Obama Makes Good.... Veto

This past Tuesday, President Obama made good on his threat to veto any Congressional measure aimed at forcing the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. It was a veto that probably surprised no one since the President has been increasingly explicit about his willingness to warm up the veto pen. Since the measure has no chance of receiving the required 2/3 majority in both houses of Congress, this particular Keystone measure is dead.

More interesting is the open letter about Keystone XL penned by former NYC mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who is now the UN Secretary General's Special Envoy for Cities and Climate Change. In the letter, Bloomberg argues that proponents of Keystone XL should be thinking in terms of a larger bargain between the U.S. and Canada that included a major climate change initiative. It is an argument I've been making for more than a year (See link to February 2014 Post). Putting some kind of climate chance pact, cooperation, coordination, consultation mechanism,..... anything, on the table in conjunction with Keystone XL approval would grease the political skids for Obama to sign off. It would give him political cover in a period in which the economic case for Keystone XL is fading along with falling oil prices.

C'mon Man

Unfortunately, Canada's Ambassador to the United States, Gary Doer, doesn't think such a bargain is possible. Ambassador Doer claims that attaching some kind of climate change deal to Keystone XL would result in a morass of legal challenges to the package that would doom all of it. The problem with this rebuttal is that no one is talking about formal linkage of Keystone approval with a climate change initiative. Formal linkage would indeed be messy, which is why negotiators are loathe to engage in such. But, a bilateral proposal for climate change cooperation in advance of this December's COP 21 meetings in Paris would go a long way toward giving Obama breathing space to approve Keystone XL. The two issues need not ever be connected in a formal way.

At the end of the day, Keystone XL is just a piece of infrastructure. But, rightly or wrongly, it also happens to be infrastructure fraught with political symbolism about climate change. Hence, absent an overwhelmingly positive economic case, the President needs something to expand the win-set for him to approve it. I agree with Mayor Bloomberg that a bilateral climate change proposal is probably the best way to get Keystone XL built. However, I think the onus is on Canadian officials to drop the fiction that Keystone and climate change aren't connected and propose the two countries work on a joint proposal for the multilateral talks in Paris later this year.