In Tuesday’s Recorder article about spiking home heating oil costs, the owner of Orange Oil made a statement that I could not let go unchallenged. Pam Harris said that the major factor in rising oil costs was “Biden’s executive order to cancel approval for the Keystone XL Pipeline, designed to carry 830,00 barrels of oil a day into the United States from Canada.” This claim is false. Many news organizations (apnews, cbsnews, nytimes, forbes) and experts have examined the facts behind this claim and soundly refuted them. The Keystone pipeline was never operational when it was shut down and was not slated to go into service until 2023. Even if the pipeline had been completed, the amount of oil it was designed to transport was a drop in the bucket for U.S demand. Furthermore, the key lesson here is that the U.S. is not the whole story, according to Gregory Nemet, professor of pubic affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin’s Energy Institute. It’s a global market and the global economic recovery is part of the reason oil prices increased. As stated in one CBS news article, “in the long run, the best way to protect Americans from spiking oil prices is to accelerate the shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy.”

Monica Winters

New Salem