Vin Suprynowicz

The political cyncism of President Barack Obama — who’s been on a seemingly non-stop “jobs”-themed re-election tour for a month — as he now postpones for another two years the creation of thousands of high-paying, private-sector jobs building a pipeline to bring $15-a-barrel Canadian oil to American refineries, is stupefying.

The $7 billion, 1,700-mile Keystone XL project, proposed by Calgary-based TransCanada, would carry oil derived from Alberta tar sands to refineries in Houston and Port Arthur, Texas.

It’s a private project. Unlike solar and wind farm boondoggles, which enrich big donors to the Obama White House but are unlikely to fill a tenth of our energy needs anytime soon, no federal subsidy would have been sought. Much of the pipe is already sitting in warehouses. It would be hard to envision a more “shovel-ready” project — nor one better suited to reduce America’s dependence on far more expensive oil imported from hostile foreign lands.

But officials in Washington City announced Thursday the Obama administration will delay what should have been a routine approval — (“The current project has already been deemed environmentally sound,” points out House Speaker John Boehner) — in order to assess a shift in its route, effectively putting off the project until after next year’s election. By which Mr. Obama means: forever.

The excuse?

Officials said Thursday they had to extend their review of the project to address Nebraskans’ objections to building across the state’s sensitive Sandhills region, an area that provides habitat for imperiled wildlife and sits above the Ogallala Aquifer.

Oh, please. Up till now the eco-extreme has been bellowing about the “global warming” implications of the Canadians’ extraction process (even as the trees of the American Northeast, still full of leaves, bend and collapse under a freak October blizzard), as though our peaceful neighbors to the north won’t proceed to use the same technology to extract and sell this same oil to the Red Chinese, if America doesn’t want it.

This isn’t about the environment. Modern pipelines leak sparingly, and when they do they can be easily shut down until repairs are made.

Furthermore, the company said in a statement Thursday that among the 14 routes already reviewed by State Department officials was one that “would have avoided the entire Sandhills region and Ogallala Aquifer and six alternatives that would have reduced pipeline mileage crossing the Sandhills or the aquifer.”

(The current route was chosen because it crossed the fewest bodies of surface water, a sensible priority.)

If it hadn’t been an “important aquifer” (name some unimportant aquifers) those who are against all development, who would like to see Americans’ energy use and standard of living rolled back to 19th century levels, would have turned up some weed or bug to focus on.

Commentators are saying the pipeline created a “political trap” for the president, who had to choose between jobs, energy independence, cheaper electricity and economic recovery on the one hand, and the incoherent shrieking of the “build nothing” Green Gang on the other.

Nonsense. Candidate Obama promised to be a “uniter,” governing in the interest of all Americans, not punishing the majority with economic devastation in order to cobble together extremist constituencies into a re-election coalition.

Meantime, the state-socialists insist overzealous regulation isn’t crippling the economy? Remember, federal regulators have already delayed the environmentally sound Keystone pipeline for THREE YEARS.

So now, Instead of simply stepping aside and letting private industry goose our economy at its own risk and expense, a president and a Senate leadership who have never operated so much as a yogurt stand between them now block coal-fired plants, block new oil drilling both offshore and on, block new refineries, block this pipeline, hem and haw as they cling to a fairy-tale vision of prosperity delivered by windmills and elves in hollow trees.

“Terrible decision for the energy future of the country; brilliant decision for the president’s re-election campaign,” Stephen Brown, vice president of government affairs for the Tesoro oil refinery, writes in an e-mail to The Washington Post. “And the administration owes a debt of thanks to the Republican leaders of Nebraska for providing an escape hatch on this.”

All too true. At the very least, the next Congress should bar any Nebraska resident from ever working on the pipeline when it’s finally built — and further bar Nebraskans from ever being allowed to buy cheaper gas or heating oil refined from Canadian crude.

Delaying the Keystone Pipeline could “inflict a potentially fatal delay to a project that is not just a pipeline, but is a lifeline for thousands of desperate working men and women,” says Terry O’Sullivan, general president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America. (And here I thought the Democrats cherished the support of union working men.) “The administration chose to support environmentalists over jobs — job-killers win, American workers lose.”

Sixty years ago, Americans worried about what would happen if prosperity-hating communists took over America. Perhaps we’re finding out.

The long-term solution? Look at the map. If the Dakotas, with their newly discovered (and vast) oil reserves, and Wyoming, with its newly discovered (and vast) coal reserves, along with oil-rich Alberta and enough of the pacific Northwest to provide a corridor to the sea, were an independent nation called “Columbia,” what do you suppose Rump Canada and the Rump United States would end up having to pay for their share of those energy supplies? How about if Texas seceded, as well, telling the eco-freaks at EPA and the State Department to go regulate each other to their hearts’ content?

Some wonder if this will ever happen. Others merely wonder when.