by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 9, 2012 | Mining & Drilling
By Richard Simon and Christi Parsons / Los Angeles Times
With gas prices becoming a high-octane campaign issue, the Democratic-led Senate beat back a Republican effort to advance the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline project.
Thursday’s vote to attach the project to a must-pass transportation bill failed 56 to 42, with 11 Democrats joining Republicans to support the measure. Sixty votes were needed for passage.
President Obama had called senators to urge a no vote.
“We hope that the Congress will … not waste its time with ineffectual, sham legislation,’’ White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said.
But the effort – along with a vote on a measure to expand offshore drilling that was also rejected — was designed to highlight differences between the two parties and provide fodder for the campaign trail in this year’s battle for control of the White House and the Senate.
“The president simply can’t claim to have a comprehensive approach to energy, because he doesn’t. And any time he says he does, the American people should remember one word: Keystone,’’ said Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. No Republicans opposed the Keystone measure, but two did not vote.
Republicans are eager to showcase Obama’s decision to withhold approval of the Canada-to-Gulf-Coast pipeline as proof that the administration is not doing enough to generate jobs and increase energy supplies. But opponents of the project accuse supporters of exaggerating the number of jobs it would create and dispute that it would bring down gas prices.
Pump prices have moved center stage on Capitol Hill, with hearings and an almost daily barrage of GOP criticisms of the administration’s approach to energy policy.
The pipeline issue has divided core Democratic constituencies, with some labor unions backing the project as an opportunity to create jobs, but environmentalists warn the pipeline would expand the nation’s carbon footprint and create more pollution.
An alternative Democratic measure that would, among other things, have prohibited the export of oil transported in the pipeline and, according to its sponsor, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), put “teeth behind all of the debate that this energy is going to be for the America consumer,’’ also failed.
Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.), who led the floor debate on the Keystone amendment, argued that the Democratic alternative measure would have added “additional impediments” to the project.
The Keystone votes come as the Senate is on track to pass a $109-billion, two-year transportation bill next week. The legislation sets road, highway and transit priorities.
But the transportation bill’s fate is uncertain because House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) has been unable to corral a majority for passage in the Republican-controlled House. Republicans are in disagreement over how big the bill should be and what it should include.
Boehner said Thursday that he plans to bring up the Senate bill “or something like it” after the House returns from a weeklong recess next week.
A Republican-led effort to open more of the coast to energy exploration was defeated, with 46 in favor and 52 against.
“We don’t need any more giveaways to Big Oil,” Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said in opposition to the measure, warning that opening the Atlantic and Pacific to new drilling would put tourism-dependent coastal economies at risk.
“You can’t drill your way out of this,’’ Boxer added.
Read more from the Los Angeles Times: http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-senate-democrats-reject-gop-attempt-to-advance-keystone-xl–20120308,0,5688947.story?
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 4, 2012 | Lobbying, Mining & Drilling
From Mother Jones
The debate over the Keystone XL pipeline has moved from the White House to a farm in Texas. Third-generation farmer Julia Trigg Crawford is engaged in a court battle over whether TransCanada, the company that wants to build the massive pipeline from Canada to Texas, has a right to declare eminent domain on a portion of her family’s farm.
Earlier this week, TransCanada announced that it intends to move forward with the portion of the Keystone XL pipeline that extends from Oklahoma down to Texas. This 485-mile-long portion of the pipeline doesn’t cross international borders, which means it won’t need approval from the State Department or President Obama. But it does cross right through Red’Arc Farm, which Crawford and her family own.
The farm is in Direct, Texas, a small town about 20 miles northwest of Paris (city notable for it’s own 65-foot-tall replica of the Eiffel Tower, complete with a cowboy hat on top). Along with her father, sister, and brother, Crawford, 53, tends to her soybeans, wheat, corn, orchards, and cattle on this 600-acre property where the Red River and Bois d’Arc Creek meet. Her grandfather bought the land in 1948, and Crawford currently lives in the farmhouse.
Back in 2008, the family got notice that TransCanada was interested in running a pipeline through a 30-acre pasture area. Crawford says they were first offered $7,000 for use of the land, though the figure later increased to $20,000. The Crawfords weren’t entirely opposed to having a pipeline run through the farm since there are several others running through the county. “Pipelines are not foreign here,” Crawford says. But then an initial archeological assessment of the property conducted by a firm the company hired found that the portion of the pasture the company was first interested in was full of artifacts left by the Caddo, a local American Indian tribe. That was not a big surprise to Crawford. “I pick up pieces of pottery all the time when I walk the dogs,” she says. She keeps the bits of pottery and arrowheads she finds in a large jar.
So the company proposed an alternate route through another corner of the same pasture, hoping to avoid the archeological site. But according to the next inspection the archeological firm undertook, there were no artifacts in this new corner. That the second dig turned up nothing made Crawford suspicious, and she decided to get an independent survey of the site—which again turned up quite a few artifacts (see the archaeologist’s report here). She hoped that the reports would force TransCanada to pick a new route, but she says the company insisted on going right through the pasture. “They said if you don’t sign the easement we have the right to condemn the land and take it through eminent domain,” she said.
She had other concerns about the pipeline, like the repercussions of a spill or the impact building the line might have on her ability to use the pasture. She says she tried to talk to the local contact person for the company and asked for concessions like thicker pipe metal, deeper burial, and assurance that her family would be compensated if the pipeline spilled into the creek they use for irrigation. The company didn’t offer any concessions, she says, and instead took the Crawfords to court last fall to claim eminent domain on the property. (The company has taken a similar tack with landowners in Nebraska as well.)
Read more from Mother Jones: http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2012/02/texas-farmer-takes-transcanada
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 28, 2012 | Mining & Drilling
By Lesley Clark and Renee Schoof / McClatchy
With President Barack Obama facing fire from Republicans over the rising cost of gasoline, the White House moved quickly Monday to trumpet a Canadian company’s decision to build a section of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline from Cushing, Okla., to Houston after Obama blocked a longer path last month.
Press Secretary Jay Carney hailed TransCanada’s announcement and used it to counter Republican criticism that the administration has stifled oil and gas production. He said that the Oklahoma to Texas section of the pipeline would “help address the bottleneck of oil in Cushing that has resulted in large part from increased domestic oil production, currently at an eight-year high.”
The company’s decision, Carney said, “highlights a little-known fact — certainly, you wouldn’t hear it from some of our critics — that we approve, pipelines are approved and built in this country all the time.”
Obama’s decision last month to reject the full 1,661-mile Keystone XL pipeline from Canada’s tar sands has become a focal point of Republican efforts to portray him as responsible for the recent spike in gasoline prices, and they fault him for blocking a project they say would create jobs and reduce America’s dependence on oil imports from unstable foreign sources.
The Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner of Ohio, poked fun Monday at the White House salute of TransCanada’s decision.
“The president is so far on the wrong side of the American people that he’s now praising the company’s decision to start going around him,” Boehner said in a statement to ABC News.
A recent national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press suggests that Obama’s Keystone decision could become a political liability. Though 37 percent of those surveyed said they’d not heard of the pipeline, 66 percent of those who had heard of it said the government should approve it, while just 23 percent opposed it.
In fact, energy experts say that the Keystone XL pipeline wouldn’t do much to lower gasoline prices. The recent price spike stems largely from speculators bidding up prices at a time of growing fear of future oil-supply disruptions if a war with Iran develops over its nuclear program.
TransCanada will be the second pipeline moving oil from Cushing to the Gulf Coast. The other is already built and owned by Enbridge Inc. The two pipelines will reduce the glut of oil in the Midwest “and in doing so will raise the price of oil in Cushing and the Midwest and will lower the price very slightly in the rest of the world,” said Severin Borenstein, a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
Prices in the Midwest could go up between 10 and 30 cents a gallon, ending the region’s cheaper gasoline compared to other areas, he said. If the full pipeline is constructed, the impact on world oil prices would “never really be noticed” because it would be so small, a few cents or less per gallon, that it would be “lost in the noise of other changes.”
TransCanada also told the State Department on Monday that it plans to submit a new application for the rejected segment of the pipeline, and Carney said the president’s rejection last month “in no way prejudged future applications.”
The White House contends that House Republicans forced Obama to reject the earlier cross-border application by not giving it enough time to review the project.
Republicans accuse Obama of putting off the decision until after the 2012 elections so as not to upset environmentalists.
Environmental groups made the pipeline a test of Obama’s will to move the country off fossil fuels and to slow climate change. They also say the pipeline would put the Ogalalla Aquifer, streams, farms and wildlife habitat at greater risk of oil spills.
Kim Huynh of Friends of the Earth said in a statement Monday that the pipeline would be an “environmental disaster” and called the administration’s welcome of TransCanada’s plan “an alarming about-face.”
“The administration must stop trying to have it both ways,” Huynh said. “President Obama cannot expect to protect the climate and to put the country on a path toward 21st century clean energy while simultaneously shilling for one of the dirtiest industries on Earth.”
From TruthOut: http://www.truth-out.org/white-house-applauds-decision-build-part-keystone-xl-pipeline/1330439983
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 27, 2012 | Mining & Drilling
By Agence France-Presse
TransCanada Corp announced Monday it would go ahead with construction of part of its Keystone XL oil pipeline that does not require US presidential approval, a stretch from the state of Oklahoma to the US Gulf Coast.
The company also said it will resubmit its proposal for the entirety of the pipeline from Canada that was rejected last month by US President Barack Obama, a move that sparked an election-year row over energy policy and the environment.
The new presidential permit application would include “an alternative route in Nebraska as soon as that route is selected,” as well as an “already reviewed route” in Montana and South Dakota, TransCanada added.
Company president Russ Girling said he hoped the lengthy environmental review of the original project — much of it unchanged in the new proposal — will mean a shorter approval process once a new route in Nebraska is determined that avoids the ecologically sensitive Sandhills area, which lies above a vital agricultural aquifer.
The White House welcomed the re-application, saying “we support the company’s interest in proceeding with this project, which will help address the bottleneck of oil in Cushing that has resulted in large part from increased domestic oil production, currently at an eight-year high.”
Obama’s office said in a statement that “moving oil from the Midwest to the world-class, state-of-the-art refineries on the Gulf Coast will modernize our infrastructure, create jobs, and encourage American energy production.
“We look forward to working with TransCanada to ensure that it is built in a safe, responsible and timely manner, and we commit to take every step possible to expedite the necessary Federal permits,” the White House added.
From Bangkok Post: http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/world/281884/part-of-keystone-xl-oil-pipeline-to-go-ahead-company
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 20, 2012 | Indigenous Autonomy, Mining & Drilling
By Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times
The prime minister is talking about being “held hostage” by U.S. interests. Radio ads blare, “Stand up to this foreign bully.” A Twitter account tells of a “secret plan to target Canada: exposed!”
Could this be Canada? The cheerful northern neighbor: supplier of troops to unpleasant U.S.-led foreign conflicts, reliable trade partner, ally in holding terrorism back from North America’s shores, not to mention the No. 1 supplier of America’s oil?
Canada’s recent push for the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline to carry oil from the tar sands of Alberta to the nation’s West Coast, where it would be sent to China, has been marked by uncharacteristic defiance. And it first flared in the brouhaha over the bananas.
Responding to urgings from U.S. environmentalists, Ohio-based Chiquita Brands International Inc. announced in November that it would join a growing number of companies trying to avoid fuel derived from Canada’s tar sands, whose production is blamed for accelerating climate change and leveling boreal forests.
Then in January, President Obama abruptly vetoed a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, Canada’s $7-billion project to deliver oil across the U.S. Midwest to the Texas Gulf Coast , which environmentalists have long opposed.
Mix in a touch of nationalism, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s view that Canada needs to hedge its oil bets by diversifying its export markets, and the fight was on — not only with the neighbor to the south, but also among Canadians.
“Canada is not what it used to be,” said Todd Paglia, executive director ForestEthics, an environmental group that has been calling for the international boycotts on tar sands oil. “It’s hard to believe, but it’s tilting toward becoming more of an authoritarian petro state, positioning itself as a resource colony for China.”
On the other side, a lobbying group pushing Canada as an alternative to unstable and sometimes unsavory oil producers in the Middle East ramped up a boycott of its own, this one targeting Chiquita bananas.
“Stand up to this foreign bully. Don’t buy Chiquita bananas,” said a radio spot by the group, which calls itself EthicalOil.org, complaining about what it called Chiquita’s record of supporting terrorist groups in South America. A Twitter profile was set up for @bloodbananas to expose the allegedly hypocritical campaign against Canada.
Over the last few weeks, a two-agency review panel has convened the first in a long round of hearings on Northern Gateway, pointedly described as a pipeline that won’t deliver much oil to the U.S. Instead, it will allow Canada to end its sole dependence on American buyers for its most important export by opening up markets in Asia, and allow it to attract the badly needed foreign investment to develop the sands.
“I think what’s happened around the Keystone is a wake-up call, the degree to which we are dependent or possibly held hostage to decisions in the United States, and especially decisions that may be made for very bad political reasons,” Harper, whose government has labeled pipeline opponents as foreign-funded “radicals,” told CBC television in January.
The $5.5-billion Northern Gateway project, which would carry 525,000 barrels a day of crude 731 miles from a town near Edmonton through the Rocky Mountains to a new port on the British Columbia coast, has long been in the works as a companion to Keystone XL.
But with Keystone’s recent turmoil in the U.S., Northern Gateway has risen to new prominence as a defiant Plan B for a nation increasingly aggressive in combating international hurdles, whether it’s greenhouse gas treaties, low-carbon fuel standards or U.S. presidential politics.
“There has always been very strong support by the Harper government, by the province of Alberta and by the oil industry for the Northern Gateway pipeline. But there’s no question that for all three of those entities, that urgency increased dramatically with the apparent defeat of Keystone XL,” said George Hoberg, a political scientist and professor of forestry at the University of British Columbia.
“The Harper government’s view is that, especially in the Obama years, the U.S. is becoming a less reliable partner for the oil sands.”
Officials at Enbridge Inc., which is proposing the western pipeline, say it has been in the works for nearly a decade, though its need has become more apparent as the economy in Asia has boomed while the American one, which until now has consumed 99% of Canadian oil exports, has slowed. By some estimates, Canada has the third-largest proven oil reserves in the world, with 175 billion barrels.
“It’s an attempt to respond to the reality that the geographical location of the demand is changing,” company spokesman Paul Stanway said, though he said the U.S., which imports more than 2 million barrels a day of Canadian oil, will remain the country’s biggest export market. Chinese state companies have more than $16 billion invested in Canadian energy development and are helping fund Northern Gateway to ship their oil.
The Northern Gateway pipeline faces its toughest opposition in Canada. More than 4,000 people have registered to speak at hearings over the next several months — more than for any project in the nation’s history.
Debate is especially intense here in British Columbia. Although some residents are eager for the tax revenue and thousands of local jobs the pipeline could bring, many who live along the corridor and in many First Nations territories, homelands of Canada’s aboriginals, are mobilizing to fight it.
Crucial are the streams and tributaries of the Fraser and Skeena rivers that lie in the pipeline’s path — possibly the greatest salmon rivers on Earth.
Along the coast, there are fears that piloting more than 200 oil tankers a year through the fiords of Douglas Channel and then southward could jeopardize the spectacular coastline of the famed Great Bear rain forest, full of azure waters and rocky waterfalls.
“We truly live in one of the most beautiful places on Earth. We live right at the start of the Fraser River watershed, and if we have a spill, it will devastate everything from here straight to the Pacific Ocean in Vancouver,” said Bev Playfair, until recently a municipal councilor in Fort St. James, where a hearing on the pipeline this month was preceded by dozens of townspeople marching down the main street with signs such as “Say No to Enbridge.”
The most formidable opposition comes from the First Nations of British Columbia, most of which, unlike those in other provinces, have never signed treaties with the federal government and thus have never relinquished title to their historic lands.
“We have the ability to go to court in Canada and say, ‘What you are proposing violates the Constitution of Canada.’ And that’s the trump card in all of this,” said Art Sterritt, director of the Coastal First Nations’ Great Bear Initiative.
On the Saik’uz Reserve, near the town of Vanderhoof, schoolchildren spent part of the afternoon before the pipeline hearing making signs and sitting quietly as tribal leaders explained the project and why it must be stopped.
“You’ve got to understand that it’s a huge, multibillion-dollar project that they’re trying to put through our lands. And it’s going to be a tough fight, because they have so much money. They probably have 10 lawyers to our one,” Geraldine Thomas-Flurer, the Saik’uz First Nation’s liaison on the Northern Gateway issue, told the students.
Tribal Chief Jackie Thomas has held meetings and written letters pointing out Enbridge’s record on accidents, including the spill of 810,000 gallons of oil from a pipeline in Michigan in 2010, much of which flowed 30 miles downstream into the Kalamazoo River. Enbridge has spent $700 million so far and workers are still trying to clean it up.
“It’s going to be a war,” she predicted of the fight ahead. “The only question is, who’s going to draw the first blood?”
From Los Angeles Times: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-canada-pipeline-20120220,0,4067907,full.story
