Dakota Pipeline Decision Is Obama’s Last ‘Screw You’ to Rural America

News - Dakota Pipeline Decision Is Obama’s Last ‘Screw You’ to Rural America | Heartland Institute:
"The Obama administration’s decision to deny an important easement needed to complete the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) represents one last single-finger salute to Middle America from the outgoing president.
Rural Americans face tough challenges, and by killing the Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipelines and by imposing several costly regulations on energy development, President Barack Obama has only served to make these challenges worse.
People living in rural areas face high levels of poverty.
...According to data provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average annual earnings for oil and gas jobs are about $67,400, a figure that is much higher than the average earnings received by workers in rural areas.
This means every family-supporting job killed by unnecessary regulations or government mandates, such as Obama’s proposed methane regulations and the politically motivated pipeline rejections/delays, has hurt workers substantially more in rural areas, where there aren’t as many good-paying blue-collar jobs, than they might in suburban or urban parts of the United States.
 Even worse, without the 4.3 million jobs generated over the past several years by the hydraulic fracturing industry, which has largely been opposed by the Obama administration, only five million jobs would have been created since Obama took office in 2009. 
Without hydraulic fracturing, Obama’s paltry job creation numbers would have been the worst of any two-term president in recent history..."