Hack Watch: With Keystone, the Left Suddenly Notices Most Infrastructure Jobs Are Temporary

It appears as though the Senate
is one vote short of getting the votes it needs to
approve the Keystone XL pipeline and push it forward to
President Barack Obama to possibly sign or veto. Sen. Mary Landrieu
(D-La.), who is facing a
run-off re-election for the Senate and desperately needs some
sort of a win before December, is trying to whip up support among
Democrats. If she fails, obviously Keystone will be back before a
Republican Senate (possibly without her).

Obama recently commented on the pipeline in a fashion that
suggests that he understands the new party dynamics in play in
Washington. Ha, ha, no I’m just kidding. He is full of partisan
bullshit.
Here’s what he said last week:

“Understand what this project is: It is providing the ability of
Canada to pump their oil, send it through our land, down to the
Gulf, where it will be sold everywhere else. It doesn’t have an
impact on US gas prices,” he said, growing visibly frustrated.

“If my Republican friends really want to focus on what’s good
for the American people in terms of job creation and lower energy
costs, we should be engaging in a conversation about what are we
doing to produce even more homegrown energy? I’m happy to have that
conversation,” he continued.

Because, you know, increasing the supply of oil “everywhere
else” won’t put also supply downward pressure on oil prices
produced by other nations and sold to the United States. Perhaps
the prices of goods at Walmart are completely unrelated to the
prices of goods at Target, right? People just shop where they shop
and never look for bargains. It’s not like fracking in the United
States has caused OPEC to
drop oil prices to compete or anything, right?

But even more absurdly, there is now a talking point that
KeystoneXL maybe isn’t so great because it actually doesn’t produce
a bunch of jobs. The job numbers people are tossing about are only
temporary. This is technically true, but the absurdity comes from
these same folks pushing other infrastructure and energy projects
that have the same fundamental “flaw” (scare quotes because it’s
not a flaw). Most of the jobs touted by these projects are only
temporary. Fixing roads and bridges, something Obama keeps
hammering about? Those are all temporary jobs. The “homegrown
energy” projects Obama mentions? Mostly temporary jobs!

CNN’s Van Jones noted the temporary nature of the KeystoneXL
jobs back in February, prompting a
Politifact check declaring his claim it would create only 35
permanent jobs to be true. Some have been attempting to claim that
there would be
thousands of permanent jobs, so it’s not as though Politifact
is carrying water for the left and advancing a one-sided argument
in this particular case. I looked to see if they were fact-checking
other exaggerated claims of permanent jobs from infrastructure
projects that the left loves, and they dinged Charlie Crist for
saying that Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s rejection of federal stimulus
money to build
high-speed rail eliminated the possibility of 60,000 jobs.
Those jobs were mostly temporary, Politifact points out.

But for pundits and politicians, trying to use the temporary
nature of the KeystoneXL jobs is pure hackery entirely because so
many projects near and dear to the Obama administration and any
Democrat looking to bring home the bacon heavily depend on
temporary jobs. That massive Ivanpah solar project I wrote about
last week? The one that got
$1.6 billion in federal loans and is now looking for hundreds
of millions in federal grants to help pay off its federal loans
because it’s not producing nearly as much energy as it promised? It
produced more than 2,000 temporary construction jobs and only 86
permanent jobs. These are their own numbers from their web page.

Now take a look at this self-promoting hackery from Bob Keefe of
Environmental Entrepreneurs (featuring an embedded advertisement
from NRG, which operates the aforementioned Ivanpah solar project)
at the
Huffington Post:

Keystone XL will create about 35 full-time jobs and 15 temporary
jobs, according to the U.S. State Department’s analysis. Granted,
about 1,950 construction jobs will be created, but those jobs —
while important — disappear after the pipe goes in the ground.

Clean energy companies, meanwhile, announced more than 18,000
jobs in more than 20 states in just the last three months alone,
according to the latest report from my organization, Environmental
Entrepreneurs (E2).
See the full report here.

Thanks for the link, Keefe! Did you check out the report
yourself? Because thousands of those jobs are also only temporary.
From his own organization’s report:

Solar generation accounted for 4,600 announced jobs — three
quarters of clean power generation’s total. All the announcements
came from companies with operations in states that have strong
public policies designed to expand solar power generation,
including California, North Carolina, New Jersey, and Maryland. For
example, nearly 2,000 announced solar construction jobs came from
California’s Imperial, Merced and Madera counties. ­… Duke Energy
expects to complete three utility-scale solar PV projects next
year, bringing 800 construction jobs to Bladen, Duplin, and Wilson
counties.

These are temporary jobs. More than half the solar power
generation jobs he is promoting are only temporary, but note the
absence of the word in the text. The charts in their report do not
differentiate between permanent or temporary jobs, but Keefe is
more than happy to critique the nature of Keystone’s employment to
serve his own agenda.  

(Hat tip to William Freeland for
pointing out this trend)