Lehr was an internationally renowned speaker, scientist, Senior Policy Advisor with the International Climate Science Coalition and Senior Science Analyst at CFACT.
Professor of Nuclear Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology (ret.), Climate Change and Energy
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News.
Tom Harris is executive director of the International Climate Science Coalition
Tim Benson joined The Heartland Institute in September 2015 as a policy analyst in the Government Relations Department.
