WASHINGTON (AP) — Although he says both sides have exaggerated their claims about the impact of the Keystone X-L pipeline, President Barack Obama has come down on the side of the opponents. He is rejecting the application by a Canadian company to build the pipeline from Canada to Texas.

The decision comes in advance of an international meeting in Paris on climate change, which Obama will attend. He says the U.S. has become a global leader on that issue -- and that the project "would have undercut that global leadership."

Speaking at the White House Friday, Obama said the pipeline wouldn't have lowered U.S. gas prices or made the country less dependent on foreign energy. And he said it wouldn't have been a long-term job-creator.

For years, President Barack Obama has chided Republicans and Democrats alike for treating the KeystoneXL pipeline as a signal of whether the U.S. would seriously fight global warming.

Now that he's killed the project, Obama is holding it up as Exhibit A as he works to lock in his environmental legacy with a powerful international climate accord.

Rejecting Keystone is the latest in a long and growing list of steps Obama has taken to try to prove to the world the U.S. is getting serious about curtailing global warming, including landmark carbon dioxide emissions limits on U.S. power plants. Although the rules are proceeding for the time being, they face an uncertain future. Half of the states in the U.S. are suing to try to block them.

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