Brace yourselves, the whole world is about to explode. Every time you turn on the news for the next few weeks you are likely to hear a politician somewhere playing political football with the Keystone XL pipeline. The Senate passed a bill authorizing the building of the Keystone pipeline last week and will now go to conference committee to work out the differences between the House and Senate versions.

The bill will go no further than that, because President Obama has promised to veto it, and supporters in the Senate do not have the votes required to override the executive smackdown. This is when the billy goats will butt heads.

Competing messages about how this pipeline will save the economy, create prosperity and jobs, and lower gas prices will be met by those who insist it will kill all wildlife in the Great Plains and poison every living thing around it. It is all much ado about nothing, because what you are not likely to hear is the truth.

The truth is that the Keystone pipeline is not a big deal. The construction of it will only create around 4,000 jobs and maintenance after it is built will only produce 35 permanent positions.

The pipeline would not lower gas prices – if anything it will increase them. This is because much of the Canadian oil that would go into the pipeline is already being refined in Midwestern cities. The pipeline would bypass them for New Orleans, where it will be exported, not used. This will lower the Midwest supply, and increase prices 20 cents per gallon or more for people living in the Midwest, Great Plains and Rocky Mountains.

The pipeline is also not a serious environmental threat; even President Obama’s own Department of State admits that. Meanwhile, the infrastructure this country does need is crumbling. Roads, bridges, ports, waterways and electrical grids receive near-failing grades from engineers regularly, but Congress hardly seems concerned about that. A comprehensive plan to fix the infrastructure that helped build the most powerful economy in history could create millions of jobs.

President Obama will be introducing a plan to pay for this on Tuesday, by taxing profits kept overseas by American companies at a 14 percent rate, instead of the original 35 percent rate. Our own Senator Rand Paul supports a 6.5 percent tax rate on profits companies bring back to America.

None of these ideas are likely to go anywhere.

So why all the attention on the insignificant Keystone pipeline? Well, in D.C. there is one hard and fast rule that exists over and above everything else: if rich people want something done, it becomes a big issue. Between lobbying and campaign contributions, hundreds of millions have already been spent fighting to get Keystone built.

So until a few billionaires start to care about roads and bridges, the rest of us will have to settle for driving on something we hope won’t crumble out from under us.