Numlock Sunday: Emily Atkin on the pipeline problem

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with an author or a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about what they wrote.

This week, I spoke to Emily Atkin who wrote “The conservative climate fear-mongering begins” for her newsletter HEATED. Here's what I wrote about it:

The Keystone XL pipeline’s permit was cancelled Wednesday pumping the brakes on a project that would bring petroleum from oil sands in Canada to a link in the United States. In the aftermath, advocates of the pipeline argued that the decision would cost significant numbers of jobs, though the data doesn’t really bear that out. Given the hypothetical state of the project and the other permits that are in legal challenges, all of the construction jobs were entirely hypothetical. Further, they were temporary gigs, as the entire point of a pipeline is to take labor-intensive work that requires a lot of people — driving trucks ful…