Keystone Vindication

"Regarding the Keystone pipeline the administration should face down critics of the project, ensure that environmental standards are met and then approve it."
" Nor is oil produced from the Canadian tar sands as dirty from a climate perspective as many believe (some of the oil produced in California, without attention from environmentalists, is worse)."
"By approving Keystone, Obama can bolster his credibility within industry and among conservatives. The president can also take advantage of rising domestic oil and gas production to defuse concerns over energy security."
"The energy utilities will duly cry foul but the same companies are already powering down old and inefficient coal-fired power plants in favour of natural-gas plants. Why? Because natural gas is cheap and burns more cleanly than coal, helping companies to meet increasingly stringent air-quality regulations."
Science journal Nature

Really. No kidding. Perfectly true. This from one of the globe's most highly respected science journals. The message: continue closing down coal-burning power and utility plants. While China is busy building ever greater numbers of coal plants to meet its manufacturing-base energy-hunger, and in the process polluting the air its citizens breathe, blocking out the sun, creating for itself an environmental disaster, North America, less desperate for tired old solutions to energy needs can afford to pack up its coal-burning plants.

The Keystone XL pipeline imbroglio, which has resulted mostly because of xenophobia (trade protectionism), and partly because of legitimate environmental concerns, has been a true-blue Keystone Kops scenario.  Twice it has undergone environmental assessments and been given the initial green light to proceed, but because it has become a political hot potato, the U.S. federal government hesitates to proceed with the green light. Resulting in Canada huffily turning elsewhere to sell its product.

The scientific minds at Nature assure its audience that the pipeline's deleterious impact will not result in the catastrophic conclusion seen as a potential to contaminate ground water and upset the delicate heritage ecology of the states through which it is meant to be built.  There are issues to be contemplated revolving around air- and water-quality impacts that are worrisome to a degree, but these are issues that will impact on Canada, as the extractor/producer, not the recipient of the energy product.

Even that renegade-respected environmental campaigner, Greenpeace, now realistically ranks coal as a larger global threat than the Alberta oil sands. "Coal is the biggest threat globally. Sometimes, we get a little parochial in Canada -- we think that the whole world is entirely focused on tar sands as the biggest problem. What we're saying here is that it's one of the biggest problems", explained Keith Stewart, one of Greenpeace's report authors.

The 1,700-mile Keystone pipeline was first proposed in late 2008 by TransCanada, and it has twice been set aside. The pipeline is meant to carry up to 800,000 barrels of oil daily from Alberta, to end up in refineries in Houston and other Texas destinations. To do that it must travel through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma. Some of those states' environmentalists and government agents raise the same fears that British Columbia has raised in objecting to an Alberta pipeline to Canada's west coast for transshipment to Eastern buyers.

TransCanada has now submitted a new application, and Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman has approved the revised route; the rest is up to the Obama administration. It would hugely benefit the United States in its bid to become energy sufficient with aid from reliable, politically clean sources. The larger headache for Canada is to commit to continued funding of critical research that would minimize the extraction process fallout within Canada.

And that's a whole other story.