Here’s what I’ve never understood about the GOP congressional leadership’s fixation with the Keystone XL pipeline, or why they made it the first thing in the box in 2015. That was before they decided to invite terrorists into the United States by nearly shutting down the Homeland Security department over an extraneous immigration debate, but that's a completely separate issue.

They framed Keystone as a jobs bill. That’s what doesn’t make any sense, at all. Energy security? Friendly relations with Canada? A political payoff to Koch Industries, which may very well be the largest leaseholder in the Tar Sands region? A signal to Saudi Arabia that its days of using OPEC as a cudgel are over? Any of those would make sense, though a bit more difficult to explain on Twitter.

But a jobs bill – in a country the size of the United States, where literally hundreds of thousands of jobs are created every single month? In January alone, more than 250,000 jobs were added in the U.S., according to labor reports.

Keystone would create 42,000 temporary construction jobs, lasting 19 weeks. After it’s built, all of those jobs go away (except for a few dozen along the route). The only real, permanent jobs will be linked to TransCanada and leaseholders like Koch Industries in Canada.



There’s only one reason GOP leaders in Washington talk about Keystone as a jobs bill. It’s because they talk about everything as a jobs or economy measure – and have for the past two decades since James Carville and Bill Clinton thumped then-President Bush in his 1992 re-election bid with “it’s the economy, stupid.”

The GOP leadership never wants to forget that political lesson. They never want to be seen as not minding the domestic economy. So everything is about jobs – even when, like Keystone, the issue has nothing whatsoever to do with “jobs.” Immigration reform, for instance, often veers into an “American jobs” subtext from GOP leaders when they justify the need for the political fight.

The Keystone fight is now surreal in ways that are nearly impossible for any objective observer to understand. And yet the GOP leadership will continue to bring it up at every turn, whenever possible, and describe it as a “jobs” bill.

It isn’t farfetched to imagine a future fight in 2015 where, like the DHS/immigration debacle playing out in D.C. right now, this Congress stalls over a Keystone rider.



Which would be patently absurd. The real energy jobs that are now being created, right and left, in America – and will only accelerate exponentially in the next 10-15 years – have nothing at all to do with Keystone or Tar Sands oil.

The jobs are in the solar energy disruption that every utility executive in America now understands and is either fighting or embracing. Solar PV – whether in residential or commercial applications – is a disrupting business force that makes Keystone almost irrelevant in the long term.

Right now, in moves that largely go unreported and unnoticed, homeowners and businesses are replacing their energy needs with vastly cheaper solar energy that is only going to continue to drop in price.

Leading business school experts are starting to predict that solar PV could thoroughly disrupt the utility sector business model in a decade or so – and create literally hundreds of thousands of new job opportunities in this new solar economy.

“Should solar continue on its exponential trajectory, the energy infrastructure will be 100 percent solar by 2030,” Stanford business school lecturer Tony Seba writes in his new book, "Clean Disruption."



“This statement, that the world will be 100 percent solar, usually generates the same befuddled looks I used to get when I forecasted a billion Internet nodes 20 years ago,” Seba wrote. “The question is: Can solar keep growing at this exponential rate for another 10 or 20 years? The answer is that the solar growth rate could actually accelerate. As a rule, when a technology product achieves critical mass (the point of no return), its market growth actually accelerates.”

That sort of energy disruption and the hundreds of thousands of new jobs that will follow in its wake dwarfs Keystone – and yet GOP leaders almost universally ignore or disdain this emerging energy economy.

Solar City and every other company entering the space now can build home systems for about $10,000, creating jobs (and cheap, renewable energy peace of mind) in every corner of the United States. It’s a lot like the satellite TV disruption that occurred when direcTV and DISH started to compete with cable television. More choices for consumers emerged, and a whole lot of new jobs were created.

Keystone has been merely a proposal for almost six years now. The only jobs it’s created have been multi-million dollar lobbying jobs for a handful of public relations, legal and government affairs shops in DC.



Meanwhile, the solar industry will complete its one millionth solar installation in America some time in 2015. A third of all new electric generation in 2014 came from solar. A new solar installation or project now occurs somewhere in the U.S. – built by a team of American workers employed in the fastest growing energy sector in the world – every three minutes.

There are now 174,000 solar workers in the U.S. – and that number grew by 20 percent last year over the previous year, according to the Solar Foundation.

"As the solar industry grows, so does its benefit to the economy,” SEIA says in a fact sheet on solar industry data. “These workers are employed at 6,100 businesses in every state. The increasing value of projects has injected life into the U.S. economy as well. In 2013, solar installations were valued at $13.7 billion, compared to $11.5 billion in 2012 and $8.6 billion in 2011.”

The solar energy disruption is creating tens of thousands of new jobs in leaps and bounds. These are good American jobs, in a growing industry that will eventually make cheap energy available to all in nearly every corner of America.