Just how bad was Joe Biden’s decision upon taking office to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline? We now have an admission directly from Biden’s own administration.

According to a newly-released report from the Department of Energy, which cited a variety of studies on the economic impact of the pipeline’s construction, the cancellation of Keystone XL cost somewhere between 16,149 and 59,000 jobs. Lost GDP from the project is also estimated to be between $3.4 billion and $9.6 billion.

Even when you only consider the SEIS, which is the government’s environmental impact study, the numbers of jobs and money involved aren’t small potatoes.

The 2014 Final SEIS estimated that about 42,100 total jobs, or 21,050 jobs annually, would be created if construction were to take two years (direct, indirect, and induced), as well as $2.05 billion in earnings in the United States. About 3,900 of these jobs would be direct construction jobs in Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas. The project was expected to support 50 jobs during the operation. The SEIS estimated that the construction of the KXL pipeline would contribute $3.4 Billion (or 0.02 percent) to the United States Gross Domestic Product.

The cop-out here still being pushed by the DOE is the idea that the pipeline would only have created 50 permanent jobs. That’s a farce for several reasons. For starters, I’ve never heard of a pipeline that’s 1,200 miles long and only requires 50 people to maintain it, from those on the ground to those flying pipeline patrol from the air.

Regardless, that’s not really relevant because the “temporary” jobs still mattered. There are entire industries full of contract workers that make a living moving between “temporary” jobs. Any individual construction project, for example, might only last a few years, but a few years of employment remains employment. How many people suffered because Biden needed to make a meaningless sacrifice to the “climate crisis”?

Besides, there wasn’t even anything good for the climate in canceling Keystone XL. America is now more dependent on foreign oil and the longer supply lines that come with that, producing more carbon emissions in the process. In the end, pipelines offer a lower impact than ships, trains, and semi-trucks. Never mind the more important aspect of all this, which was the foreign policy disaster that resulted in giving away all our leverage, causing a mad scramble to try to get more oil from places like Venezuela.

Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, whose state was heavily impacted by Biden’s decision to scrap Keystone XL, put out this statement.

The Biden administration finally owned up to what Montanans have known all along — killing the Keystone XL pipeline cost good-paying jobs, hurt Montana’s economy and was the first step in the Biden admin’s war on oil and gas production in the United States.

And as if to put a fine point on how out of control and corrupt the US government is, this report came out a year after it was mandated to be released within 90 days. Daines and others had successfully inserted the 90-day provision into Biden’s infrastructure bill, which passed in November of 2021. The DOE completely ignored it, no doubt wanting to wait until after the 2022 election to release the report, technically breaking the law in the process.

Will any price be paid for any of this? Of course, not. Biden can make terrible decisions, flaunting the law in order to cover them up, and all he’ll receive are shrugs. There’s no accountability because those charged with holding him accountable are on his side politically.