Alaska governor argues canceling pipeline permit 'makes no sense across the board'

Alaska governor on Biden potentially canceling Keystone XL

Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy on potential fallout from canceling pipelines.

Alaska Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy told Fox Business Network Monday that reported plans by the incoming Biden administration to cancel pipeline permits makes "no sense across the board.”

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Dunleavy argued on “Cavuto: Coast to Coast” that if oil and gas projects are pushed overseas, jobs, wealth, revenue and opportunities will follow. In addition, Dunleavy told host Neil Cavuto that such actions would "jack up the cost of energy for poor people.”

CBC News reported over the weekend that the words "Rescind Keystone XL pipeline permit" appear on a list of executive actions scheduled to take effect on the first day of the new administration. The list, shared with U.S. stakeholders, appears to be a lengthier version of a memo released publicly by Biden chief of staff Ronald Klain.

The Keystone pipeline is operated by TC Energy Corp. The $9 billion project, which would move up to 830,000 barrels of crude oil daily from the province of Alberta to Nebraska, has been delayed because of legal issues.

In 2017, after reviewing its impact on the environment and climate, President Trump directed the State Department to approve Keystone XL. The Biden campaign pledged in May that the Democratic candidate would commit to rescinding the permit allowing the pipeline to cross the U.S.-Canada border.

“I think this demonstrates there’s been a complete transformation of the Democratic Party,” Dunleavy said on Monday.

“It used to be the party that looked out for poor people. When you stop projects like this that would bring cheap energy to America, you’re going to hurt poor people first,” he explained. “So this transformation, this idea that you stop oil lines or gas lines, coal, etc., is somehow going to help people, it’s really not in the end because it’s going to be the poor that suffer the most.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, TC Energy Corp. planned to announce a series of overhauls this week in an effort to win Biden's support for the controversial project. The overhauls reportedly included spending $1.7 billion on solar, wind and battery power to operate the partially completed 2,000-mile pipeline system, a pledge to hire a union workforce, and to eliminate all greenhouse-gas emissions from operations by 2030.

In a lengthy statement, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney said he was "deeply concerned" by the CBC report, arguing that the move would "kill jobs on both sides of the border, weaken the critically important Canada-U.S. relationship, and undermine U.S. national security by making the United States more dependent on OPEC oil imports in the future."

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“For years we’ve worked at realizing the dream of energy independence for America so that we wouldn’t be relying on foreign actors and we achieved that over the last couple of years through technology and now we’re going to roll that back, and we’re going to trade this out for higher cost energy,” Dunleavy said.

He did, however, acknowledge that “America has tremendous opportunity in renewables,” noting that Texas “does renewables well, as well as fossil fuel.”

“Alaska itself is looking at capitalizing on a renewable potential as well,” he continued.

The governor stressed that “the whole idea should be to create an environment in which you have as much opportunity as possible for jobs, for wealth [and] for revenues” as well as “for cheap, reliable energy for some of our poorest folks” to help “lift them out of poverty and to give them opportunities.”

Dunleavy then asked the Biden administration to “just step back and work through the whole concept because … if the idea is to ‘save the environment,’ we do it better here in America than anyone else is in the world.”

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“And so if you ship it over there, you’re just going to help ruin the environment overseas as opposed to here,” he continued. “We’ll protect it here. Overseas they won’t.”

A spokesperson for the Biden transition team did not immediately return FOX Business' request for comment.

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Fox News' Morgan Phillips, Lucas Manfredi and Allie Raffa contributed to this report.

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