RUTHFULLY YOURS

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper was in Beijing recently signing an agreement and touting his country’s growing energy partnership with China. It’s good news for Canada, which is rightfully looking to grow markets for its sizeable oil reserves. And it’s particularly good news for China, which needs to keep tapping into fresh supplies to feed its growing economy and mounting demand for oil.

Unfortunately, it’s bad news for Americans, particularly when you consider that one of the main reasons China has become such an attractive market to Canada was President Obama’s recent rejection of the Keystone XL Pipeline. This cross-border connection would have provided a golden opportunity to partner with our neighbors to the north in producing massive amounts of energy, both for our country and the globe.

It seems unimaginable, yet President Obama refused Trans-Canada’s request to run its pipeline across the border from Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast. This extensive pipeline holds the potential of moving up to 830,000 barrels of crude oil per day—including oil produced in North Dakota and Montana—to refineries here in Texas. Translated into job numbers, that’s up to 20,000 direct jobs and estimates of up to hundreds of thousands of indirect jobs created by this $7 billion project.

Keystone would have provided a shot in the arm for our nation’s uncertain economy, and it could have provided economic opportunity for tens of thousands of families, stretching from here in Texas all the way to the Canadian border.

Hoping to appease environmental radicals, President Obama said no, claiming he didn’t have time to adequately consider the pipeline.

This is despite the fact the original request was made in September 2008, and Keystone was the subject of dozens of meetings on multiple levels of his own administration, as well as exhaustive environmental impact reviews. Certainly, three-and-half years is more than enough time to make a decision.

His reasoning becomes even more laughable when you put it up against his massive, ill-conceived so-called stimulus bill, which he muscled through Congress and signed within the first month of his presidency.

President Obama wants us to believe he is for jobs, economic opportunity and greater energy security, and his Keystone decision does help meet those goals—for the People’s Republic of China. The American people get nothing.

President Obama simply caved to the more radical activist elements of his base who almost immediately decided they would vigorously oppose Keystone, regardless of the U.S. State Department’s conclusion that it would be one of the safest pipeline systems in the United States.

President Obama put his personal political interests ahead of improving our country’s economic climate.

His decision also relegates the U.S. to continued reliance on oil from volatile nations in the Middle East, where unrest, chaos and Iran’s threats to block the oil supply moving through the Strait of Hormuz are driving gas prices ever closer to $4 a gallon.

It’s all reflective of a wrong-headed approach that vilifies energy companies, ignores the realities of energy markets, squeezes the pocketbooks of struggling Americans, and doesn’t take us one step closer to energy independence.

In Texas, our approach has been steady and consistent, an “all of the above” energy portfolio that cultivates a vibrant energy market that includes traditional sources, as well as wind, solar and biomass.

We’re still a long way from doing it all with renewables, and we need to continue finding and utilizing new supplies of traditional energy sources, like oil, natural gas, nuclear and coal, if we’re going to keep our economy healthy in the years to come.

That’s what Keystone was bringing us. And that’s what President Obama rejected.

There are efforts in Congress to find a way around the president’s roadblock, led by Texas Sen. John Cornyn, among others.

Unless President Obama changes his mind, or we find an alternate method of getting the pipeline built, all that oil will likely flow to China instead of here, taking with it an all-too-rare economic opportunity.

Mr. Perry, a Republican, is the governor of Texas.