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President Obama is set to make a big speech about energy tomorrow in Oklahoma.  If advance press reports are correct, he will use his visit to the town of Cushing – a major hub in the nation’s oil pipeline network – to announce his support for the southern leg of the Keystone pipeline, aka “Keystone Lite,” which will run nearly 500 miles from Cushing down to the Gulf Coast refineries.  The point of this southern pipeline is to help ease the flow of oil out of the “chokepoint” of Cushing, which, so the argument goes, will help to lower oil prices by increasing supply.

It won’t, of course.  Oil is a global commodity, and whether or not this pipeline gets built will have virtually zero impact on oil prices. (Bryan Walsh has a good backgrounder on the Big Republican Lie about oil prices.)  So let’s be blunt: The president is backing the pipeline now because it’s a quick-and-easy way to inoculate himself from attacks from Mitt Romney and other Republicans during the upcoming campaign that he is beholden economy-killing enviros and solar-power cronies.

But by backing the pipeline now, Obama opens himself up to other political dangers.  In the fight over the Keystone pipeline last fall – which ended with the administration punting on whether to approve the project – the president won a lot of praise from clean-energy activists (and big donors who care about clean energy) for his willingness to stand up to Big Oil.  And in recent weeks, he’s talked frankly about  oil as “fuel of the past” and of the need to cut $4 billion in subsidies to the fossil-fuel industry.  By endorsing Keystone Lite, he risks looking like just another hack who talks big about getting off oil but who, when it comes down to it, won’t take real risks to achieve it.

So tomorrow’s speech will be an interesting moment, if only to see how far the president goes in playing kissy-kissy with the carbon kings.  Some things to watch for:

How will he justify his support of the pipeline?  In recent speeches, Obama has talked about fossil fuels as “the fuels of the past” and renewable energy as the fuels of the future.  That’s a good distinction, and obviously true.  But if that is the case, how will he justify okaying Keystone lite?  Granted, this is a private investment, so if TransCanada – the company building the pipeline – wants to spend billions on it, that’s up to them.  But why should the president invest his own political capital in promoting the delivery of the fuel of the past?