President Obama rejected an application to build the Keystone XL pipeline from the tar sands of Canada, to oil refineries along the U.S. Gulf Coast on Wednesday. And so now the mudslinging begins.
Obama blamed congressional Republicans, who had set a 60-day deadline that his administration deemed to short to complete a thorough review of the project. (Because the proposed pipeline would cross the Canadian border, the U.S. State Department oversees permitting.)
Then, just minutes after Obama issued his statement, Republican members of Congress, who support the project for the U.S. jobs and energy security it could create, lined up before TV cameras to accuse the president of choosing his own politics above the needs of the nation.
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According to an NPR report on Thursday, Rep. Lee Terry of Nebraska said that with the nation's unemployment rate at 8.5 percent, there's no good reason for the president to reject the pipeline.
No good reason, huh? NASA scientist James Hansen can think of a few. And so can the more than 800 other environmental advocates who were arrested in front of the White House this past September while protesting the Keystone project.
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Their main gripe about tar sands is that processing them into usable fuel requires more energy—and thus generates more heat-trapping greenhouse gases—than does conventional crude oil.
And then there are the problems of potential leaks and general environmental disruption of the pipeline itself, which would stretch 1,700 miles (2,735 kilometers) down through the middle of Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas.
Discovery News correspondent Cristen Conger provides an excellent cheat sheet explaining more details of the project and its opponents' concerns. Her report includes a comment from Hansen, who asserted that it would be "game over" for curbing climate change if the U.S. government were to approve the Keystone deal.
In the Huffington Post yesterday, Corbin Hiar explains why the Keystone XL rejection won't stop tar sands development—and why the project's opponents may regret their strategy. Canada may just decide to sell its crude to China instead of the U.S., for example, which won't do anything to stop tar sands from contributing to global warming.
Alas, it is unclear whether any of the real concerns over tar sands development will be audible amid the political roar over the pipeline itself. NPR reports that the battle will take up again next week, when House Republicans plan to hold a hearing on the project, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton slated to testify.
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IMAGE:
The Trans-Alaska pipeline runs about 800 miles (1,300 km) from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Alaska at Valdez. That's less than half the length of the proposed tar sands pipeline project Keystone XL. (Photo courtesy Luca Galuzzi via Wikimedia Commons)
Tags: Engineering, Politics
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