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Keystone leaks and reminds us why we’re glad there isn’t an XL pipeline out there

by Bob Dole Posted on April 5, 2016

Keystone leaks and reminds us why we’re glad there isn’t an XL pipeline out there

By on 4 Apr 2016commentsShare

A major section of the original Keystone pipeline is out of commission after an oil spill near the pipeline was detected in South Dakota on April 2.

The spill, estimated at 187 gallons of crude oil, serves as a reminder of the risks that pipelines pose — and that with the Obama administration’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline proposal, we’ve likely avoided the potential for an even bigger, more disastrous spill.

Part of the original argument against Keystone XL was that eventually, the proposed pipeline was bound to spill. A 2013 Forbes article (which claimed that it was “crazy” to think Keystone XL wouldn’t leak) pointed out that as pipelines age, they are often not properly maintained, leading to a greater possibility of a leak occurring.

The recent oil spill was discovered, of course, by TransCanada’s state-of-the-art spill detection technology — oh, what’s that? My state-of-the-art Tweet detecting system’s “Bill McKibben” sensor just went off:

Apparently, a South Dakota landowner first noticed signs of a spill and informed TransCanada of the leak. As a result, TransCanada shut down the section of the pipeline from Alberta, Canada, to Cushing, Okla. (The section of Keystone that runs from Cushing to Texas is still in operation.)

Transcanada says that “no significant impact to the environment has been observed” from the April 2 spill. We hope it stays that way — and in the meantime, we’re glad that there’s one less huge pipeline out there to worry about. Spilled milk might not be worth crying over, but unspilled pipelines are definitely worth celebrating.

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Keystone leaks and reminds us why we’re glad there isn’t an XL pipeline out there

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Keystone leaks and reminds us why we’re glad there isn’t an XL pipeline out there

After Keystone failure, TransCanada comes up with another pipeline scheme in the U.S.

by ElisabettaBerger56 Posted on March 18, 2016

After Keystone failure, TransCanada comes up with another pipeline scheme in the U.S.

By on 18 Mar 2016commentsShare

After its hopes of cutting an enormous tar-sands oil pipeline across North America were dashed by anti-Keystone activists, TransCanada has moved on to something new: buying the Houston-based Columbia Pipeline Group, Inc. (CPG), a large natural gas pipeline company. The move will not improve TransCanada’s poor environmental reputation, as CPG has a troubled environmental history of its own.

On Thursday, The New York Times reported that TransCanada, Canada’s second-largest pipeline operator, said it would buy CPG for $10.2 billion. CPG owns about 15,000 miles of natural gas pipeline, mainly in the heavily fracked Marcellus and Utica shale regions. After the deal is made, TransCanada will own about 57,000 miles of gas pipelines in all. TransCanada CEO Russ Girling said during a conference call that the deal was “a rare, attractive opportunity that will create one of North America’s largest natural gas businesses,” according to the Times.

CPG and its subsidiaries have a record of pollution and of safety and environmental violations. Last year, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection cited Columbia Gas Transmission, a unit of CPG, for 125 violations in 2011 and 2012 at a site where it was constructing a pipeline. Those included multiple violations of the Clean Streams Law, including potentially polluting nearby waterways that were considered “High Quality” or “Exceptional Value Waters.” CPG was fined $150,000 for the violations, and was ordered to cover an additional $21,500 for the cost of inspections.

In 2014, the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration fined Columbia Gas Transmission $28,800 for failing to provide proper fire protection at a liquefied natural gas plant in Chesapeake, Va., in 2012.

Last July, a diesel spill was discovered along the right-of-way of a buried natural gas pipeline owned by Columbia Gas of Virginia. The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality concluded that the spill contaminated the main drinking water source for a community in Monroe County, W.Va. Columbia Gas of Virginia was a subsidiary of CPG when that pipeline went online in 2014, though last year it was separated off to become a unit of NiSource Inc.

It’s not clear yet when the acquisition will be completed. TransCanada did say last November that it was looking to acquire a company that could help it expand its pipeline network into the Marcellus shale region. With the wounds from its Keystone battle still raw, TransCanada is now shifting some of its attention from Canadian tar sands oil to U.S. natural gas. Climate activists and environmentalists will want to keep a close eye on this soon-to-be-even-larger pipeline giant.

CPG and TransCanada did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

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After Keystone failure, TransCanada comes up with another pipeline scheme in the U.S.

Posted in alo, Anchor, ATTRA, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on After Keystone failure, TransCanada comes up with another pipeline scheme in the U.S.

Obama says “no” to TransCanada’s latest Keystone gambit

by AntoineJeffrey Posted on November 5, 2015

Obama says “no” to TransCanada’s latest Keystone gambit

By on 5 Nov 2015 4:28 amcommentsShare

On Monday, TransCanada tried a desperate move to salvage its plan to build the Keystone XL pipeline: It asked the State Department to delay its review of the project, in the hopes that the delay would put the decision in the hands of the next president, and in the hopes that the next president would be a Republican.

On Wednesday, the Obama administration said no dice. From The Washington Post:

The State Department formally rejected a request by TransCanada Corp. for a “pause” in the pipeline’s approval process, a move that would have effectively deferred a decision until after next year’s U.S. presidential elections.

State Department officials said the administration’s review of the project —now in its seventh year — would continue, barring a decision by TransCanada to withdraw its application altogether.

Climate activists and anti-Keystone protestors cheered the decision, of course, and called for Obama to just reject the whole damn pipeline already. “Now that he’s called TransCanada for delay of game, it’s time for President Obama to blow the whistle and end this pipeline once and for all,” said Jamie Henn, communications director for 350.org.

Activists are pushing the president to reject Keystone XL before the big U.N. climate talks that will begin on Nov. 30 in Paris, to show the world that he’s serious about reining in carbon pollution. There’s a good chance he’ll do it. Stay tuned.

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Obama says “no” to TransCanada’s latest Keystone gambit

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, ONA, organic, Radius, solar, solar panels, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Obama says “no” to TransCanada’s latest Keystone gambit

TransCanada Just Asked the United States to Suspend the Keystone XL Pipeline

by DuaneJoshua Posted on November 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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In an unexpected turn of events, the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline proposal requested to temporarily suspend its US permit application on Monday.

In a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, the Calgary-based TransAmerica Corporation asked that State Department, which reviews cross-border pipelines, delay its decision while the company goes through a state review process in Nebraska. Earlier in the week, the White House indicated its intention to rule on the controversy-ridden pipeline by the end of Obama’s term; some were expecting the State Department decision to reject the pipeline as soon as the end of the week.

“We are asking State (Department) to pause its review of Keystone XL based on the fact that we have applied to the Nebraska Public Service Commission for approval of its preferred route in the state,” TransCanada Chief Executive Russ Girling said in a statement.

But some are speculating that the request is a political play: A delay in the permit could mean pushing the issue beyond the 2016 election—and into the hands of a new administration.

TransAmerica has vowed over the years that it would not back down on the proposed pipeline from Alberta to Texas in the face of economic or political challenges, and until recently, it had been pushing for a speedy border permit approval.

â&#128;&#139;This post has been updated.

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TransCanada Just Asked the United States to Suspend the Keystone XL Pipeline

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Clinton Changes Her Mind on Obama’s Trade Deal

by DakotaMacDonnel Posted on October 7, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Hillary Clinton firmly distanced herself today from a top priority of the Obama administration, announcing her opposition to President Barack Obama’s controversial trade deal after avoiding a firm position on the pact for months.

In an interview with CBS’s Judy Woodruff in Iowa on Wednesday afternoon, Clinton stated her opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a deal that, after years of negotiations, Obama hopes will be a cornerstone of his presidential legacy. In the interview, Clinton cited apprehension that protections against currency manipulation were absent from the details of the TPP, as well as her concern over the imbalance between benefits for pharmaceutical companies and those for patients.

“We’ve learned a lot about trade agreements in the past years,” Clinton said. “Sometimes they look great on paper. I know when President Obama came into office he inherited a trade agreement with South Korea. I, along with other members of the cabinet, pushed to get a better agreement. Now looking back on it, it doesn’t have the results we thought it would have.”

Shortly afterward, Clinton published a fuller explanation of her opposition to the deal.

“As I have said many times, we need to be sure that new trade deals meet clear tests,” Clinton wrote. “They have to create good American jobs, raise wages, and advance our national security.”

This move from Clinton is not altogether surprising in the context of her political evolution regarding trade deals. In June, Clinton proclaimed that had she still been serving in the Senate, she would have voted against giving Obama “fast-track authority” to enact the TPP. But in her 2014 book Hard Choices, she wrote that while the TPP “won’t be perfect,” it would still “benefit American businesses and workers.” And as Obama’s secretary of state, she called it the “gold standard in trade agreements.”

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Clinton Changes Her Mind on Obama’s Trade Deal

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Spy agencies are snooping on enviros around the globe

by LachlanKreitmay Posted on February 26, 2015

Spy agencies are snooping on enviros around the globe

By on 26 Feb 2015commentsShare

Another week, another instance comes to light of governments targeting peaceful environmental activists. This latest document leak finds that South Korea asked for an assessment from South Africa of whether Greenpeace International Executive Director Kumi Naidoo constituted a “security threat against the president of South Africa during the G20 summit to be held in South Korea.”

The cables are part of a leaked cache from South Africa’s spy agency that shows efforts by a number of countries to keep close tabs on dissenters. The request was made in the run-up to the 2010 summit, and listed Naidoo alongside two other “dangerous persons” who were later arrested during a terrorist raid in Pakistan. In an otherwise unamusing document, Naidoo’s first name is amusingly misspelled “Kimi.”

Another document in the cache alluded to some sort of cooperative effort between the CIA and intelligence agencies in the U.K., Australia, and South Africa “to provide the CIA with a deeper understanding of the potential for ramping up renewable and clean energy in key parts of the world and a better understanding of the collection capabilities and interests on renewables in the UK, South Africa and Australia.” From The Guardian:

The reasons for the CIA’s interest are not clear. It may see climate change as a potential source of conflict and want to explore possible consequences. Some see a potentially more sinister motivation.

A senior US climate scientist, Alan Robock, based at Rutgers University in New Jersey, expressed concern this month that the CIA and other intelligence agencies were funding climate change research to learn if new technologies could be used as potential weapons.

The document casting Naidoo as a potential terroristic threat puts South Korea among a host of governments recently discovered to be targeting Greenpeace. The Indian government cracked down on the group, as well as other international environmental NGOs, ahead of Obama’s recent visit to the country, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, irked by the group’s anti-Keystone activism, named Greenpeace alongside the Sierra Club and Tides Canada in a leaked document outlining potentially violent threats to Canadian infrastructure.

Environmental activists have also faced some heat in the States recently. Grist’s own Heather Smith wrote last month that FBI agents have been paying visits to anti-Keystone activists, asking for information while also saying that there’s no investigation underway. Bloomberg reported this week that the intelligence behind those FBI visits could be coming from TransCanada, the company that wants to build the Keystone XL pipeline. Reporter Isaac Arnsdorf writes that local authorities along the pipeline’s route had been warned that homegrown extremists were targeting the project:

That risk assessment, laid out in documents obtained through open-records requests, wasn’t provided by law enforcement. It was provided by TransCanada Corp., the Calgary-based company that has waged a long campaign to sell America on Keystone XL and the Canadian crude it would carry. President Barack Obama vetoed Congress’s approval of extending the pipeline, but the fight is far from over.

Few understand the threats facing corporations better than corporations, and few could argue with putting safety first. Yet the alarms TransCanada raised in Nebraska … were part of a broad campaign for Keystone XL, the documents suggest. Time and again, in private e-mails and closed-door meetings with federal, state and local law enforcement, the Canadian company characterized peaceful opponents engaged in constitutionally protected protest as dangerous radicals or worse. …

TransCanada representatives have met with law-enforcement officers in at least two states. Hundreds of pages of meeting logs, police e-mails and other documents obtained by Bloomberg suggest TransCanada provided intelligence on protesters’ activities and, at times, helped guide law enforcement’s response.

Kumi “Kimi” Naidoo, for his part, said he wasn’t particularly surprised that spy agencies were keeping tabs on him. “Sadly, the assumption that we make, especially after the Edward Snowden leaks and the Wikileaks information came out, is that we are heavily monitored and under constant surveillance,” he told Al Jazeera. “But it’s one thing assuming that it’s happening; it’s a little numbing and chilling to have it confirmed.”

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Spy agencies are snooping on enviros around the globe

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Spy agencies are snooping on enviros around the globe

The Keystone XL Pipeline Is One Step Closer to Approval

by DaciaStillings Posted on January 9, 2015

Mother Jones

This story originally appeared in the Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In a victory for proponents of the Keystone XL pipeline, the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the pipeline’s proposed route through the state can go forward.

The decision means that TransCanada, the company seeking to build the pipeline, can build the route that Nebraska’s former governor approved in 2013. The court ruling was split, with four of the court’s seven judges agreeing with a lower court that the 2012 law used to grant TransCanada that permission was unconstitutional. However, Nebraska requires a supermajority of at least five judges to strike down the law. “We believe that Nebraska citizens deserve a decision on the merits. But the supermajority requirement…coupled with the dissent’s refusal to reach the merits, means that the citizens cannot get a binding decision from this court,” the court wrote in the majority opinion.

In 2012, the Nebraska legislature passed a law that gave the governor authority to approve both the pipeline and the use of eminent domain to access land along the pipeline route. In January 2013, then-Gov. Dave Heineman (R) said yes to TransCanada’s proposed route through his state. But some landowners along the route sued, arguing that the legislature’s action violated the state constitution and that the decision should have been left to the Public Service Commission.

The plaintiffs won in county court early last year, and the state appealed to the Nebraska Supreme Court, which held oral arguments this past September.

Given the ongoing state-level fight, the Obama administration announced last April that it was delaying a federal decision on the pipeline until after the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled.

But the newly Republican-controlled Congress is pushing legislation that would override the Obama administration’s process, which GOP lawmakers say has dragged on too long, and force approval of the pipeline. The House is slated to vote Friday on its legislation, while the Senate plans to vote next week.

The State Department said previously that it would give federal agencies at least 14 more days to comment on the route once Nebraska reached its decision, which the Obama administration would then need to consider before making up its own mind on whether to approve the pipeline. That means a final decision is probably still weeks in the making.

Nebraskans who filed the lawsuit over the route said they want TransCanada to follow state laws.

“We’ve always thought that if the pipeline is going to be built, it has to be built in compliance with Nebraska law and make sure that Nebraska landowners are fully and fairly paid for an easement with reasonable terms,” David Domina, a lawyer representing landowners who sued, told the Huffington Post before the Nebraska Supreme Court decision was issued.

The focus now turns to President Barack Obama for a final decision—for both pipeline supporters and opponents.

“President Obama has no more excuses left to delay or deny the Keystone XL pipeline,” said Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, in a statement.

“Today’s ruling was a loss for propriety rights, and sends the signal that a foreign corporation can buy its way through our state legislature,” Jane Kleeb, director of Bold Nebraska, which opposes the pipeline, told HuffPost. “We now turn to our president, who knows that this route is too risky to approve.”

UPDATE—The White House announced Friday that it still intends to veto the House Republican bill authorizing Keystone, even after the Nebraska ruling. From spokesman Eric Schultz comes the following statement:

Today, the Nebraska Supreme Court denied a challenge to the validity of the route for the Keystone XL Pipeline under Nebraska law. The State Department is examining the court’s decision as part of its process to evaluate whether the Keystone XL Pipeline project serves the national interest. As we have made clear, we are going to let that process play out. Regardless of the Nebraska ruling today, the House bill still conflicts with longstanding Executive branch procedures regarding the authority of the President and prevents the thorough consideration of complex issues that could bear on U.S. national interests, and if presented to the President, he will veto the bill.

Read the Nebraska Supreme Court’s decision below:

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The Keystone XL Pipeline Is One Step Closer to Approval

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New Photobook Documents the Travails of Transgender Cubans

by WilhemiBanniste Posted on May 8, 2014

Mother Jones

Malu with her parents and sister, in front of their home. Mariette Pathy Allen

Of all the allies in the global fight for LGBT equality, Cuba may be the most unlikely. For decades, the island was notorious for its crackdown on “social deviants”—an underclass that included homosexuals, transgender people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, and anyone critical of the Castro regime. The 1960’s were especially bleak. Deemed unfit for the revolution, gay Cubans were banned from joining the military or becoming teachers. Thousands were confined to isolated labor camps. Conditions deteriorated further in the ’80s and ’90s as Cuba quarantined HIV-positive citizens, many of whom were gay.

Mariette Pathy Allen’s new photobook, TransCuba (Daylight Books), captures a country slowly outgrowing its history of persecution. Shot in 2012 and 2013, the book is haunted by the trauma inflicted by Fidel Castro’s government. But it is optimistic about life under his brother, Raúl, who assumed the presidency in 2008. Since the change in power, Cuba’s Ministry of Public Health has approved state-funded sex reassignment surgery, and the government has relaxed many discriminatory policies targeting sexual orientation and gender. In 2012, Adela Hernandez became the country’s first openly transgender person elected to public office. Perhaps most shockingly, in a 2010 interview with the Mexican newspaper La Jornada, Fidel Castro called his decision to imprison homosexuals in the 1960’s “a great injustice….I’m not going to place the blame on others,” Castro said, “We had so many and such terrible problems, problems of life or death.”

Despite its progressive reforms, Cuba continues to have serious problems, particularly with transgender rights. “I see transgender Cubans as a metaphor for Cuba itself: people living between genders in a country moving between doctrines,” Allen writes. The women she documents are grateful for the increasing tolerance, but they still suffer from entrenched stigmas. Natalie, for example, was denied a factory job because of her appearance. She began hooking to make ends meet, and picked up HIV at age 18. She also had a run-in with police that escalated, at which point an officer “hit her until he didn’t feel like it anymore.” She was imprisoned for inciting violence.

Allen’s other protagonists share similar tales of woe. Amanda, a 36-year-old prostitute with HIV, tried twice to get to the United States, and twice failed. She was taken to Guantánamo Bay, where she begged her English-speaking captors to return her to the streets of Havana.

Another subject, Alsola, spent two years studying psychology and medicine at a school in Santiago de Cuba, the country’s second largest city. School policy mandated that students respect the dress code of their birth gender, so she dropped out rather than conform. “My life is nothing special,” she says now.

Allen’s portraits are moving proof to the contrary. TransCuba follows her two previous photobooks—Transformations (1989) and The Gender Frontier (2003)—capping a loose trilogy that is one of contemporary photography’s most poignant explorations of gender identity. Her portraits, whether shot in Cuba or the United States, remind us that looking is a political act, and seeing a revolutionary one. Although Allen’s subjects face the camera instead of a jury or a firing squad, their expressions bear the same frank entreaty for compassion. To quote Yanet, another Allen subject: “We all have implausible dreams, things that make no sense, we all have fantasies.” TransCuba is a testament to the difficult, intoxicating, sometimes tragic work of realizing who we are.

Alsola, Santiago de Cuba Mariette Pathy Allen

Charito at home with her week-old piglet, Camagüey. Mariette Pathy Allen

Paloma with her boyfriend at Mi Cayito beach, near Havana. Mariette Pathy Allen

Partners Nomi and Miguel at Malu’s apartment, Havana. Mariette Pathy Allen

Laura at home, Havana. Mariette Pathy Allen

Erika at home, Cienfuegos. Mariette Pathy Allen

The view from Natalie’s window in Havana. Mariette Pathy Allen

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New Photobook Documents the Travails of Transgender Cubans

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, Mop, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on New Photobook Documents the Travails of Transgender Cubans

Undercover agents infiltrate anti-Keystone protests

by DeenaBumg Posted on August 13, 2013

Undercover agents infiltrate anti-Keystone protests

By John Upton

Shutterstock

Is this spy a cop or a private investigator? Either way, watch out.

What do you get when you mix America’s national security apparatus with TransCanada’s determination to build a tar-sands pipeline between Canada and the Gulf of Mexico?

A whole lot of arrests.

Earth Island Journal profiles the infiltration of peaceful Keystone protest groups by police and investigators — and in so doing paints a troubling picture of a government security force working in league with TransCanada:

On the morning of March 22 activists had planned to block the gates at the company’s strategic oil reserves in Cushing, Oklahoma as part of the larger protest movement against TransCanada’s tar sands pipeline. But when they showed up in the early morning hours and began unloading equipment from their vehicles they were confronted by police officers. Stefan Warner, an organizer with Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance, says some of the vehicles en route to the protest site were pulled over even before they had reached Cushing. He estimates that roughly 50 people would have participated— either risking arrest or providing support. The act of nonviolent civil disobedience, weeks in the planning, was called off.

“For a small sleepy Oklahoma town to be saturated with police officers on a pre-dawn weekday leaves only one reasonable conclusion,” says Ron Seifert, an organizer with an affiliated group called Tar Sands Blockade. “They were there on purpose, expecting something to happen.”

Seifert is exactly right. According to documents obtained by Earth Island Journal, investigators from the Bryan County Sherriff’s Department had been spying on a Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance training camp that took place from March 18 to March 22 and which brought together local landowners, Indigenous communities, and environmental groups opposed to the pipeline. …

The infiltration of the Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance action camp and pre-emption of the Cushing protest is part of a larger pattern of government surveillance of tar sands protesters. According to other documents obtained by Earth Island Journal under an Open Records Act request, Department of Homeland Security staff has been keeping close tabs on pipeline opponents — and routinely sharing that information with TransCanada, and vice versa. …

The new documents also provide an interesting glimpse into the revolving door between state law enforcement agencies and the private sector, especially in areas where fracking and pipeline construction have become big business. One of the individuals providing information to the Texas Department of Homeland Security’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division is currently the Security Manager at Anadarko Petroleum, one of the world’s largest independent oil and natural gas exploration and production companies. In 2011, at a natural gas industry stakeholder relations conference, a spokesperson for Anadarko compared the anti-drilling movement to an “insurgency” and suggested that attendees download the US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual.

The article, which includes scanned excerpts from documents the magazine obtained, is worth reading in full. For even more on the topic, read Earth Island Journal’s in-depth article from earlier this year: “We’re Being Watched: How Corporations and Law Enforcement Are Spying on Environmentalists.”

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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Undercover agents infiltrate anti-Keystone protests

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TransCanada and GOP steamed over EPA’s Keystone comments

by N0bodyh56 Posted on April 24, 2013

TransCanada and GOP steamed over EPA’s Keystone comments

By John Upton

Shutterstock /

Rena Schild

The EPA would seem to agree.

TransCanada, the Canadian company that wants to build the Keystone XL pipeline, is pissed at the U.S. EPA for not quietly going along with the plan.

The EPA this week slammed the State Department’s draft environmental report on the pipeline, saying in formal comments that it has a lot of shortcomings and contains “insufficient information” on the pipeline’s potential environmental effects.

From the Montreal Gazette:

TransCanada Pipelines has accused the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency of attempting to interfere in Canadian sovereignty by recommending that the State Department explore ways the U.S. can get involved in reducing emissions from Canada’s oilsands. …

In a statement, TransCanada also said it is surprised at the EPA letter because the agency has been “intimately involved” in the environmental impact assessment process from the beginning.

If the company is surprised, it hasn’t been paying attention. The EPA slammed previous State Department environmental reports on Keystone in 2010 and 2011.

More from the Toronto Globe and Mail:

TransCanada also challenged the EPA’s view — which is shared by State — that [greenhouse gas] emissions from the oil sands are 17 per cent higher than the average crude refined in the United States on a full “well-to-wheels” basis that includes vehicle emissions. The company said the comparison is faulty because Alberta bitumen would be displacing other sources of heavy oil from Venezuela and Mexico, which produce a similar volume of emissions.

Jeez, TransCanada wonders, how many U.S. agencies does it have to manipulate just to catch a break and be allowed to ship its toxic tar-sands oil right down the middle of America so it can be processed at the Gulf Coast for export?

And guess who else is angry with the EPA for registering its professional disapproval of State’s shoddy report? Those environmental experts known as House Republicans. From The Hill:

“EPA’s comments [Monday] on the State Department’s draft EIS are the perfect example of government run amok,” said a statement from Rep. Lee Terry (R-Neb.), who in March introduced a bill that would force the State Department, which is reviewing the pipeline proposal, to approve the project.

“It’s unfortunate we have to legislate to keep government agencies from going rogue,” he added.

Republicans warned that the EPA’s letter, combined with a U.S. Court of Appeals ruling Tuesday that upheld the agency’s authority to veto a mountaintop removal coal mine permit in 2011, portend future interference from the environmental agency.

Fancy that, an agency charged with protecting the environment having the gall to work to protect the environment.

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TransCanada and GOP steamed over EPA’s Keystone comments

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