Nov 09 2011
Progressives Look to Obama to Prove Climate Credentials Over Keystone XL Decision
The proposed Keystone XL pipeline continues to be a battleground for the Obama Administration as 10,000 protesters gathered this past Sunday in Washington DC to demand an end to the $7 billion dollar project. The pipeline, now in its third year of a questionable State Department approval process, would bring 700,000 barrels of dirty tar sands a day from Alberta Canada to Texas oil refineries, cutting diagonally through the middle of the United States from the Northwest to the Southeast. Part of the pipeline’s route is slated to go through the Sandhills region of Nebraska directly above the Ogallala aquifer which supplies drinking water to 1.5 million Americans. Nebraska’s Republican Governor David Heineman had taken a strong position against the pipeline for that reason. Now, despite massive public outcry over the project, he asking for the pipeline’s route to be altered rather than scrapped completely. Heineman says, “TransCanada [the company that would built the pipeline,] already has a route along the eastern side of our state. If they put this second pipeline right next to it, I’ll stand up and be supportive, so will Nebraskans, and this controversy will end.” Nebraska Senator Annette Dubas has introduced a bill in a special session to allow the state’s public service commission to review and reroute pipeline projects. TransCanada however claims that rerouting the pipeline this late in the process will be impossible. Environmentalists are unhappy with a mere re-routing, citing numerous potentially lethal environmental outcomes regardless of where the pipe runs. TransCanada’s other pipeline Keystone 1 has actually leaked a dozen times within a single year despite the company’s claims that it would leak no more than three times in a decade. While the final approval for the construction must be granted by Hillary Clinton’s State Department, based on public comment and an environmental impact report, President Obama, ahead of his 2012 election campaign, is now inserting himself into the debate by claiming he will be the one to make the final decision. Putting pressure on the project is the Premier of Alberta Canada, Alison Redford who is heading to Washington to promote the pipeline among US lawmakers.
GUEST: Jamie Henn, co-founder of 350.org.
Visit www.tarsandsaction.org and www.350.org for more information.
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