Media fact-checkers have their hands full debunking lies about the Keystone XL pipeline from anti-pipeline voices including a fringe media personality and President Barack Obama.
Oil extracted from Western Canada and transported through the pipeline to Gulf Coast refineries "will be sold everywhere else" but the United States, Obama claimed this week.
That is false, according to Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler. "Current trends suggest that about one-third of that refined product would be exported," Kessler explained. "That is not insubstantial, but it is certainly much smaller than 100 percent."
Those facts are made clear by a U.S. State Department study on the project. "The president might want to study it before he addresses the Keystone question again," Kessler quipped.
The pipeline has languished in bureaucratic obscurity for nearly six years as the president delays a decision that is sure to anger either the American public at large, which overwhelmingly supports the pipeline’s construction, or the president’s environmentalist base and its cadre of ultra-wealthy political donors.
Those donors succeeded in buying sufficient congressional opposition to the pipeline to scuttle a Senate vote on its approval this week.
Anti-pipeline voices in the left-wing press have been even more divorced from the facts, according to additional media fact-checking.
According to Thom Hartman, an anchor on Kremlin propaganda network Russia Today, libertarian philanthropists Charles and David Koch "stand to make around $100 billion if the government approves the Keystone XL pipeline."
According to fact-checking website PolitiFact, that is also false, and egregiously so. It earned Hartmann a "pants-on-fire" rating, the website’s lowest ranking for factually incorrect statements.
"The $100 billion estimate is far from a neutral analyst’s prediction, based instead on the far-out calculations of a group that wants the pipeline, and the Koch brothers, to fail," PolitiFact wrote.
The claim was based on a report from the left-wing International Forum on Globalization, which used shoddy techniques and loaded assumption to arrive at the $100 billion figure. Actual experts panned the report.
Experts we consulted were struck by the report’s bias, with chapters devoted to victims of "Koch greed" and the Kochs’ vast web of nonprofit spending for political aims, as well as its calculation that the Keystone XL pipeline carries "$100 billion in potential profits" for the Kochs. Experts in energy, economics, and business called the methodology behind the figure "absurd" and "puzzling."
The Washington Post was forced to correct a March article based on the IFG report, though critics said it did so with only minimal regard for factual accuracy.
While Democrats have long sought to tie the Kochs to the Keystone pipeline, both Koch Industries and TransCanada, the company building it, have repeatedly said that Koch has no interest in the project.