Fox News anchor Sandra Smith found herself on the receiving end of a real-time, on-air fact check from a former Obama administration official on Wednesday.
Robert Wolf, a member of the president’s Export Council from 2014 to 2016, was asked to respond to an increasingly frequent Republican argument that the Biden administration shouldn’t have nixed the Keystone XL pipeline because it would have helped prevent the current rise in oil and gas prices.
“Perhaps opening up the Keystone pipeline is not off the table for this White House?” Smith asked after playing a clip of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) accusing the Biden administration of being “unfriendly” to oil and gas companies.
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“I think [the pipeline] is off the table,” Wolf said. “And let’s recall a few things: One, it’s the worst type of oil you can have. It’s tar sands going from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico. It wasn’t going to really change anything to do with our oil supply. It was to export from the Gulf of Mexico.”
Smith, who has been fact-checked on-air by a former Obama adviser before, then interjected, “That’s debatable.”
“It’s not actually debatable,” Wolf replied. “[The pipeline] has nothing to do with oil fields. It’s a pipeline that was going to end in the Gulf of Mexico. That’s a fact, and you should look it up.”
“And with respect to President Trump,” continued Wolf, who was appearing along with former Trump administration economic adviser Stephen Moore. “As Stephen will tell you, only ten percent of it was even done under his four years. So it’s not about XL. It’s about how do we become energy independent, and I’ve always been supportive of the all-in energy approach for actually ten years now.”
As The Washington Post’s Philip Bump notes, much of the oil from Alberta was intended for the Gulf Coast where it could be refined into petroleum products like gasoline, and “part of the plan was also to then ship refined oil out of the country.” (As of 2017, about two-thirds of products refined there are exported.) Additionally, the State Department under President Trump acknowledged that “any impact on prices for refined petroleum products resulting from the approval and construction of the Keystone XL pipeline would be minimal."
