Washington, DC – Today President Barack Obama vetoed legislation that would have approved the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a strong opponent of the pipeline who voted no on the bill, released the statement below regarding the vote:
“The State Department’s Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement for the Keystone XL Pipeline Project said there would be massive environmental harm from Keystone’s tar sands oil – the equivalent of adding 6 million vehicles on our highways for 50 years. They also said that if oil prices stayed above $75 per barrel the environmental harm would happen anyway because the tar sands oil would get out regardless (by train or otherwise). With oil prices now below $50 per barrel that’s no longer true, but the fossil fuel industry still insists falsely that the pipeline would have ‘no environmental impact.’ This is the sort of nonsense we have to put up with all the time from the fossil fuel industry and I’m glad the President saw through it and vetoed the bill. Now I hope he will go one step further to protect us from this unnecessary harm by rejecting the pipeline outright.
“Here in the Senate, Republicans concerned about jobs should pass a real jobs bill like Senator Shaheen’s Energy Savings and Industrial Competiveness Act, which would create 5 times more jobs than the Keystone XL project and lower energy costs. It’s a much better bill for energy and for jobs – it just doesn’t do the bidding of the fossil fuel industry, so the Republicans won’t go to it.”
###
