Environmentalists are fuming over the conclusion from the State Department that the Keystone XL pipeline -- a fiercely-debated proposal to transport heavy crude from Alberta's oil sands deposits 1,700 miles to the U.S. Gulf Coast -- would be "environmentally sound."
The government claims in the report released on Friday that the pipeline project wouldn't significantly alter climate change. Such an assessment is at odds with the warnings of experts and advocates -- more than 40,000 of whom recently convened in Washington to rally against Keystone. The report also is inconsistent with President Barack Obama's renewed pledge to tackle global warming, environmentalists said.
James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute and Columbia University is among top climate scientists who have argued that approval of the pipeline would essentially mean "game over" for the climate.
"To say that the tar sands have little climate impact is an absurdity," Hansen said in a statement on Friday evening that followed the late-day release of the State Department's draft environmental impact statement. The report, which focuses on the northern portion of the proposed pipeline, makes no recommendation about whether the project should be built, cheering the oil industry.
The European Union's climate commissioner, Connie Hedegaard, told The Huffington Post in an interview on Thursday that she had been "interested to see" the impact assessment. She emphasized the importance of acknowledging that greater greenhouse gas emissions result from the extraction and burning of tar sands oil, compared with normal crude oils.
A study published in January by the advocacy group Oil Change Internationalbolstered this point. The pipeline project, it concluded, would have more profound effects on the climate than previously thought, due largely to the oft-overlooked emissions of petroleum coke, a refinery byproduct from tar sands oil.
The State Department's new impact statement also suggested that Alberta's oil sands would be developed at pretty much the same rate with or without Keystone.
Hansen refuted that claim as well.
"The total carbon in tar sands exceeds that in all oil burned in human history, and if the pipeline is built, ways will be found to extract more and more of it, burning fossil fuels during the extraction and destroying the local environment," Hansen said.
Stephen Kretzmann, executive director of Oil Change International, offered a similarly skeptical view. "Please. If this were true, why would the Canadian government and the oil industry be hell-bent on building it? They know it's key to their expansion, and so do we," he said in a statement. "The State Department is overlooking the fact that the pipeline is likely to trigger at least 450,000 barrels per day of additional tar sands production capacity."
The State Department's assumption doesn't necessarily agree with what industry itself has been saying in recent months. The climate advocacy group 350.org has postedquotes from the industry that the group said show that stopping Keystone would mean vast amounts of tar sand oil will stay in the ground,.
"All of the crude oil export pipelines are pretty much full, running at maximum capacity," Vern Yu of Enbridge Inc. told The Globe and Mail in November. "And we're not likely to see any meaningful capacity added to these networks until the end of next year."
Obama in January 2012 rejected pipeline operator TransCanada's original route for the Keystone pipeline, citing environmental concerns. The State Department report considered TransCanada's revised route. Obama has said he'll decide whether to approve the pipeline this year.
Not surprisingly, Friday's signal from Washington was met with support from pro-pipeline Republicans and industry groups.
“Today’s report again makes clear there is no reason for this critical pipeline to be blocked one more day,” House Speaker John Boehner (D-Ohio) said in a statement. “After four years of needless delays, it is time for President Obama to stand up for middle-class jobs and energy security and approve the Keystone pipeline.”
"It is time for our leaders to make a decision. ... Canada's did a long time ago," Daniel Kish, senior vice president of the industry-backed Institute for Energy Research, said in a statement. "Too many are hurting and too much is at stake for any more time or money to be wasted on trivial matters and long addressed and re-addressed chimeras advanced by opponents of any and all affordable sources of energy."
Hedegaard was hesitant to offer specific recommendations for the Obama administration's domestic policy. "How Americans will deal with Keystone is up to Americans," she said.
But the climate commissioner warned of the danger in simply extracting "all the fossil fuels that we can find in the world." As HuffPost reported earlier on Friday, doing so would jeopardize any hope of keeping the increase in global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius -- a benchmark agreed to by world leaders as critical for avoiding the most dangerous effects on the climate system.
Europeans were cautiously optimistic after Obama gave substantial attention to climate change in both his inaugural and State of the Union addresses, according to Hedegaard. A similar attitude has permeated U.S. environmentalists working to slow climate change.
Friday's news may have quelled much of that optimism.
"President Obama and John Kerry have eloquently pledged to respond urgently to climate change," Daniel Souweine, of the climate change advocacy group Forecast the Facts, said in a statement.
If the State Department's determination becomes final, Souweine added, "it would mean that these speeches were empty words that will do nothing to help the millions of Americans whose lives and livelihoods are already being destroyed."

State Department's Keystone XL Analysis Upsets Environmentalists


The State Department released their Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) for TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline proposal on Friday, concluding in large part that the proposal is environmentally acceptable.
The review looks at the environmental strain of construction and possible spills, while also examining potential climate change impacts. A few weeks ago, over 40,000 people rallied in Washington, D.C. urging President Barack Obama to fight climate change by rejecting the "dirty, dangerous" pipeline.
The pipeline proposal focuses on transporting crude oil from Alberta, Canada and the Bakken Shale Formation in Montana to existing Nebraska facilities. The oil would then be transported to Cushing, Oklahoma and the Texas Gulf Coast region, although the southern portion doesn't require presidential approval because it does not cross international borders. 

The new application proposes a route avoiding Nebraska's Sand Hills --TransCanada's previous application for a Keystone XL pipeline was denied when additional information on environmental concerns could not be reviewed in the time Congress allotted for a decision to be made, according to the State Department.
As highlighted by ThinkProgress, the analysis states that the approval or denial of the proposed pipeline would not have a significant impact on Canada's oil sands or future U.S. oil consumption:
Based on information and analysis about the North American crude transport infrastructure (particularly the proven ability of rail to transport substantial quantities of crude oil profitably under current market conditions, and to add capacity relatively rapidly) and the global crude oil market, the draft Supplemental EIS concludes that approval or denial of the proposed Project is unlikely to have a substantial impact on the rate of development in the oil sands, or on the amount of heavy crude oil refined in the Gulf Coast area.
Oil Change International's Stephen Kretzmann argued in a press statement that "the pipeline is likely to trigger at least 450,000 barrels per day of additional tar sands production capacity. In addition, by dismissing emissions associated with petroleum coke produced by the diluted bitumen the pipeline will carry, the State Department is underestimating the climate emissions of the pipeline by at least 13 percent."
Sierra Club's Michael Brune referred to Obama's declared commitment to combat climate change, and emphasized that if he stands true to his promise, Obama "should throw the State Department’s report away and reject the dirty and dangerous Keystone XL pipeline."
Obama pledged in his State of the Union speech that his administration would take action on climate change, and "if Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will. I will direct my cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future, to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy."
TransCanada CEO Russ Girling previously declared the Keystone XL was necessary "as North American oil production increases and having the right infrastructure in place is critical to meet the goal of reducing dependence on foreign oil." But, according to the assessment, the State Department previously projected that the midstream sector of the petroleum industry "is capable of developing alternative capacity" to move central and western North American crude even if the Keystone XL is not built. "If there were no additional pipeline projects approved," the report explains, "Rail and supporting non-pipeline modes should be capable, as was projected in 2011," of delivering Canadian crude oil to refineries.
Greenpeace's Phil Radford stated, “The State Department’s report got one thing right: we don’t need the Keystone Tar Sands Pipeline to meet America’s energy needs. And it got something very, very wrong: it is just untrue that piping oil from the Tar Sands will not have a devastating impact on our climate."
Environmentalists argue the majority of known fossil fuel reserves must remain underground to avoid raising average global temperatures above two degrees Celsius. "80 percent of those reserves," to be precise, wrote 350.org's Bill McKibben in a 2012 Rolling Stone op-ed. "We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn," he argued.
In a May 2012 op-ed in The New York Times, NASA climate scientist James Hansen wrote regarding Alberta oil sands extraction, "If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate." He argued, "We need to start reducing emissions significantly, not create new ways to increase them."
There will be a 45-day public comment period after the draft is posted, and the Washington Post suggests Obama is unlikely to make a decision on the permit application before mid-summer.
As McKibben declared in a written statement, "Mother Nature filed her comments last year -- the hottest year in American history; the top climate scientists in the U.S. have already chimed in. The rest of us have 45 days to make our voices heard, and we will."

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