RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Trump is making short work of campaign promises, and on Tuesday he signed executive orders reviving the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines. The resurrection is good news for the economy, but one question is whether he’ll sink the projects with his protectionist impulses.

Mr. Trump signed an executive order inviting TransCanada to apply again for a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, which the Obama Administration rejected to indulge the anti-carbon obsessions of Democratic campaign donors. Another Trump directive aims to expedite the Dakota Access pipeline, which is 90% finished but was halted by President Obama amid protests. A federal judge ruled that the government had met its legal obligations, but the Obama Administration suspended work anyway.

Such carve outs for progressive constituencies are one reason voters rejected Democrats in November, and the pipelines promise broader prosperity. Keystone is predicted to spin off 20,000 construction and manufacturing jobs, many of them to be filled by union workers, and add $3 billion to GDP. The pipeline could move 830,000 barrels a day along the route from Alberta to Nebraska; up to 100,000 would come from North Dakota, where a glut of crude has to travel by rail to reach refineries built to process it. The efficiencies will ripple across the oil and gas industry.

The Keystone order directs the State Department to make a recommendation within 60 days for a prompt approval, though environmental groups will file lawsuits in every eligible jurisdiction. The objections are specious: President Obama’s State Department concluded on several occasions that Keystone would have no meaningful effect on climate or emissions. Moving oil by pipeline emits less carbon and is safer than trains.

As for Dakota Access, you may have noticed the months-long media rally around Standing Rock Sioux protests. The tribe claims the pipeline will harm its land and water, but this is fake news: Dakota Access does not run beneath the reservation. The route, which was altered 140 times in North Dakota to protect cultural resources, cuts along private land where other pipelines run. The tribe lost in federal court but has vowed to fight President Trump’s order.

One danger here is President Trump’s campaign promise to “renegotiate some of the terms” that included bromides about how “we’ll build our own pipes, like we used to in the old days.” He floated royalty payments during the campaign, and a separate order on Tuesday directed the Commerce Department to develop a plan to use U.S. steel and iron in all new pipelines. TransCanada has said in past months that it’s “fully committed” to Keystone XL, but the company may not be eager for another politician to direct its investment decisions.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Mr. Trump is looking to ensure taxpayers the best possible deal. Reminder: Taxpayers pay nothing. The State Department estimated that when Keystone is finished and pumping oil, local governments will collect more than $55 million a year in property taxes. About 70% of the resulting refined products from Keystone would stay in the U.S., which will push down gas prices as another benefit, according to a study from IHS. That already sounds like a good deal.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump signed two executive orders on Tuesday to move forward with construction of the controversial Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil pipelines, rolling back key Obama administration environmental actions in favor of expanding energy infrastructure.

While oil producers in Canada and North Dakota are expected to benefit from a quicker route for crude oil to U.S. Gulf Coast refiners, a revival of the projects would mark a bitter defeat for Native American tribes and climate activists, who vowed to fight the decisions through legal action.

Trump campaigned on promises to increase domestic energy production and before taking office indicated he supported completion of the Dakota pipeline and re-starting the C$8 billion ($6.1 billion) Keystone XL project, which was rejected in 2015 by then-President Barack Obama.

Protesters had rallied for months against plans to route the $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline beneath a lake near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, saying it threatened water resources and sacred Native American sites.

It is not yet clear how exactly the orders will move the projects forward.

In a statement, the Standing Rock Sioux said they would fight the decision.

“Americans know this pipeline was unfairly rerouted towards our nation and without our consent. The existing pipeline route risks infringing on our treaty rights, contaminating our water and the water of 17 million Americans downstream,” said Dave Archambault II, chairman of the Standing Rock tribe.

In the Senate’s ongoing confirmation hearings, knee-jerk liberals keep asking President Trump’s appointees – even though the question is totally irrelevant to the secretaries being questioned – about global warming (AGW, for anthropogenic global warming), aka global climate change. Surprisingly, most of those appointees have affirmed their “belief” in climate change. In the light of the president’s deletion of all mentions of AGW and climate change from the White House website at high noon on January 20, those appointees might want to reconsider their stance. In affirming the “reality” of AGW, these cabinet appointees buy into the two points that liberal climate fanatics seem to miss, but which President Trump seems to get.

First, when, for a decade, the globe’s temperatures refused to budge, those doctrinaire doomsayers who publicly “believe” in their patently corrupted “climate science” quietly tried to change the subject. Without making a big deal out of what is, after all, a very big deal, those obsessive climate Gore-clones tried to move away from decrying global warming and toward viewing with alarm their new menace, global climate change.

Their reasoning is simple. When the globe stopped getting hotter in the late 1990s, and since these facts slipped out despite all that “climate scientists” could do, the view-with-alarmists had to move to a more defensible position. After all, the globe’s dynamic climate changes every day. No two days are alike. Never have been, never will be. So they can actually tell the “truth” when they point to “climate change.”

These private-sector doomsayers were supported by Obama’s own climate minions – bought and paid for “experts” working for NASA and NOAA, as well as those over at the Pentagon – and even in the CIA – who had been commanded to buy into the absurd fiction that climate change is America’s greatest threat. With that “official” position about to change, President Trump’s go-along-to-get-along nominees might want to rethink their position.

The bigger issue these climate-waffling appointees need to address is one the doomsayers never admit to. President Trump seems to grasp this bigger issue, if only because he has often referred to both AGW as a hoax. His cabinet nominees should ponder this and pay close attention to the logical fallacy President Trump sees lurking behind the entire issue of climate change.

The only way AGW could possibly be important is if there were just one perfect, ideal global climate that benefits everyone and harms no one. If you follow the climate fanatics’ flawed logic, that one ideal, perfect global climate was that unnamed benchmark year, sometime in the 1980s. Those grant-addicted “climate scientists” can’t agree on a benchmark year, but climate fear-mongers act as if any variation from that perfect Year Zero benchmark climate must be a bad change.

The Trump Administration has a long to-do list, not least at a lawless Environmental Protection Agency. Sending early signals will be important, and one opportunity for Administrator nominee Scott Pruitt would be to revoke the Pebble Mine veto.

In February 2014 the EPA took the unprecedented step of issuing a pre-emptive veto, blocking a proposal to create America’s largest copper and gold mine in southwest Alaska. The veto was a message to every developer that EPA would stop any project the environmental left opposed—with no hearing and sham science.

Under the Clean Water Act, the Army Corps of Engineers has the primary job of evaluating projects. The law gives EPA a secondary role of reviewing a project, and then potentially vetoing one—though only with cause. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy’s decision to veto before Pebble had even applied for permits or received a Corps review was a first in the Clean Water Act’s history.

A subsequent 346-page investigation (requested by Pebble) by former Senator and Defense Secretary William Cohen provided evidence that EPA had decided on its veto as early as 2010. That was well before native tribes (with EPA encouragement) asked the agency to intervene. EPA then built a façade of science and procedure, inventing a phony watershed assessment based on a hypothetical mine to justify its veto.

Internal agency documents show that EPA staff and officials were also in constant contact with activists who opposed the mine. The Cohen report noted that the evidence raised “serious concerns as to whether EPA orchestrated the process to reach a predetermined outcome; had inappropriately close relationships with anti-mine advocates; and was candid about its decision-making process.”

The Pebble veto is above all a trammeling of state’s rights. Alaska owns the land for the project and protested EPA’s decision to cut the Corps and state out of the process. The Pebble proposal is controversial even in Alaska, with arguments on both sides. But the state’s residents, legislators and regulators were robbed of influence by a federal agency that pre-empted the normal process. The EPA essentially set itself up as the sole regulator of every watershed in the country.

Donald Trump has encouraged his cabinet nominees to take the initiative as soon as they’re on the job, and one area ripe for action is reversing the Obama Administration’s habit of letting its green-energy obsessions interfere with national defense. A good place to start is reviewing a wind farm that could compromise a crucial U.S. defense radar in southern Virginia.

That’s the location of one of America’s two Relocatable Over-the-Horizon Radar (Rothr) sites. Rothr, which is run by the Navy, provides long-range surveillance of aircraft and surface ships through the Caribbean to South America. The two Rothr sites—the other is in Texas—are crucial for tracking foreign military operations, drug runners and other criminals.

The Navy—informed by MIT and government studies—has long held that wind farms within a 28-mile radius of a Rothr site interfere with its ability to function. In 2011 the Spanish wind-turbine manufacturer Iberdrola nonetheless applied to build a giant wind farm in North Carolina near the Virginia border. The farm’s more than 100 turbines, some more than 500 feet tall, would fall within 28 miles of the Rothr site, some as near as 14 miles.

For years the U.S. military opposed the wind project. General John Kelly, then leading U.S. Southern Command, told Congress that the wind farm “could and likely will adversely impact our Rothr systems,” adding that while the Pentagon was working with “developers and stakeholders to develop potential mitigation solutions,” he had “little confidence we will succeed.” Gen. Kelly is now Mr. Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security.

So it was a surprise to many when the Pentagon reversed itself in October 2014 and approved the project. The preamble in its agreement with Iberdrola says “it is an objective of the DoD to ensure that the robust development of renewable energy resources . . . may move forward in the United States.” And we thought the Pentagon’s mission was to defend against America’s enemies.

The wind-farm agreement refers vaguely to “mitigation” and “de-conflicting” activities but doesn’t list actions that Iberdrola performed to gain approval. The Navy later said a new study showed the farm would not interfere with the Rothr mission, though it has refused to release that study. The agreement also bars the government from stopping the turbines save for “emergency circumstances.”

The site’s first turbines are due to be up and running soon, and state legislative leaders in North Carolina recently sent a letter to Mr. Kelly asking him to intervene. They want the Trump Administration to shut down the wind farm or require the developer to shut down the turbines whenever they degrade the Rothr signal by more than 5%.

The Obama Administration used the military as a spear for its green agenda, but evidence is growing that these demands (biofuels, electric military vehicles) have come at a cost to military readiness. Mr. Kelly and new Secretary of Defense James Mattis can reassure the military and the public by focusing defense back on national security and away from climate-change indulgences.