I look up from my computer and see gales of snow blowing across my soggy yard and over whitecaps on the lake.
The U.S. State Department appears to be getting snowed. The department has issued a supplemental environmental impact statement, 900 pages total, on TransCanada's proposed Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline. This is the big pipeline TransCanada wants to run across western South Dakota and over Nebraska's Ogallala aquifer, over the objection of many local landowners who don't cotton to oily water or eminent domain. After the EPA gave State an F for its original draft EIS, State has come back and said their original report was pretty much just fine.
The draft rejects many arguments opposing the pipeline and emphasizes the "stable and reliable" nature of oil imports from Canada. The draft also frets that rejecting Keystone XL "would increase market incentives" for Canadian tar sands producers to ship their very crude crude to Asian buyers... even though that's where Keystone XL oil will go anyway. (Don't believe me? Believe The Economist, which says oil demand in America has flattened and may never recover, leading refiners to focus on growing overseas markets.)
The State Department is also rejecting calls from environmental groups who want 120 days to review the supplement and submit public comment. State is allowing just 45 days of such comment.
You can read the full supplemental EIS online. You can also read why the National Resources Defense Council and Friends of the Earth think the State Department is once again putting foreign business interests over American environmental safety.
This post compares the pipeline to NAFTA and concludes "[u]nlike the NAFTA Superhighway, Keystone XL could represent a real threat to America, according to environmentalists."
{CAH: Excellent article, LK! Where are the anti-North-American-Unionists shouting about this Pan-American plot?}