Endangered Whooping Cranes – like this adult with its chick – are one of many species threatened by tar sands pipelines. (US Fish & Wildlife Service)

National Wildlife Federation board member David Carruth, an Arkansas resident who has spent the last few weeks assisting in the response to the disastrous Pegasus pipeline spill, will be speaking at a press conference to highlight the dangers of tar sands for wildlife and public health. And David, along with Nebraska Wildlife Federation president Duane Hovorka, will testify at the hearing. adding their voices to the hundreds of attendees telling the State Department to deny the pipeline.

You can watch a live stream of the event here, and I’ll be back with a recap of the hearing later this week so stay tuned. If you haven’t already sent a message to the White House, NOW IS THE TIME! The public comment period closes on Monday, April 22 so tell the President and Secretary Kerry “NO KXL!”

Speak up for people and wildlife at risk from tar sands — Tell the White House to say NO! to Keystone XL.

Watch Larry Schweiger, President and CEO of National Wildlife Federation, as he reacts to the vote from the Platte River in Nebraska–a vital stopover for hundreds of thousands of sandhill cranes threatened by toxic oil spills from Keystone XL:

Click here to view the embedded video.

At a time of record-breaking temperatures and increasingly devastating extreme weather events, our leaders need to stand up against dirty and dangerous energy projects. With your voice today, we can hold the senators accountable who sided with Big Oil over their constituents interests.

On Twitter?

Find your senators in the list below and remind them that Americans don’t want the Keystone XL pipeline by tweeting at them:

Protect caribou by telling the Obama administration to address Keystone XL’s impacts on wildlife, habitat and climate change.

Bob Allpress says Nebraska DEQ left his entire farm, including this federally protected Bald Eagle nest, out of its Keystone XL pipeline review

That’s right, the revised route—the one TransCanada told us we could trust to protect our wildlife, public lands and clean water.

National Wildlife Federation has already reported extensively on how tar sands production threatens Canada’s caribou and wolves. But America’s wildlife is also threatened by Keystone XL, as Big Oil’s rush to pad corporate profits bumps up against America’s conservation values.

Nebraska Landowner Sounds the Alarm

Bob Allpress, the Nebraska landowner who raised the red flag in testimony last month, charges that the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality (the state agency tasked with examining the route through Nebraska) failed in their responsibility.

“Even though I contacted the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality several times, nobody from the DEQ ever contacted us nor inspected the route through our farm,” says Bob, who lives in Naper, NE. “If this report is this flawed within two miles of the South Dakota border, the entire report is suspect.”

After the DEQ ignored Allpress, NWF reached out to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, which contacted the U.S. State Department and asked them to shift the route away from this eagle’s nest and impose mitigation measures to protect eagles in the area. It remains to be seen whether the State Department will do.

TransCanada, the company trying to build the Keystone XL pipeline, might find a way around this particular problem—they may decide to re-route the pipeline a few hundred feet around the nest, or just build through the area and assume the eagles will find another home. But the bottom line is that TransCanada and the Nebraska DEQ failed to spot this problem when they had the chance, and it took a landowner and an outcry from conservation groups to even bring this problem to light.

New Route for Keystone XL Pipeline Just as Dangerous?

Bald eagles are back from the brink of extinction, but the tar sands industry has visions of dollar bills clouding their patriotism. (Photo: Art Goldenberg)

How President Obama responds will give us a clear view of his true priorities and determine—perhaps more than any other decision he makes—his conservation legacy.

The decision to move forward with the Keystone XL pipeline is currently up to President Obama and the U.S. State Department, who must review the project and decide whether to allow it to go forward.

Obama rejected the original permit application early in 2012, based mainly on concerns about damage to the Ogallala aquifer and other crucial resources in Nebraska. National Wildlife Federation and our partner groups in Nebraska are deeply troubled by the lack of consideration given so far to climate change and wildlife impacts, and the revised route still poses serious problems for the aquifer.

“Why are we risking our water—the main source of our state’s economy—for a foreign export pipeline?” asks Jane Kleeb of Bold Nebraska.

More Wildlife Species at Risk

In addition to Keystone’s game-changing (or if you believe NASA’s James Hansen, game-ending) effect on global carbon emissions, wildlife is at particular risk from tar sands development, pipeline spills and construction:

• In the event of a spill in Nebraska, the iconic sandhill cranes that migrate in vast numbers through the Platte River valley would be exposed to toxins like benzene. And at every river crossing along Keystone XL’s 2,000 mile route, fish habitat would be destroyed and the riparian system disturbed.
• Until earlier this year, it was official policy in Canada to hunt down and poison gray wolves as a “solution” to caribou habitat loss; a public outcry led by NWF caused the Alberta provincial government enough embarrassment to rethink that practice.
• Whooping cranes and hundreds of other species of migratory birds are seeing their northern nesting grounds bulldozed on an unprecedented scale as the oil industry expands its footprint in the Canadian tar sands region.
• The million-gallon Enbridge pipeline tar sands spill in Michigan killed or poisoned blue herons, muskrats, turtles, and dozens of other species. Yet we still don’t have state or federal laws requiring agencies to consider the unique impacts of tar sands spills, and according to Prof. John Stansbury of the University of Nebraska, “The bottom line is that a thorough and adequate study of the impacts has not been done [to date], and that includes the DEQ report.”

According to Dr. Doug Inkley, senior scientist at the National Wildlife Federation, “Bald eagle recovery is one of America’s great conservation success stories, something we can all be proud of. But oil companies’ priorities are so skewed that they can’t even be troubled to take wildlife into account. This situation is a reminder that the pipeline will affect wildlife from one end to the other.”

Tell the Obama Administration to reject Keystone XL and protect people and wildlife from dangerous tar sands!

Related Links:

• Learn more about bald eagles >>
• Check up on the Decorah Eagle Cam >>

The Proposed Alternative

The proposed route changes for the Keystone XL pipeline, as announced Sept. 5, 2012.

NWF’s Statement

Joe Mendelson, National Wildlife Federation climate and energy policy director, said:

“The reason TransCanada needs to keep rerouting the Keystone XL map is because it’s just a bad idea. Each new map amounts to a catalog of which property owners will suffer, and what habitat will be placed at risk. The best approach is to ditch Keystone XL entirely and embrace clean energy solutions that don’t spill or explode.”

For more information, visit NWF’s Keystone XL page.

Same Problems, Same Risks

Jane Kleeb with Bold Nebraska says,

“The new route still risks our land, water and property rights. The new route still crosses high water tables, sandy soil which leads to higher vulnerability of contamination and still crosses the Ogallala Aquifer, the lifeblood of Nebraska’s economy.”

Let’s get rid of this project once and for all. 

Let the U.S. State Department know you want to protect people and wildlife from this dangerous tar sands pipeline!

Sandhill cranes near Kearney, Nebraska on the Platte River earlier this spring (photo: flickr/stpaulgirl)

The Sandhills, in turn, are a unique landscape: 20,000 square miles, part desert, part grassland, with lakes and wetlands scattered throughout. Formed after the last Ice Age by winds that steadily built the dunes as high as 400 feet, the Sandhills are now stabilized by native grasses that allow farmers and ranchers to make a good living there. It is home not just to ranchers and cranes but also pronghorn antelope, porcupines, elk and bison, along with hundreds of other wildlife and plant species.

Making all this possible is a vast underground reservoir — the Ogallala aquifer — that sits beneath the Sandhills. It is our biggest water reserve, providing 30% of the groundwater used for irrigation in the entire US and drinking water for millions of Americans, and at some places the water table is so high that it’s actually at the surface, creating those lakes and wetlands. The Ogallala enabled the Great Plains to become “America’s bread basket,” but overuse threatens to suck this vital resource dry and now Big Oil (always eager to kick Mother Nature when she’s down) has raised the stakes for farmers and cranes alike.

Big Oil’s Dangerous Gamble

Tar sands pipelines spell big trouble for species like cranes (photo: Andrea Westmoreland)

The Global Labor Institute at Cornell University has concluded that spills from pipelines of tar sands-derived oil are three times as likely to occur per mile as spills of crude oil. And when they do, the researchers say, the damage is greater, the public health risks larger, the clean-up harder, the costs higher.

A spill over the aquifer would be a disaster. After a local and national outrcry — including criticism from Nebraska’s Republican governor and senators from both parties — sent Keystone XL back to the drawing board, the company has recently proposed another route. But the revised project still crosses the Ogallala aquifer, and critics charge that the “official” border of the Sandhills is a pretty meaningless distinction, because the surrounding area is similar geologically. In other words: new route, same risks.

Double Trouble in the Boreal Forest

Sandhill cranes mate for life (photo: Matthew Paulson)

Stretching across the northern reaches of our continent, this ecosystem is one of the most important you’ve (probably) never heard of, not just for its striking range of biodiversity but also for the crucial role it plays in regulating our climate: globally, boreal forests — almost a third of which are in Canada — store more carbon than any other biome.

Calling it simply a forest is a little misleading, though — the region also includes vast wetlands like the delta of the Peace and Athabasca rivers in northeastern Alberta, a favorite nesting area for sandhill cranes and hundreds of other species. But danger is on the horizon: just to the south of this vibrant delta, the oil industry is building the biggest industrial project in our planet’s history.

Big Oil’s wholesale demolition of the boreal forest is well-documented but mostly overlooked outside of Canada. (It’s worth checking out these photos to get a sense of the scale and what we’re fighting to protect.) Taken together, habitat loss, catastrophic spills, and climate change pose an enormous risk to sandhill cranes, caribou, wolves and other wildlife, and pipelines like Keystone XL are the key to the whole system. Thanks to a grassroots uprising we’ve halted this project so far, but we need your help to hold the line against tar sands.

Speak up now and tell the Obama Administration to say NO to Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline. Our planet deserves better.

For now, the President and the U.S. Senate have rejected this scheme, though President Obama has openly invited pipeline builder TransCanada to submit a new proposal. TransCanada took a big step in that direction this week, by announcing a new route. Why? Nebraskans deemed the old route too environmentally risky to sensitive habitat.  Well the new route appears no better. It still crosses the Nebraska Sandhills, and it still crosses the Ogallala Aquifer.

Sandhill Cranes would be in danger from the proposed new route for Keystone XL. Photo from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

The Unique Sandhills and the Ogallala

Many experts have cautioned against locating the pipeline through Nebraska’s Sandhills and the Ogallala aquifer, from ranchers to university professors.

The Nebraska sandhills are the largest dune formation in the United States.  The pipeline could splice right through this unique habitat of sand dunes, grasslands, wetlands and groundwater-fed lakes.  There are over 1,000 plant and animal species in this region.  The sandhills and especially central Nebraska are critical stopover points for millions of migrating birds in the spring, notably sandhill cranes.

The proposed pipeline’s route also cuts through the Ogallala aquifer, a geologic formation 174,000 square miles in size, larger than the state of California and spanning the states of Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico.  The Ogallala provides drinking water for millions of people and around 30 percent of the groundwater used for irrigation nationwide.  Irrigated agriculture is critical to the economy of many communities that draw from the Ogallala. “The Ogallala Aquifer, whose total water storage is about equal to that of Lake Huron in the Midwest, is the single most important source of water in the High Plains region, providing nearly all the water for residential, industrial, and agricultural use,” reports the Water Encyclopedia.

Pipelines break; pipelines leak. TransCanada predicted that the Keystone XL pipeline would have 11 spills over the next 50 years, but University of Nebraska professor John Stansbury puts the estimate at eight times that, 91 over 50 years.  He should know.  He is a professor of environmental and water resources engineering.  TransCanada’s Keystone One pipeline had 14 spills in its first year alone, a disheartening fact.

Our Water in the Crosshairs

Of particularly concern are the largely unknown consequences of oil seeping into the Ogallala. In a June 2011 letter, University of Nebraska professors John Gates and Wayne Woldt wrote Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that little is known about how an oil plume would behave in the sandhills and the Ogallala, that there is only one study of long-term plume hydrogeochemistry and that the conditions of that spill’s location, in Minnesota, are not comparable to the conditions of the sandhills.

The Ogallala lies under permeable layers of sand, gravel and rock, a type of soil mixture that absorbs water like a sponge, conditions make the area particularly vulnerable to oil leaks and spills because water can move quickly through this soil.  “All the conditions are right for producing potentially very short lag times between an oil release near the surface of the earth and water contamination in the aquifer below,” John Gates, assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences, University of Nebraska, has warned.

The Keystone XL pipeline will not bring us energy security or international security.  And equally important, it will not provide us economic or environmental security.  Americans take the risks, and oil companies get rich.  It’s a sucker’s deal and we should reject it.

You can help!  Take action now to protect wildlife like Sandhill Cranes, wolves and others that are in harm’s path from tar sands.

“The sound is just a long drawn out ‘boom’; you can just tell it’s a very old song that’s been going on for thousands of years. Kind of like an alarm clock in spring telling you to wake up; it’s something you have to experience, I can’t describe it.” – Aaron Price

Nebraska rancher Aaron Price is referring to the “boom” of the male prairie chicken calling for a mate in spring. The distinctive sound is accompanied by a dance that we can enjoy courtesy of You-tube in this video of a South Dakota grassland prairie chicken.

Click here to view the embedded video.

But videos can’t compete with a real life experience. If you want to see the prairie chicken dance in person, you can go to the First Annual 2012 Nebraska Prairie Chicken Festival hosted by Calamus Outfitters and the Gracie Creek Landowners.

The event is organized by landowners of three ranches that border each other in Nebraska. Due to the good stewardship of the ranch owners over the years, greater prairie chickens have been thriving. Sarah Sortum of Calamus Outfitters, who is organizing the event, says that the landowners “wanted to do something, because we were really just excited about what we’ve been doing, the birds, and what we have to offer. We weren’t sure how to get the word out, so we came up with the festival idea. Landowners are excited to show the project area and educate the public that by and large private landowners are responsible stewards—sometimes we get a bad rap. And we also just want to have fun.”

Two Greater Prairie Chickens dance on a lek on Gracie Creek Ranch, Nebraska. Photo by Aaron Price

“It’s kind of like a fraternity, a bunch of guys trying to pair up and push the weaker ones out of the territory and attract females. The males group up normally in twos and try to work their way to the middle.”

After the early morning dance, the festival begins with a Native American traditional prairie chicken dance. Each day there are  activities: ranch tours, kids activities, and talks from several speakers –  including keynote speaker Michael Forsberg, a celebrated conservation photographer.

The Nebraska festival is one of several events celebrating the prairie chicken; there are also festivals in Wisconsin, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, attended by many people who celebrate wildlife. Sortum and the other landowners have been doing a lot worth celebrating. Says Sortum:

“We have a comprehensive stewardship plan, with an umbrella of biodiversity goals we’re working toward: controlling invasives, restoring native hydrology, implementing grazing management. You come to find out there’s a reason people live here—they love to see the wildlife and the grasslands. It’s a form of community planning, even though we’re a rural community. What do we want our resource to look like in the next 20 years?”

Photo Credit: Aaron Price

1. Take a trip!  Visit the Calamus Outfitters website to read more about how to attend the  2012 Nebraska Prairie Chicken Festival, and go see the dance.  And don’t miss Ryan Stockwell of NWF, who will be speaking the 21st on the importance of the Farm Bill in protecting grasslands.
2. Write to your Congressman or Senator and ask them to help the Lesser Prairie Chicken and other grassland species by adding a Sodsaver provision to the next Farm Bill, which will protect native grasslands from being converted to cropland while keeping land available for grazing.

Farming and ranching makes a huge contribution to the economy of the Great Plains states

In its original application for a Presidential permit, TransCanada Corp. (the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline) planned a route that would have cut through the sensitive Sandhills region of Nebraska.

Fierce opposition from farmers, ranchers, and citizens of every political stripe forced the company to scrap that idea.

Now TransCanada is trying to identify a new route.

Any Pipeline Through Nebraska Puts the Ogallala Aquifer at Risk

Even though the oil industry was forced to make this concession to public health, a much vaster resource is still threatened: the Ogallala aquifer, which provides 30% of the groundwater used for irrigation in the United States, and drinking water for 2 million people. 

Almost any feasible pipeline route through Nebraska will still run over the Ogallala aquifer.

It would be hard to overemphasize how vital the Ogallala is to our national economy. As Nebraska’s Republican Governor Dave Heineman stressed in a letter to the White House, “This resource is the lifeblood of Nebraska’s agriculture industry.” 

The aquifer’s enormous stores of fresh water are the only reason the “Breadbasket of America” can exist–it irrigates farms that harvest nearly 20 percent of our wheat and cotton, and 15 percent of the U.S. corn–and makes possible a booming cattle industry across the Plains states.

The Ogallala aquifer stretches across 8 states and supplies billions of gallons of fresh water for irrigation

Tar Sands Pipelines: A Disaster in Waiting

Oil spills happen all the time–a dirty secret that’s not so secret anymore, thanks to the scrutiny faced by the industry the last few years. And tar sands pipelines in particular have been in the news for all the wrong reasons:

• a 1.1 million gallon spill in Michigan’s Kalamazoo River;
• a 42,000 gallon spill in the pristine Yellowstone River in Montana; and
• a 21,000 gallon eruption in North Dakota on TransCanada’s first Keystone 1 pipeline – which has been plagued by at least twelve spills since it was completed in 2010.

TransCanada is doing their best to hide these risks, even going so far as to manipulate data submitted to the U.S. State Department.

An independent analysis by the University of Nebraska found that the worst-case spill scenarios were much higher than TransCanada’s estimates, with up to “91 major spills over a 50 year design life of the pipeline” and even the potential for benzene contamination of drinking water for hundreds of thousands of people. A study after the Kalamazoo spill found that nearly 60% of area residents experienced gastrointestinal, respiratory or neurological symptoms from exposure.

An Easy Choice

It’s obvious that tar sands pose an enormous risk to the Ogallala aquifer and the crops that feed Americans from coast to coast. Public polling on the issue reflects this concern: According to a Feb. 3 poll conducted by Hart Research Associates, 64% of voters think that the risk of a toxic oil spill in the Ogallala aquifer was a “very convincing” or “somewhat convincing” reason to block construction of Keystone XL. And after hearing pro and con arguments, a wide plurality of voters supported the White House’s decision to deny the permit (47% support, 36% oppose, and 17% undecided or no opinion).

Randy Thompson, a rancher whose land Keystone XL would cut through, put it in plain terms:

 Perhaps it’s just my Nebraska logic, but from my perspective it appears that the United States is getting the short end of the stick on this deal. Canada and the big oil companies are reaping the rewards while Americans are being left to fix the fence.

When you hear it like that, you realize that this debate boils down to a pretty simple question: Do we decide to protect Americans’ food supply and drinking water, or pad the profits of foreign oil companies that want to cut through our farmland on the way to overseas markets? It should be an easy choice.

 Urge President Obama to stand strong to protect wildlife against Big Oil.

For more on tar sands and the Keystone XL pipeline visit nwf.org/tarsands

The bill heading to the president will likely include the rider that rushes the decision on the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.  So what does this mean for the pipeline?  Speaker Boehner is trying to satisfy Big Oil’s lobbyists and some of the GOP’s top corporate donors by forcing the president to make a hasty decision, but it will backfire.   I am confident that President Obama will stand up to big oil and reject this dangerous and unnecessary pipeline because it is the right thing to do, and that the American public will support him.  Americans understand that it is wrong to play political games and strip families of our right to protect our land and our clean water from foreign oil companies, because you can’t drink oil.

I asked  Jane Kleeb of Bold Nebraska and Bill McKibben of 350.org, two of the leading fighters to stop this pipeline,  for their reaction today as well. Here is what they wrote me:

Bill McKibben:  ”The administration’s promise to deny this permit, if fulfilled, will be one of the rare pieces of good news for the climate in a year which saw America shatter all records for billion-dollar weather disasters. The president campaigned hard in 2008 on trying to slow the climate crisis, and this would be a strong sign he meant what he said.”

Jane Kleeb: “The pipeline is unnecessary and a scam that would export the oil while burdening our families with all the risks.”

 Prior Update: Tweet from White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer (@pfeiffer44):

Keystone XL Legacy: More Tar Sands Pollution (image courtesy circleofblue.org)

As someone who has testified twice this year in Congress against the pipeline, you might think I should be alarmed about Big Oil’s latest stunt to rush the president’s decision on the Keystone XL pipeline. I’m not. Here’s why it will backfire.

Of course oil companies want to rush approval of the project. The pipeline means more profits– a lot more.  Not just more oil, but higher prices too (a price tag of $4 billion more every year, according to Transcanada’s analysis). The president has the responsibility to determine whether the pipeline is in the “national interest.” If he says “yes,” then Canadian oil company Transcanada will start taking American families to court to take their land under eminent domain laws.  After Nebraskans rebelled against the original pipeline route, Transcanada announced they will pick a new route.  They still haven’t told us where they will build it.  The ill-conceived rider would essentially be a blank check to route the pipeline where they want without federal oversight.

House Speaker John Boehner, who seems to have trouble saying “no” to oil companies on anything, fell in love with the rider. He threatened to torpedo the payroll tax relief bill for American families unless it includes a rider to rush the pipeline decision in 60 days.

Here’s the catch:  The State Department (which is responsible for doing the required assessments of the Canadian pipeline) had already clearly said that a Congressional order to rush the pipeline is a mandate to kill the pipeline.

Here is what the State Department said:

“Should Congress impose an arbitrary deadline for the permit decision, its actions would not only compromise the process, it would prohibit the Department from acting consistently with National Environmental Policy Act requirements by not allowing sufficient time for the development of this information. In the absence of properly completing the process, the Department would be unable to make a determination to issue a permit for this project.”

This makes sense. If there is one thing we learned from the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf, it is the danger of rushing oversight and trusting oil companies to regulate themselves.  The first Keystone pipeline, which has been in operation for only a year, has already had 14 spills! How can regulators approve a pipeline when the company building it hasn’t decided where it will be routed, whose land they will grab, and which water supplies they will put in harm’s way? And how can anyone say that highly corrosive tar sands oil is safe to transport in pipelines when Congress this week passed a bill requiring the first-ever study of tar sands pipeline safety?

Rally against tar sands in Washington, DC, October 2011

More than 500,000 Americans have already commented against the Keystone XL pipeline. They understand that oil companies don’t build pipelines to change where we get our energy next year or the year after–they build oil pipelines to deepen our addiction for decades to come. We need to set our compass to steer toward cleaner, safer energy sources, not Canadian tar sands, the most toxic and most expensive form of oil on the planet.

Oil companies have plenty of money to spend on the media and politicians to keep up their drumbeat in the coming weeks. Even though we know how this story ends, we don’t intend to let oil companies be the only voices heard on the way there. People who care about the energy future we leave our children and grandchildren now need to mobilize once more.

Update 12/17:  The Obama administration has been confirming to reporters that the payroll tax rider will sink the pipeline. According to a Bloomberg report:

Republican insistence on including a demand to speed a decision on a controversial Canada-to-Texas oil pipeline means it almost certainly will not be built, a senior administration official said. [...]

Obama stands by the State Department’s warning on Monday that a Republican effort to limit the pipeline review to 60 days would violate environmental laws and force it to withhold approval, the senior official said. [...]

The Democratic president can live with the Keystone clause in the tax deal because it does not mandate that he approve the pipeline, only that he make a decision within 60 days on whether or not to allow construction.

The official said the project would now almost surely be killed because Obama has made clear he will not give the go-ahead without time for an adequate review of the health, safety and environmental risks.

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY)  is calling the pipeline rider a “Pyrrhic victory” for Republicans.

Support National Wildlife Federation’s work on to stop dirty fuels and the Keystone XL pipeline at our Choose Your Cause website.

Citing environmental concerns and the potential impacts to Americans’ health and safety, Obama told the State Department to take a closer look at the project, which has been blasted by Midwestern landowners, native tribes, conservationists and others around the country.

Making Nebraskans Pay?

Now, just days later, a Nebraska congressman has teamed up with TransCanada Corporation to speed up the process – and Nebraskans would foot the bill.

Wildlife like these Sandhill Cranes are at risk from pipeline spills and construction (Photo: Len Radin)

Nebraska state Senator Mike Flood, who introduced the legislation Monday, said it’s up to Nebraskans to cover the cost of a new review. “This is our land. These are our people. We will pay for this. It’s the right thing to do,” Flood said.

It’s quite the turnaround for the good folks at TransCanada, who had obstinately refused to re-route their pipeline away from the state’s fragile Sandhills ecosystem and the Ogallala aquifer. But the payoff is obvious: instead of waiting 12-18 months for the federal government to complete a thorough analysis, now they hope the project could get hustled through the back door in as little as six months. Not a bad deal, huh?

Hold your horses! The State Department says we don’t have to worry:

“Any new proposed routes will be subject to the thorough, rigorous and transparent review process we have undertaken throughout,” deputy spokesman Mark Toner said late Monday.

Protesters carry an inflatable Keystone Xl pipeline around the White House during the Nov. 6th rally. (Photo: Marine Jaouen)

He might want to go back and check his facts, because the State Department has been one of Keystone’s biggest cheerleaders. “Thorough, rigorous and transparent” is the exact opposite of how the review went down, and we need this decision taken out of their hands and handled by an agency with a lot fewer skeletons in the closet.

Consider this: the State Department didn’t even factor in carbon pollution during their analysis, even though NASA’s top climatologist, James Hansen, says developing Canada’s tar sands spells “Game Over” for the fight against climate change. Add that to a long list of shady dealings (like the fact that the company that conducted KXL’s environmental review listed TransCanada as a “major client”) and it’s obvious we need a change of juries.

So what does all this mean? First off, it proves, once again, that you can’t trust Big Oil to tell the truth. And it also means that we have to be vigilant to ensure that this project gets the scrutiny it deserves.

Keep Up the Fight

Last week was a big victory, but the fight isn’t over. Already, other companies are proposing new pipelines to exploit Canada’s tar sands, and the last time I checked, those won’t be any greener or more wildlife-friendly than the Keystone XL proposal.

But we’ve proven that our voices count – your protests brought a filthy, $7 billion project to a screeching halt – and in this era of corporate domination that’s pretty impressive.

Let’s keep it up.

You can help protect Canada’s boreal forest and prevent the spread of tar sands development by making a donation through NWF’s Choose Your Cause program.

• More about National Wildlife Federation’s work stopping Keystone XL
• Article about Canada’s tar sands tragedy from National Wildlife magazine.