How Much Did Seven House Votes Pushing Keystone XL Cost Taxpayers?

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News broke recently that the 37 House votes to repeal Obamacare cost taxpayers $55 million. The House has voted for Keystone XL eight times, and Oil Change International says the House members who voted for it took six times as much money from the oil industry as their colleagues who voted against. Those votes cost Big Oil $36 million. How much did they cost us, theย taxpayers?

Turns out itโ€™s pretty much impossible to calculate the cost of any House activity. The Congressional Research Service refuses to offer estimates, calling it โ€œmethodologicallyย impossible.โ€

The $55 million figure for the Obamacare repeal votes is extrapolated from a number in a CBS report from last year, on the occasion of the House Republicansโ€™ 33rd vote to repeal Obamacare, and Politifact says it is so rough an estimate that it amounts to a falseย claim.

But letโ€™s playย anyway!

CBS calculated that it took 80 hours for the first 33 House votes, to the tune of $48 million ($24 million aย week).

Thatโ€™s 2.4 hours per vote times eight votes to allow Keystone XL to sidestep all of our nationโ€™s environmental laws, which gives us about 19.4ย hours.

Since this is all fuzzy math anyway, letโ€™s bump that to 20 hours, or half aย week.

So, $12 millionโ€“thatโ€™s what House Republicans have wasted doing the bidding of Big Oil to approve this new infrastructure that would lock us into many more decades of reliance on oil at precisely the moment when we need to move decisively away from fossilย fuels.

$12 million. Thatโ€™s a lot of solar panels.ย 

Image credit: burning money onย Shutterstock

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Mike Gaworecki is a San Francisco-based journalist who writes about energy, climate, and forest issues for DeSmogBlog and Mongabay.com. His writing has appeared on BillMoyers.com, Alternet, Treehugger, Change.org, Huffington Post, and more. He is also a novelist whose debut โ€œThe Mysticistโ€ came out via FreemadeSF inย 2014.

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