How many Americans does it take to lay some pipeline?

From a patent application by Ezra Cornell, 1844, for a machine to cut trenches and lay pipes for telegraph cables. Cornell University's Chronicle Online.

It seems the proportion is about 67 US citizens to one Canadian. That's at any rate, according to a Greenpeace Report (via ThinkProgress), what the TransCanada company (aka TRP) told its investors when it was selling that Keystone XL pipeline from the Alberta tar sands out through the Ogallala Aquifer to Texas; that is, the figures they gave the Canadian National Energy Board suggested the total amount of employment they were going to create with the Canadian part of the project would be about 442 person-years, while for the US portion, four times as long, the US Congress was given a number amounting to 118,000.

Of course when people asked Dr. Johnson how he expected to finish his Dictionary in three years when it had taken 40 years for the 40 Immortals of the Académie Française to complete theirs, he replied,

This is the proportion. Let me see: forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman.

I guess those Canadians must be really patriotic.  Or maybe they're just making the numbers up because they know what the Congresspersons like to hear. How did they come up with the 20,000 construction jobs that will build the pipeline to start with? On the basis of a $7-billion budget; but

Simple arithmetic shows that this figure is grossly overstated, possibly by more than 350 percent, because Perryman included three major budget items that have little or nothing to do with investment or job creation in the U.S.:

• The $1.6 billion Canadian portion of KXL;   

• The $683 million section of Keystone Phase II in Kansas that is already built; and

• The $3.1 billion already spent or committed, most of it on pipes and pumping component from companies outside the U.S.

  This means the total spending in the U.S. may be $2 billion or even lower. That translates into significantly fewer jobs simply because the true budget for KXL in the U.S. is less than a third of Perryman’s budget. Dividing TRP’s claim of 20,000 jobs by three equals 6,667 – a number that may still be overstated but is much closer to reality for a project such as KXL.

According to the US Chamber of Commerce,

We can put 20,000 Americans to work right away and up to 250,000 over the life of the project

and the American Petroleum Institute's Keystone XL Pipeline website still says

Projects like this, along with additional investment in oil sands development in Canada and expansion of pipelines and refineries in the U.S., make it possible to realize an additional 500,000 U.S. jobs in 2035.

So who knows? Maybe the Keystone XL Pipeline will end up employing everybody in the world. Or maybe (since they not only lied to the US Congress, but far worse, to their shareholders, just maybe, something bad will happen to them for once. I mean, no doubt jail is too much to hope for, but if we could hurt their feelings a little bit?

I fear if you are at all hip this may not be funny—it's four years old, for one thing—but I think it's a gas, as it were.