DEMOCRATS
The timing is too much: 3 p.m. on a Friday. And not just any Friday—the one just before the Super Bowl.
That’s when the U.S. Department of State decided to release its hotly anticipated report on the environmental safety of the Keystone XL, the $5.4 billion, 875-mile final leg of a network of pipelines carrying Alberta crude to refineries and tankers in Port Arthur, Tex.
It’s genius. You can almost hear a State Department bureaucrat: "We’ll bury this thing late on Super Friday. By Monday everyone will be too busy tweeting Super Bowl ads to notice how compromised we look."
In recent months, those in favor and those opposed to the Keystone XL have been pestering Obama to quit stalling and go ahead—approve or nix the damn thing.
The pipeline crosses an international border, so it falls to him to decide.
It’s an executive order: just the sort of power the president implied he’d wield in last week’s State of the Union.
It fell to the State Department, meanwhile, to determine whether the pipeline is safe for, among others, the Montana, South Dakota, and Nebraska property owners who will have the 3-foot-diameter pipe driven through their fields and across their water supplies.
But the real motive to bury this report on Super Friday isn’t, finally, the questionable assumption that the tar sands will inevitably burn, with or without the Keystone.
It’s that the State Department has ignored one warning sign after another about the subcontractor, ERM, that carried out the fieldwork for the FSEIS.
In fact, today’s report has beaten another much-anticipated report to the punch, this one from the Office of the Inspector General to determine whether ERM lied to the U.S. government to secure the contract.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-31/keystone-xl-cops-part-xlviii-pipeline-gets-state-departments-green-light
