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Canadian PM to Obama: Let’s make a deal on Keystone!

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Keystone study contractor under scrutiny by State Dept. watchdog

by Aaron Small Posted on August 5, 2013

Keystone study contractor under scrutiny by State Dept. watchdog

By Grist staff

Does the consulting firm studying the environmental effects of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline have a conflict of interest?

For months, climate activists have been raising the alarm about Environmental Resources Management (ERM), the main firm contracted by the State Department to write the official environmental impact statement for Keystone.

Now State’s Inspector General is looking into allegations of improper ties and incomplete disclosures.

From The Hill:

The State Department’s internal watchdog has “initiated an inquiry” into whether the contractor Foggy Bottom used for a draft environmental analysis on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline had a conflict of interest.

The move is a response to allegations from several outside groups, Doug Welty, a spokesman with the State Department Office of Inspector General, told The Hill on Friday.

The development raises the possibility of another redo of the analysis assessing Keystone’s environmental impact.

Bloomberg Businessweek explains some of the allegations of improper behavior:

[Friends of the Earth] engaged in opposition research, as it is called during election campaigns, to turn up the evidence that ERM had worked with TransCanada on projects that it had failed to disclose to the U.S. State Department. …

Here, (PDF), for example, is a 2010 document, cached online, in which ERM lists TransCanada as a client. Does this prove that ERM has been biased toward TransCanada in its Keystone assessment? No. But unless this document is a forgery, ERM appears not to have disclosed all it should have to the U.S. government. (ERM declined to comment.)

Meanwhile, there’s another hiccup for Keystone, this one in Nebraska. From The Washington Post:

[A] little-noticed trial scheduled for next month in Nebraska could spell problems for [Keystone].

Despite two attempts by Nebraska’s attorney general to have the case thrown out, Lancaster County District Court Judge Stephanie Stacy has set a Sept. 27 trial date for arguments in a lawsuit that contends the state legislature unconstitutionally gave Gov. Dave Heineman (R) authority to approve the pipeline route.

A win for the plaintiffs — three Nebraska landowners who oppose the pipeline — would force TransCanada, the company that wants to build the 1,179-mile northern leg of the project, to go through the entire siting process again. Even supporters do not believe that would permanently block the project, but it could add years to the timeline.

No wonder TransCanada is now looking to build a big tar-sands oil pipeline that doesn’t cross the U.S. border.

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Keystone XL won’t use state-of-the-art spill technology

by marsxxzaa Posted on June 19, 2013

Keystone XL won’t use state-of-the-art spill technology

By Claire Thompson

Dan Holtmeyer

These women don’t trust TransCanada’s assurances about safety.

TransCanada swears that once the Keystone XL pipeline is operational, it will be totally safe. The company is apparently so confident — despite already having had to dig up and replace faulty stretches of the pipeline’s southern leg — that it doesn’t see the need to invest in state-of-the-art spill-detection technology. TransCanada is like that obnoxious seventh-grade skateboarder too confident in his sick moves to bother with a helmet.

The internal spill detectors TransCanada currently uses — in which sensors alert remote operators if pressure along the pipeline drops — are standard for the industry, but they’re designed to catch high-volume spills. Bloomberg Businessweek reports:

Keystone XL would have to be spilling more than 12,000 barrels a day — or 1.5 percent of its 830,000 barrel capacity — before its currently planned internal spill-detection systems would trigger an alarm, according to the U.S. State Department, which is reviewing the proposal.

New external technology, on the other hand, can identify much smaller leaks. For example, acoustic sensors can pick up the sound of oil escaping through a pinhole-size opening. And helicopters doing flyovers can be fitted with trash-can-size devices that detect oil vapors in infrared sunlight, potentially spotting leaks flowing at rates of less than 10 barrels per day.

Bloomberg Businessweek calculated that it would cost about $705,000 — $5,000 per mile — to install advanced fiber-optic cable technology along 141 critical miles of the pipeline, areas where drinking water, ecosystems, and population centers are at risk. That’s hardly a drop in the bucket compared to the overall $5.3 billion cost of the pipeline. And investing in better spill-detection technology pays off:

Equipment available to spot spills more quickly would have cut 75 percent off the estimated $1.7 billion toll in property damage caused by major incidents on oil lines from 2001 to 2011, consultants said in a December report prepared for the [U.S. Transportation Department].

Though the U.S. EPA recommended these new external detection tools be used on Keystone XL, a TransCanada representative told Bloomberg that they haven’t yet been sufficiently tested on projects the scale of Keystone, and that they produce too many false positives to be reliable. But it’s not like the current system is doing a bang-up job, either:

Internal systems such as the one planned for Keystone XL have a spotty record catching leaks, according to the Transportation Department’s report, prepared by the engineering firm Kiefner & Associates Inc., of Worthington, Ohio. Members of the public reported 23 percent of the 197 oil and liquids pipeline leaks between January 2010 and July 2012, according to the study, compared to 17 percent identified by the pipeline companies.

TransCanada claims to be studying, at the EPA’s request, whether it could implement the new technologies along environmentally sensitive portions of the pipeline.

The company has had its share of safety issues — record numbers of leaks and a shutdown on the original Keystone pipeline, an explosion of a natural-gas pipeline, accusations that it cuts corners on construction. And a report by researchers at Cornell estimates that we could see 91 major spills over 50 years from Keystone XL. So maybe it couldn’t hurt for TransCanada to spring for some new and improved safety features this time around.

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.

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Obama says a climate plan is coming next month, so climate hawks delay lawsuit

by DorothyUn Posted on June 18, 2013

Obama says a climate plan is coming next month, so climate hawks delay lawsuit

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“Sit tight, guys. Climate rules are coming soon, I swear.”

A cavalry of lawyers representing states and environmental groups was expected to launch a legal assault against the Obama administration this week over its slow movement on climate rules, but the charge was postponed at the 11th hour.

What changed? Obama has been telling donors that he plans to unveil new climate change regulations as part of a larger climate strategy next month.

Those regulations are expected to include a long-awaited rule on carbon dioxide emissions from new power plants, which would likely make it impossible to build new coal plants unless they have carbon-capture technology. The administration has been delaying release of that rule, reportedly working to improve it so it can better withstand the inevitable industry lawsuits. That delay in turn prompted states and environmental groups to threaten their own lawsuit.

From Reuters:

The attorney generals of New York and nine other states, along with three major green groups, had planned to sue the EPA this week because it missed a deadline in April to finalize emissions standards for new electric power plants.

Two months after notifying the agency they intended to sue, the consortium had expected to file as early as Monday, but backed off temporarily to allow the White House to disclose its climate plans.

“Due to public reports that the president will be announcing major action on climate change very soon, the Attorney General has decided to postpone a lawsuit on this matter for a short period,” said Melissa Grace, a spokeswoman for New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.

So the prospect of a new climate initiative is enough to mollify the would-be litigants — for now.

But climate activists are still restless and unhappy, particularly over Obama’s indecision on the Keystone XL pipeline. Just yesterday, 22 activists were arrested during a Keystone protest outside a State Department office in Chicago.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Al Gore, raising the heat on Obama, calls Keystone an “atrocity”

by grycjanekg Posted on June 17, 2013

Al Gore, raising the heat on Obama, calls Keystone an “atrocity”

Center for American Progress Action Fund

The Goracle does not like Keystone.

From one Nobel Peace Prize winner to another, this whole Keystone XL thing is an “atrocity.”

Al Gore has been calling on Barack Obama to step up the fight against climate change and Keystone, most recently during an interview with The Guardian:

The former vice-president said in an interview on Friday that he hoped Obama would follow the example of British Columbia, which last week rejected a similar pipeline project, and shut down the Keystone XL.

“I certainly hope that he will veto that now that the Canadians have publicly concluded that it is not safe to take a pipeline across British Columbia to ports on the Pacific,” he told the Guardian. “I really can’t imagine that our country would say: ‘Oh well. Take it right over parts of the Ogallala aquifer’, our largest and most important source of ground water in the US. It’s really a losing proposition.” …

“This whole project [Keystone XL] is an atrocity but it is even more important for him to regulate carbon dioxide emissions,” Gore said. He urged Obama to use his powers as president to cut carbon dioxide emissions from new and existing power plants — the biggest [single] source of global warming pollution.

“He doesn’t need Congress to do anything,” Gore said. “If it hurts the feelings of people in the carbon polluting industries that’s too bad.”

A few days previous, the former veep made another call for Obama to take action. “I hope that he’ll get moving on to follow up on the wonderful pledges he made in his inaugural speech earlier this year and then soon after in his State of the Union,” Gore said during a Google+ video chat last week, Politico reported. “Great words. We need great actions now.”

Gore joins a growing number of Democrats and activists who have been voicing their frustrations with Obama over the president’s failure to match his strong climate rhetoric with strong climate action. Last week, a group of Democratic senators sent the president a letter urging him to get going. From The Hill:

Five senators from New Jersey, New York and Connecticut sent a letter Thursday to President Obama saying the “superstorm” that tore through the Northeast last year “brought home the increasing costs of global warming for millions of Americans.” …

The letter urges Obama to impose emissions standards on the nation’s existing power plants, which is a top priority for climate change activists.

It seems the president is preparing a response to the growing tide of cries for action. From Bloomberg:

With his administration under pressure from environmentalists to reject the Keystone XL pipeline project, President Barack Obama plans to unveil a package of separate actions next month focused on curbing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

At closed-door fundraisers held over the past few weeks, the president has been telling Democratic party donors that he will unveil new climate proposals in July, according to people who have attended the events or been briefed.

Obama’s promise frequently comes in response to pleas from donors to reject TransCanada Corp.’s proposed Keystone XL project, a $5.3 billion pipeline that would carry tar-sands oil from Canada to U.S. refineries. Opponents of the pipeline say it would increase greenhouse-gas emissions by encouraging use of the tar sands.

While Obama has not detailed the specifics of his plan to the donors, pipeline opponents anticipate the package will include final rules from the Environmental Protection Agency to limit greenhouse-gas emissions from new power plants.

One big question is whether Obama’s new climate action plan will be linked to approval of Keystone XL, an attempt to mollify both sides. That wouldn’t work. As climate organizer (and Grist board member) Bill McKibben said earlier this year, “Given that the Arctic melted last summer, we’re not really in a place where we get to try and ‘please both sides’ anymore.”

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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House votes to take Keystone decision out of Obama’s hands

by irj972ys Posted on May 23, 2013

House votes to take Keystone decision out of Obama’s hands

The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Lee Terry (R-Neb.)

Those rambunctious fossil-fuel flunkies in the U.S. House of Representatives were at it again Wednesday. They passed a bill that would allow Keystone XL to bypass environmental laws and be built without approval from President Obama.

But the vote tally showed that support for construction of the pipeline is waning among House Democrats, following years of campaigning by environmentalists.

The House voted 241-175 to do away with an ongoing environmental review for the northern leg of the tar-sands pipeline project and make it more difficult for opponents to file appeals. (The southern leg is already more than halfway built.) The vote was mostly along partisan lines: All but one Republican voted in favor, and all but 19 Democrats voted against. Reuters reports that the number of Democrats in favor of the bill was down from the 69 that voted to approve similar legislation in April 2012.

“Pure political theater” is how The Guardian described the passage of the bill:

The bill was unlikely to pass in the Senate and the White House said on Tuesday it would veto any measure that attempted to bypass the current permit process.

But the vote — the seventh time Republicans in Congress have voted to speed up or approve Keystone — keeps up the pressure on Obama to approve the project.

The vote gave GOP lawmakers an opportunity to grandstand and demonstrate their loyalty to an industry that so heavily funds their campaigns:

“Five years! Five years and still no decision. What does five years mean? Well, world war two, where we mobilised America,” Ted Poe, a Texas congressman, said from the house floor on Wednesday.

“We went off to war in less than five years. But yet we can’t get a decision out of the White House for more than five years on this project. Are you kidding me?”

The bill was introduced by Rep. Terry Lee (R-Neb.), who posted a statement on his website lauding its passage and claiming the pipeline would somehow create up to 20,000 jobs, plus another 120,000 indirect jobs. Which is weird, since the State Department’s review found that the northern leg would create 3,900 temporary construction jobs and then just 35 permanent jobs. Maybe Lee doesn’t understand how pipelines work. Maybe he thinks they are filled with child laborers passing oil-filled buckets down the line.

A bill explainer from Anthony Swift’s NRDC blog:

Terry’s bill would thwart a decades old bipartisan process for considering international pipeline applications — a process [in] which the American public is heavily invested after submitting over a million comments detailing the tar sands project’s significant environmental impacts. Moreover, in a series of unprecedented provisions, Terry’s bill would exempt the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline from the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Clean Water Act (CWA), the Endangered Species Act (ESA), permitting requirements for federal rights of way, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

The bill would not actually approve construction of the pipeline, it would just do away with environmental considerations that some House lawmakers liken to mere paperwork. From Reuters:

“What this boils down to is breaking through bureaucratic hurdles and making this project a priority,” said Jeff Denham, a California Republican.

Yeah, it attempts to boil something down alright. Earth.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who

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Canada’s government is spending millions to get you to like the Keystone pipeline

by Felixct7yh Posted on May 22, 2013

Canada’s government is spending millions to get you to like the Keystone pipeline

By Claire Thompson

Canada obviously has a huge stake in the fate of the Keystone XL pipeline. If President Obama fails to approve it — a decision he recently put off yet again – the Canadian oil industry will have a tough time getting its abundant tar-sands crude to seaside ports. Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently came to the U.S. to make the case for the pipeline in person, as did Canada’s ministers of foreign affairs and natural resources and the premiers of Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Let’s be friends!

And now our neighbor to the north is focusing its powers of persuasion directly on the American people. The country just launched a taxpayer-funded, multimillion-dollar marketing campaign extolling the virtues of tar-sands oil to U.S. citizens. From The Vancouver Observer:

To support the government position and its travelling ministers, Ottawa has launched a $16 million marketing campaign that includes a new website and newspaper advertisements in the US to promote Keystone KL. The thrust of the campaign is the promotion of Canada as a reliable supplier of oil and a “world environmental leader” in the field of oil and gas development.

The millions of dollars being spent on marketing efforts and road trips is unsettling to many in the scientific and environment community.

“I think it’s pretty inappropriate for government ministers to be salesmen for particular industries particularly when opinion in Canada is so divided,” Sierra Club of Canada Executive Director John Bennett told The Vancouver Observer in an interview. “We cancelled regulations, we backed out of the Kyoto Protocol, we’ve had four different plans with three different (emission reduction) targets and each time they announced targets they were weaker and further off.”

The federally funded campaign comes two months after the Alberta government purchased a full-page Sunday New York Times ad promoting the pipeline as “the choice of reason.” According to The Globe and Mail, ads “targeted at lobbyists and lawmakers” appeared last Monday, May 13, on Beltway-insider sites The Hill and Politico, and are slated to run later in other influential publications.

Go With Canada, the government’s newly launched website, promotes the idea of the Keystone XL pipeline as a crucial component of the U.S.-Canada alliance. “America faces a choice,” it states. “It can import oil from Canada — a secure and environmentally responsible neighbor that is committed to North American energy independence — or it can choose less stable offshore sources with much weaker environmental standards.”

The Globe and Mail reports:

The taxpayer-funded campaign doesn’t solely focus on TransCanada’s private $5.3-billion pipeline proposal designed to link the vast oil sands reserves with massive refineries along the Gulf coast and thus provide the vital access to major markets that will, in turn, permit further oil sands development. There also is a major effort to portray Canada as a leader in curtailing greenhouse gases and environmentally responsible. Both claims are apparently intended to deflect attacks by anti-Keystone XL groups.

But some of the figures the government’s website touts to back up those claims have already been called into question, says CBC News:

The site asserts that “Innovation and research drives improvement in the oil sands — GHG emissions have dropped 26 per cent between 1990 and 2011.”

In fact, Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions more than tripled between 1990 and 2011. The emissions intensity per barrel of oil fell 26 per cent.

CBC also notes that this “current promotional onslaught has been years in the making,” with meetings as far back as March 2010 between the Canadian government and oil industry to start hashing out their communications strategy.

Will the marketing money work? Obama is, after all, the one with the final say — but it looks like the Canadian government, seeing what a fractious issue the pipeline has become, is counting on the president’s tendency to take what he assumes to be the politically safe route.

But when half of Americans don’t even know what the Keystone XL pipeline is [PDF], any information campaign — for or against — has its work cut out for it.

h/t: Fiona Woo at World Future Council

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.

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As climate change broils the Arctic, John Kerry apologizes

by Joe Mosh Posted on May 16, 2013

As climate change broils the Arctic, John Kerry apologizes

ShutterstockOops, it’s melting. Sorry ’bout that.

“Hello, world? Hey, John Kerry here. Just wanted to apologize for all those decades of America’s non-leadership on that crazy global warming thing. But now we’ve decided to start making some nice sounds about the issue. Hope you can hear me making them over the din of the Arctic ice breaking up behind me.”

OK, so the Secretary of State didn’t actually say that. But the leader of the department that will rule on the climate-changing Keystone XL pipeline proposal has begun apologizing for the nation’s lack of progress in tackling climate change.

“I regret that my own country – and President Obama knows this and is committed to changing it – needs to do more and we are committed to doing more,” Kerry said Tuesday, referring to climate change, in a press conference with Sweden’s prime minister.

Kerry is in Sweden to attend meetings in the country’s northernmost city of Kiruna of the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum for governments that have a stake in the fate of the fast-melting region. As the Arctic melts, new shipping routes and oil fields are opening up, and the international community is going to need to coordinate and temper the scramble to cash in on these new opportunities.

“We come here to Kiruna with a great understanding of the challenge to the Arctic as the ice melts, as the ecosystem is challenged, the fisheries, and the possibilities of increased commercial traffic as a result of the lack of ice raises a whole set of other issues that we need to face up to,” Kerry said during the press conference. “So it’s not just an environmental issue and it’s not just an economic issue. It is a security issue, a fundamental security issue that affects life as we know it on the planet itself, and it demands urgent attention from all of us.”

The Obama administration on Friday released the National Strategy for the Arctic Region [PDF]. The strategy pledges to “enable our vessels and aircraft to operate … through, under, and over the airspace and waters of the Arctic, support lawful commerce … and intelligently evolve our Arctic infrastructure and capabilities.” All done sustainably and in harmony with other nations, of course. But the 11-page document is not so much a detailed strategy document as it is a vague wish-list for the future of the region, and no federal funds have been committed to turn the strategy’s goals into reality.

That said, the attention that the U.S. is affording the Arctic Council is politically significant. From the BBC:

Mr. Kerry, who held one of the first US Senate hearings on climate change as early as 1988 with then-Senator Al Gore, is hoping to put the spotlight on the issue of climate change again, after efforts to make concrete progress faltered during President Barack Obama’s first term.

Despite a multitude of international crises, Mr. Kerry insisted on attending the meeting of the once-obscure council.

Climate change has countries as far away as India also paying attention to the Arctic — and seeking observer status in the council.

What the Arctic most needs, of course, is a fast and deep cut in the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Actions leading to that — like, say, rejecting the Keystone XL Pipeline — will carry more weight than press-conference words.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who

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blogs about ecology

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Keystone XL oil would be processed in sick East Texas community

by ild4sho Posted on April 29, 2013

Keystone XL oil would be processed in sick East Texas community

Tar Sands Blockade

Children play at a park in front of a Valero refinery in Houston, Texas.

For many, the battle over the Keystone XL pipeline is about national energy strategy and global climate change.

For residents of the Manchester neighborhood in Houston, it’s also about what will be processed and spewed into the air in their backyards.

Activist Doug Fahlbusch recently brought some attention to the community when he held up a sign at a Valero-sponsored golf tournament that said, “TAR SANDS SPILL. ANSWER MANCHESTER.” That protest got him carried away from the links by security guards and arrested.

What did Fahlbusch mean? Why are he and his colleagues at Tar Sands Blockade so concerned about Manchester?

Yes! magazine reporter Kristin Moe took a trip to the embattled neighborhood, where a refinery owned by Valero Energy Corp. could end up processing most of the tar-sands oil that flows south through the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Here is a little of what Moe found in “Houston’s most polluted neighborhood”:

Yudith Nieto, 24, has lived in Manchester since her family came from Mexico when she was a small child. While it’s OK to visit the playground, she says, it’s not OK to bring her camera. On several occasions, security guards from the Valero refinery next door have appeared and asked her to leave, claiming that taking pictures in the park was “illegal.” They’ve even brought in Houston police as reinforcements. Valero, one of the major oil companies operating in this industrial part of Houston, keeps its security busy: Nieto says that they have harassed documentary filmmakers and journalists. And when college students participating in an “alternative spring break” program came to the park to talk to her about the neighborhood’s problems, a guard drove up in an unmarked vehicle and took video of the meeting on his cellphone. “I’m not afraid of the attention I’m getting from these people,” Nieto says, “because we want people to know that we’re aware.”

Manchester, one of Houston’s oldest neighborhoods, is surrounded by industry on all sides: a Rhodia chemical plant; a car crushing facility; a water treatment plant; a train yard for hazardous cargo; a Goodyear synthetic rubber plant; oil refineries belonging to Lyondell Basell, Valero, and Texas Petro-Chemicals; as well as one of the busiest highways in the city. Industrial development continues uninterrupted down the Houston Ship Channel for another 50 miles south to the Gulf of Mexico. The refineries around Houston have been called the “keystone to Keystone” because they’re expected to process 90 percent of tar sands crude from Alberta [PDF] if the controversial Keystone XL pipeline is completed.

It’s one of the most polluted neighborhoods in the U.S., one where smokestacks grace every backyard view. But it’s taking on a new significance as the terminus of Keystone because the pipeline is at the center of the highest-stakes environmental battle in recent years. As international pressure builds, residents are beginning to organize, educate themselves, and speak out for the health of their families. …

Manchester is in some ways typical of low-income urban neighborhoods: it’s almost entirely Latino and African American, with a large number of undocumented immigrants. A full third of residents live below the poverty line. Drugs, unemployment, and gangs are a problem. And there’s a strange smell in the air: sometimes sweet, sometimes sulfurous, often reeking of diesel. The most striking thing is that people here always seem to be sick. They have chronic headaches, nosebleeds, sore throats, and red sores on their skin that take months to heal.

Manchester is where the tar-sands rubber will hit the ground. Or where the bitumen will hit the air, if you will. To learn more about the community’s battles against Valero and Keystone XL, read the full article in Yes!

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

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