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President Obama appeared on The Colbert Report last night to talk health care, jaded young voters, and the recent job report. And — good news for those young voters — while Obama didn’t say whether he’d block Keystone XL, he spoke of the tar-sands pipeline in dismissive terms.

Here’s what he had to say after Colbert asked about Keystone:

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[I]f we look at this objectively, we’ve got to make sure that it’s not adding to the problem of carbon and climate change, because these young people are going to have to live in a world where we already know temps are going up. And Keystone is a potential contributor of that — we have to examine that, and we have to weigh that against the amount of jobs that it’s actually going to create, which aren’t a lot.

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Essentially there’s Canadian oil passing through the United States to be sold on the world market. It’s not going to push down gas prices here in the United States.

It’s good for Canada. It could create a couple of thousand jobs in the initial construction of the pipeline. But we’ve got to measure that against whether or not it is going to contribute to an overall warming of the planet that could be disastrous.

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