Proponents of the dangerous Keystone XL project claim that construction of the 1700-mile tar sands pipeline from Canada to Texas will create tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of much-needed jobs across the country. “Jobs for the 99%!” proclaims a website funded by the American Petroleum Institute (API). The Wall Street Journal promises “13,000 union jobs.” On the House floor today, Rep. Alan Nunnelee (R-MS) claimed the pipeline will create “20,000 high-wage construction jobs.” Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) says the pipeline will “create 14,600 jobs in Illinois.” The US Chamber of Commerce claims the project will create “more than 250,000 permanent jobs.” “U.S. jobs supported by Canadian oil sands development could grow from 21,000 jobs today to 465,000 jobs by 2035,” said API Executive Vice President Marty Durbin.

Accepting these figures, reporters like CNN’s Steve Hargreaves, NPR’s Ari Shapiro, and the New York Times’ Kirk Johnson have portrayed the battle over the tar sands pipeline as one of economic benefits versus environmental fears.

However, these tremendous-seeming jobs claims are based entirely on a report by the Perryman Group, commissioned by the pipeline’s owner TransCanada, whose results have been described as “dead wrong” and “meaningless” by Council on Foreign Relations fellow Michael Levi and environmental economist Andrew Leach, neither of whom oppose the construction of the pipeline.

The only independent analysis conducted of the American job-creation potential of the Keystone XL pipeline finds that between 500 and 1400 temporary construction jobs will be created, with a negative long-term economic impact as gas prices rise in the Midwest and environmental costs are borne:

Why this tremendous discrepancy? Examining TransCanada’s business operations, the Cornell Global Labor Institute report finds that TransCanada has already purchased most of the steel it intends to use for the pipeline from India; that most of the work will be conducted by people already employed by TransCanada; and that the Perryman Group included already-completed pipeline projects in its job-creation estimates.

“The operating costs for KXL are very minimal,” the Cornell Global Labor Institute report explains, “and based on the figures provided by TransCanada for the Canadian section of the pipeline, the new permanent US pipeline jobs in the US number as few as 50.”

Unlike the Perryman Group’s “opaque” methodology, the Cornell report explains its calculations with full transparency.

JR:  In Stephen Lacey’s original post, we noted that Stearns’ notion of subsidizing successful companies is how the 1% operate.  The rich get richer. And that’s one reason inequality is growing in this country.  Roberts takes the analysis one-step further to discuss the self-justifying rationalizations of the 1%.

by David Roberts, in a Grist cross-post

Yesterday I sketched the sort of personality type most likely to identify as conservative: those who prefer stability to change, order to complexity, familiarity to novelty, and conformity to creativity. This sort of personality type is drawn to clear lines separating in-groups from out-groups, highly aware of social hierarchies, suspicious of change, and strongly inclined toward system justification, i.e., seeing the prevailing socioeconomic regime as worthy and desirable

I often think that the actions and rhetoric of today’s conservative politicians are easier to make sense of at this level, the level of temperament and worldview, than at the level of stated principles and policy proposals. Seeing through this lens can help make sense of a lot of stuff that otherwise looks hypocritical or absurd. In particular, it can help make sense of the political fight over climate change and clean energy.

The other day, Stephen Lacey flagged some comments from Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) that I found extremely revealing:

So what I’m trying to do is say, the government should not be picking winners and losers, let the private sector determine the winners and losers, and then … when somebody is successful, then you give them the subsidies and the tax credit.

This makes absolutely no sense relative to the small-government, fiscal conservative principles Stearns purports to hold. Nor does it make sense as energy policy. But it does make sense at a deeper level.

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By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

As ThinkProgress reported yesterday, Republican members of Congress have been waging a war to open 1 million acres around the Grand Canyon to uranium mining. Last week Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar took one of the last steps in withdrawing the area from new mining claims. But in response, Republicans have introduced H.R. 3155, the Northern Arizona Mining Continuity Act of 2011, to keep the decision from moving forward. The issue has become “one of the top legislative priorities of Republicans in Congress” as Energy and Environment Daily reported this morning.

At a hearing yesterday on the bill in the Subcommittee on National Parks, Forest and Public Lands, Republicans called a witness to the stand who is a retired United States Geological Survey scientist. Dr. Karen Wenrich noted in her testimony supporting the bill that the Bureau of Land Management has “vastly overstated the environmental harm caused by past and potential uranium development.”

However, under questioning from Representative Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), it became clear through public Securities and Exchange Commission filings that Wenrich stands to make $225,000 by selling 61 uranium claims that she owns only if the Interior Department’s withdrawal does not go forward.

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This Sunday, November 6th, activists are going to surround the White House in a show of protest against the Keystone XL Pipeline. So far, 10,000 people have reportedly signed up to join the protests.

In the lead up to Sunday’s demonstration, Tar Sands Action and NRDC took out a full page ad in today’s Washington Post to put the pressure on Obama, who now says he’s the “decider” on approval of the pipeline.

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Charles and David Koch, the right-wing petrochemical billionaires who fuel the Tea Party, have set their sights on the clean energy economy. Even though Americans overwhelmingly support investment in solar and wind energy, the rise of renewables threatens the stranglehold the Kochs and other oil giants have over United States politics. A new ad from the Koch’s astroturf organization Americans for Prosperity claims the Obama administration’s investments in solar power, like the loan guarantee given to Solyndra, were just a corrupt plot by President Obama to support campaign donors:

In reality, Solyndra was supported by the Bush White House and received venture-capital funding from firms with ties to both Republicans and Democrats. The faux scandal fits the agenda of the Koch brothers — embarrass Obama and smear clean energy — but it isn’t based in reality.

Anyone who cares about addressing climate change and strengthening America’s economic competitiveness knows that being anti-renewable energy is terrible policy. Turns out, it’s bad politics too.

A new poll conducted by ORC International for the non-partisan Civil Society Institute finds that 77% of Americans support — including 65% of Republicans surveyed — believe “the U.S. needs to be a clean energy technology leader and it should invest in the research and domestic manufacturing of wind, solar and energy efficiency technologies.”

The poll found that Americans support subsidies for renewable energy over fossil energy 3 to 1. When asked about having to choose between only subsidizing clean energy or fossil energy, 38% of respondents said they’d choose renewables, while 13% would choose fossils.

Despite all the sweeping calls to end all subsidies to energy from presidential candidates, the poll shows that only 13% believe that’s a good idea. And remarkably, only 26% of Tea Party members support that idea.

The Civil Society Institute explains the political significance of the findings:

If Congress thinks it has found a winning issue in trashing wind and solar power … and if the Obama Administration believes that voters will reward it for boosting coal, gas and nuclear power … then both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue are making serious miscalculations about the sentiments of mainstream Americans.

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AP Photo/Michel Euler

by Andrew Light and Rebecca Lefton

G-20 leaders of the world’s major economies who are meeting this week in France will be scrambling to deal with economic emergencies rippling across Europe, rising unemployment, and stagnating economic growth. But these leaders must also take up climate change, which will become more costly the longer we wait to deal with it. They can seize on the challenge of global warming to generate economic growth and enshrine a path for environmentally sustainable development. Specifically, they should use this forum to create revenue generators for financing used for climate change adaptation and mitigation as recommended by the World Bank. And they should advance a second international climate finance period. Both of these steps would do much to ensure necessary global warming emissions reductions.

Growing greenhouse gas pollution will lead to more frequent and intense natural disasters, droughts, rising food prices, water shortages, and the devastation of natural resources that are necessary to sustain livelihoods and the global economy. Experts agree that greenhouse gas emissions must be cut in half to limit a temperature increase of 2 degrees Celsius, which is the level necessary to avoid the worst impacts of global warming.

The assembled G-20 parties asked the World Bank in April to give them a plan to pay for an adequate response to address global warming. The World Bank responded. Now the assembled parties must take these recommendations and formulate a plan to implement them.

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Other stories below: Morocco to Host Massive Solar Farm; Plummeting Clean Energy Shares Exaggerate Risk

China will phase out energy-draining light bulbs

China will phase out power-draining light bulbs within five years in a move to make the world’s biggest polluting nation more efficient but also certain to impact the global market.

China will ban imports and sales of 100-watt-and-higher incandescent bulbs from Oct. 1, 2012, in an attempt to save energy and curb climate change, China’s main planning agency said Friday.

Bans will also be imposed on 60-watt-and-higher bulbs from Oct. 1, 2014 and 15-watt-and-higher old-style bulbs from Oct. 1, 2016. The time frame of the last step may be adjusted according to an evaluation in September 2016, the National Development and Reform Commission statement said.

State-run Xinhua News Agency quoted Xie Ji, deputy director of the NDRC’s environmental protection department, as saying China is the world’s largest producer of both energy-saving and incandescent bulbs and so the plan will also “have a significant impact” in reducing the use of incandescents worldwide.

Last year, 3.85 billion incandescent light bulbs were produced in China and 1.07 billion of them were sold domestically, the agency said. Power consumption for lighting is estimated to be about 12 percent of China’s total electricity use, it said.

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The Keystone XL tar sands pipeline will not reduce dependence on imports from the Middle East, an analysis conducted for the Department of Energy revealed a year ago. The hope of getting away from oil from the volatile region is a favored talking point by proponents. “The Keystone project has the potential to significantly reduce oil imports from the Middle East,” Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-KY) has claimed. However, an analysis by Department of Energy contractor Ensys Energy in December 2010 found that the pipeline would have virtually no impact on Middle East imports:

In contrast, efforts to reduce oil demand, Ensys found, “would result in reduction of oil imports from non-Canadian foreign sources, especially the Middle East.”

by Christy Goldfuss

For many conservationists and lovers of the great outdoors, it was not obvious at first how President Barack Obama, with his urban Chicago roots, would make his mark on the vast expanse known as the public estate—national parks, national forests, monuments, and hundreds of millions of acres of lands that belong to all Americans. Despite his early trip to Grand Canyon National Park with his daughters Sasha and Malia, it seemed unlikely that this former community organizer would follow in the footsteps of President Teddy Roosevelt and prioritize protecting large areas of land for future generations.

But three actions in the past two weeks show how President Obama and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar are working from the ground up to build this administration’s conservation legacy: the designation of Fort Monroe as a national monument, a new proposal for solar energy development on public lands, and recent plans to protect the Grand Canyon from mining development.

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