The TransCanada climate

TransCanada Corp. wants to invest $8 billion in a 1,179-mile pipeline between Hardisty, Alta., and Steele City, Neb., that would facilitate delivery of blended bitumen from the oil sands of Alberta to high-conversion refineries on the US Gulf Coast. Environmental activists treat the project as a threat to human life and a definitive political question.

The activists have had their way. The US State Department has studied the project for 7 years, found no problem, yet refused to recommend presidential approval of the pipeline's border crossing. On Nov. 2, TransCanada asked the department to suspend work on its permit application.

Economic ills

The company's request followed by 3 days a report by the Bureau of Economic Analysis that growth in the US gross domestic product slowed in the third quarter to an annual rate of 1.5% from 3.9% in the second quarter. It followed by 4 days an announcement by the Federal Open Market Committee that the Federal Reserve System will keep its target interest rate very low-at 0-0.25%-because economic growth remains "moderate" and employment remains below levels most committee members consider optimum. And it followed by a month a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that the job-growth rate is below last year's level while unemployment remains at 5.1%, indicating continuation of a troubling trend of frustrated withdrawal from the active labor force.

The Keystone XL project would help remedy these ills. It would enhance energy security and benefit consumers of oil products. It would fortify traditionally solid but lately strained relations between two great and friendly nations. But the administration of Barack Obama instead accommodates wishes of environmental activists. He is thought to be close to rejecting the project, rather than simply stymying it with endless study. Avoiding that outcome probably was TransCanada's main reason for seeking the delay, although the official explanation is that the company wants Nebraska's government to have more time to study a route change.

Ever demanding, never content with practical victories, activists now demand outright rejection of Keystone XL. With hyperbole typical of this side of the issue, Daniel J. Weiss, senior vice-president for government affairs of the League of Conservation Voters, said, "This is nothing more than another desperate and cynical attempt by TransCanada to build their dirty pipeline someday if they get a climate denier in the White House in 2017. President Obama and Secretary [of State John] Kerry have all the information they need to reject this dangerous pipeline, and we are counting on them to do just that."

Statements such as Weiss's are too obnoxious to be taken seriously. They nevertheless represent arguments of the activist fringe. And they work. The day after TransCanada asked the State Department for a pause in its permit review, the White House announced Obama will issue a decision about the pipeline before he leaves office in January 2017.

Can anyone believe that decision hasn't already been made? Obama probably will decline the border-crossing permit before or during international climate negotiations beginning at the end of this month in Paris. The decision will be a grand gesture of American willingness to render sacrifice to climate alarmism, designed to coax other countries into comparable acts of righteousness. It will demonstrate the "leadership" Obama craves on an issue about which rational discussion has become impossible.

Dangerous climate

Exaggerated fear, expertly manipulated, thus quashes economic considerations and steers policy-making. Investment in the US therefore must account for the swelling possibility that an imperious Executive Branch will ignore economic and strategic imperatives in order to appease extremists by regulating with abandon and blocking important work. What, for example, might an administration that has nationalized health care and power generation give away in Paris?

Indeed, the climate changing most dangerously is the one, polluted by the Keystone XL record, under which capital must be exposed to risks increasingly dominated by governmental caprice. No wonder the economy and employment barely grow.