ANN ARBOR—President Barack Obama today rejected the Keystone XL pipeline, saying that he does not believe the project serves the national interest. The University of Michigan has experts available to discuss the significance of that decision.

Joe Arvai, director of the Frederick A. and Barbara M. Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise and the Max McGraw Professor of Sustainable Enterprise in the School of Natural Resources & Environment and at the Ross School of Business.

Arvai joined the University of Michigan from the University of Calgary, where he had extensive experience with the Canadian oil and gas industries and the pipeline sector. His expertise is in the area of decision-making, corporate sustainability, and the triple-bottom-line. He can discuss the objectives that might have been central to the Obama administration’s decision to reject Keystone XL. In addition, he can speak to events in Canada that may have contributed to today’s decision.

“This decision was years in the making and has as much to do with what Canada wasn’t doing—acting on climate change, for example—as it does with what the Obama administration was thinking in the months and years leading to today. The change in government in Canada, as well as Trans Canada’s request for a pause in the pipeline review, didn’t come soon enough to change President Obama’s calculus on this decision.”

Contact: 734-647-3891 (office), 734-834-2075 (cell), [email protected], @DecisionLab (Twitter).

 Andrew Hoffman, education director at the Graham Sustainability Institute, can field questions about the economic competitiveness and climate-change impacts of the decision.

“Obama’s decision is consistent with his efforts of late to galvanize his legacy on climate change, an issue he hardly addressed at all during his first term,” Hoffman said. “But in the end, this is all a tempest in a teapot. The Keystone pipeline will not substantively lower gas prices, reduce our dependence on foreign oil or create a significant number of jobs.

“Similarly, it will not significantly raise carbon dioxide emissions. It is just one more battlefield between the left and the right about free commerce, the role of government and the influence of activists,” Hoffman said. “It is about whether we continue to pursue a fossil fuel economy, whether we begin to address climate change, whether the government should intrude in the market in this way and whether activists should be able to interfere in commerce in this way.

“While Obama may veto it today, we can expect to see this again in the next administration, particularly if it is a Republican administration,” he said.

Contact: 734-763-9455, 617-285-0920 or [email protected].

Barry Rabe is a professor at the U-M Ford School of Public Policy and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He also holds appointments in U-M’s School of Natural Resources and Environment and the Program in the Environment.

He was the first social scientist to receive a Climate Protection Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2006 and is a member of the National Research Council committee on Risk Assessment and Risk Governance for Shale Gas Development.

Contact: 734-615-9596 or [email protected].