Keystone Pipeline Opponents Cite State Dept. Funny Business & Oozing Oil To Demand (Further) Review
“TransCanada, the Calgary-based energy conglomerate behind the proposed Keystone XL pipeline project, has often stumbled in trying to win the hearts and minds of Americans.
It has, for example, infuriated property-rights advocates from Montana to Texas by aggressively invoking eminent domain when landowners in the pipeline’s planned path refuse to grant easement. The company’s mixed record of leaky pipelines, too, has not helped to turn skeptics into supporters of its 2,000-mile Keystone project, which would ship a heavily processed (and environmentally suspect) petroleum product from Alberta to the Gulf Coast.
But if executives at TransCanada felt they had successfully weathered the worst of what has been a uniquely acrimonious, five-year battle with environmentalists and other critics of the project — a feeling surely augmented by recent suggestions that President Barack Obama was likely to approve the contentious pipeline — events of the last week or so will have curbed their enthusiasm.
On Monday afternoon, a coalition of environmental and public interest groups fired off a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry and the State Department’s Inspector General, Harold Geisel, demanding a probe into the agency’s handling of its widely criticized environmental review of the proposed project. Chief among the charges: that the third-party contractor hired to conduct the analysis, Environmental Resources Management, effectively lied when asked by the State Department, in a screening questionnaire, whether it had any potential conflicts of interest.”
Zeller, Tom jr. Huffington Post 8 April 2013.