Tired of the president dragging his feet, John Hofmeister, former CEO of Shell, bluntly shared his thoughts about the Keystone XL pipeline on Feb. 18.
Hofmeister passionately argued for approval of the Keystone XL pipeline on “Squawk on the Street,” calling it a “no brainer decision” to boost the economy. Hofmeister criticized President Barack Obama’s refusal to approve the pipeline, citing Obama’s “financial supporters” and obstructionism.
Hofmeister, who is now CEO of Citizens for Affordable Energy, said that the approval has become “so unnecessarily politicized.”
“This is ridiculous. I mean to put it- To put it very bluntly; this is a no-brainer decision in terms of the overall economic health and well being of the country, ” Hofmeister said.
He blamed Obama’s refusal to approve Keystone on the fact that “some of [Obama’s] financial supporters object to” the pipeline.
“It’s also a statement about how broken the political process is in our country,” Hofmeister added. He explained that majorities in both houses of Congress support the pipeline but that Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry are “backed off.”
“I get very irritated at the nonsense that we see when we could be employing people, we could be building the infrastructure of the country and taking care of our energy security needs in decades ahead,” he said. Hofmeister noted that “pipelines are part of the infrastructure that the president has been pushing for five years.”
According to its website, Citizens for Affordable Energy seeks [1] to “educate citizens and government officials about pragmatic, non-partisan affordable energy solutions.”
— Sean Long is Staff Writer at the Media Research Center. Follow Sean Long on Twitter. [2]