Here's a Shovel-Ready Project Obama Should Embrace

But he won't for two reasons: The environwackos are opposed to it, and he doesn't want America to have inexpensive oil. From Rich Lowry:

One of the holiest words in the Democratic economic lexicon is “infrastructure.”

Yet the proposed Keystone XL pipeline represents a big, honking $7 billion, 1,700-mile-long infrastructure project that the Obama administration is delaying and the environmentalists are opposing. If Pres. Barack Obama thinks the country lacks its former economic verve, he need look no farther than the Keystone XL fiasco for a demonstration of one reason why.

Keystone XL meets every possible standard. President Obama wants “shovel ready” jobs. The materials to build the pipeline from Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf Coast are waiting to go. The president rightly notes that construction has been hard hit in the recession. Building Keystone XL will create thousands of construction jobs. The president criticizes our dependence on Middle Eastern oil. Keystone XL is projected to pump as much as 830,000 barrels of crude oil a day from our friendly neighbor to the north.

President Obama should want to sign the permit himself and send Vice Pres. Joe Biden to take credit at the groundbreaking. At this rate, though, the project will get underway sometime in the second Obama or first Cain administration, if ever. For more than three years, the administration has been dragging TransCanada, the prospective builder of the pipeline, through a review process involving about a dozen federal agencies and a cast of thousands. In the time the federal government has been considering TransCanada’s project, Al Smith and the gang could have built three Empire State Buildings, at one year and 45 days each.

Read more about this project here. The has become a cause celebre for various Hollywood tree-huggers, and it's doubtful this project will ever be built as long as Obama is president.