Canceling Keystone XL Heralds the End of Fossil Fuels, Not Jobs
Large numbers of oil workers will need to find new employment, but their skills will transfer and the government should help smooth the way.
Energy jobs aren’t just in oil anymore
Photographer: Bloomberg
The demise of the Keystone XL pipeline heralds the beginning of the end for the oil age in the U.S. and Canada. This is a necessary evolution, but it raises many challenges. Workers displaced by the shift away from oil will need new jobs, and energy industry clusters like Houston and Alberta will need new activities to sustain their economies.
It would be easy to see the cancellation of the Keystone XL as merely a flamboyant political gesture by a new president intent on demonstrating loyalty to the environmental and Native American rights movements that have passionately opposed it. But as my colleague Liam Denning writes, the pipeline project simply didn’t make economic sense in the modern world. Though Canadians have gotten better at extracting oil from the tar sands of Alberta, those projects still require oil prices of well over $40 a barrel to be profitable. Oil prices are now just over $50, having fallen by about half since the early 2010s. That’s a slim margin.