As Jim noted [1] on Tuesday, the announcement of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline elicited bipartisan approval from Virginia’s politicians, while also causing the environmental and progressive communities to get quite irate.
The prime motivator for the electeds is jobs — lots of them, with more likely to come, and the potential for future economic growth.
Elsewhere, pipeline politics are more problematic. In the debate Wednesday between Barbara Comstock and John Foust, the Democrat fumbled the issue of the Keystone Pipeline, offering muddled answers to the rather direct question of whether he supported its construction:
One might expect a Northern Virginia Democrat running for Congress to be wishy-washy on the construction of a pipeline carrying the demon fossil fuel. It’s not what the activist base wants to hear. Nor does this guy [2], who has spent a lot of money on Virginia Democrats in the recent past. But the jobs such efforts generate? Those are very hard to ignore.
We can only imagine how Mr. Foust’s campaign will react to the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. Perhaps it won’t and, given the candidate’s response to the Keystone project, any response would likely be confused and contradictory.
Maybe if the pipeline carried soft sunshine and sweet breezes instead of natural gas…yeah. Foust could back that.