by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 21, 2012 | Mining & Drilling
By Suzanne Goldenberg / The Guardian
Barack Obama is expected to speed up approval of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline on Thursday after taking to the road with what the White House is billing as an “all of the above” energy tour.
Obama’s planned visit to the oil hub of Cushing, Oklahoma, on day two of the energy tour has raised expectations he will speed up approval of the southern US-only segment of the pipeline, running from the town to Port Arthur, Texas.
The approval, which would infuriate environmental groups, could allow construction on that portion to begin before November’s presidential elections instead of next year.
Obama’s tour starts with a visit to the country’s biggest operating solar farm in Boulder City, Nevada. The White House said in a statement: “The president will highlight his administration’s focus on diversifying our energy portfolio, including expanding renewable energy from sources like wind and solar, which thanks in part to investments made by this administration is set to double in the president’s first term.”
But the visit seemed a detour on a trip apparently solidly focused on fossil fuels and the price of gas at the pump.
Obama has been under nonstop attack from Republicans for rising petrol prices, which now stand at well over $4 (£2.50) for a US gallon in some parts of the country, and for his decision in January to halt the pipeline because of a section running through an ecologically sensitive part of Nebraska.
On the campaign trail, Newt Gingrich has said he would cut gas prices to $2.50 if he is elected president, and Mitt Romney has taken to demanding Obama sack his energy secretary, Steven Chu, the interior secretary, Ken Salazar, and his Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Lisa Jackson. Gingrich calls the three the “gas hike trio”.
But Obama’s forthcoming speech at a pipe yard owned by TransCanada, the Canadian company behind the project to pump crude from the tar sands of Alberta, was seen as a strong signal that the pipeline – at least, the portion running from Cushing to Port Arthur, Texas – is back on track.
The White House said last month it would allow the southern portion, which requires no State Department approval, to go ahead. It was not immediately clear how Obama would push the process along further.
TransCanada has said it will go ahead with the Cushing-Port Arthur segment of the pipeline as soon it gets the go-ahead from the army corps of engineers.
The White House said in a statement Obama’s visiting Cushing was intended to show his commitment to “improving and supporting the infrastructure that helps us leverage our domestic resources, while also ensuring these projects are developed in a safe and responsible way”.
It continued: “This includes a pipeline that will transport oil from Cushing to the Gulf of Mexico, which will help address the bottleneck of oil that has resulted in large part from increased domestic oil production in the midwest.”
Fast-tracking a portion of the pipeline would be a huge disappointment for a broad coalition of activists who have campaigned against the project, framing it as a test of Obama’s green credentials.
Friends of the Earth accused Obama of trying to dupe his environmental supporters by initially rejecting the pipeline, and then turning around to expedite the project. “Was the President’s initial rejection of the Keystone XL simply a farce to temporarily appease the environmental voters who dared to hold him to his own promises about real leadership on the climate,” the group said. “It would seem so.”
But Obama has come under even greater pressure from Republicans and some Democrats to approve the pipeline, and lower gas prices.
The schedule for the two-day energy roadshow exhibits those competing pressures. From his first stop at the solar facility in Nevada, which produces enough power for 17,000 homes, Obama is due to head to the oil and gas fields of New Mexico.
While there, he is expected to talk up the expansion of domestic oil and gas production during his time at the White House. In recent days, administration officials have been touting the expansion of domestic oil and gas production over the last few years. Much of that expansion is due to fracking, in another disappointment for environmental groups.
After his stop in Oklahoma, Obama is expected to end his trip with a speech on conservation at Ohio State University in Columbus.
From The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/21/obama-oil-fuel-pipeline
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 15, 2012 | ACTION, Indigenous Autonomy, Lobbying, Mining & Drilling
By Shawn McCarthy / The Globe and Mail
Ottawa is headed for a legal showdown with British Columbia first nations if it insists on proceeding with the Northern Gateway pipeline, the leader of the Yinka Dene Alliance warns.
Chief Jackie Thomas, of the Saik’uz First Nation, was part of a delegation in Ottawa Tuesday meeting with opposition members of Parliament to build support for their anti-pipeline stand. She said her group will pursue a legal challenge if Ottawa approves the pipeline over their objections.
Along with other first-nation communities, the Dene alliance has taken a firm stand against Enbridge Inc.’s plan to build a crude oil pipeline across their land to transport oil-sands bitumen to the B.C. coast for export to Asia.
“We will defend our rights, no matter what bully tactics the federal government throws at us,” she said. “Our decision has been made: Enbridge will never be allowed in our lands.”
Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver has lashed out at opponents to the Gateway pipeline, saying they are undermining the country’s national interest and oppose all resource development.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has made it a key priority of his government to diversify oil and natural gas exports beyond the traditional U.S. market to target growing Asian markets.
Ms. Thomas said the Saik’uz community is not anti-development. It is working with other mining, forestry and energy companies on projects. It is partnering with Apache Corp., a U.S. oil company, on a pipeline to feed a liquefied natural gas plant in Kitimat, which would also be aimed at exporting energy to Asia.
But the community feels an oil pipeline would be far more risky, and far more disruptive to the salmon fisheries and other species.
“They can’t attempt to offset the water needs of my community, the salmon that goes in the water, and the animals and plants on the land that are in jeopardy,” Ms. Thomas said.
Read more from The Globe and Mail:
Photo by Jake Hills on Unsplash
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
