There are so many falsehoods and inaccuracies in your editorial that I cannot rebut them point by point ("The Keystone delay," April 22). I would rather present the facts about why the Keystone pipeline should have been approved years ago and why President Barack Obama's continued delays are both wrong-headed and duplicitous.
Due to domestic U.S. fracking and the tar sands oil that would be transported via the Keystone pipeline, the U.S. and Canada have now discovered that we have about 100 years of gas and oil reserves to access and deploy. Developing these resources will help both America's and the world's economies. Energy companies will continue to develop non-carbon energy sources — wind, solar and nuclear — not due to inherent altruism but rather because they are capitalistic, for-profit entities and know carbon energy sources are a finite resource.
Canada has handed us a way out of $3.75 per gallon gas prices and Middle Eastern dominated oil sourcing on a platter. President Obama is electing to reject this offer not due to any visceral concerns about environmental pollution — innumerable objective analyses (most recently by the U.S. State Department) have negated that ill-founded fear — but rather to a bare-knuckled acknowledgment that wealthy Democratic National Committee, far left green donors are blackmailing the president into submission, regardless of growing bipartisan support for the Keystone pipeline's development. Specifically, Wall Street hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer has dangled a $100 million donation to the DNC, if President Obama elects not to develop Keystone.
Keystone will create hundreds of thousands of jobs, provide a jolt to our moribund economy and enhance our foreign policy initiatives when the U.S. becomes a viable gas and oil alternative to Russia for our NATO and former Baltic States allies. Anyone who does not perceive this reality is either blindly anti-energy and anti-capitalistic or suicidally naïve.
Thomas M. Neale, Baltimore
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