My Open Letter on Keystone XL Pipeline and State Department Draft Report

<repost, updated; sent to State Department, as well as numerous national newspapers>

I was completely shocked and disturbed that the initial State Department report so underestimated the effects of the Keystone XL pipeline on climate. The impacts of the project to climate alone are significantly adverse and unmitigatable. The Pentagon has concretely said that climate change is one of the largest threats to our national security and well being in the future.1 This would accelerate that irreversibly.

The environmental impacts are significantly adverse to the Canadian Boreal forests, Athabasca watershed, water quality, wildlife, and humans there (see new accelerated cancer rates of native people along the watershed) and potentially communities in the US through which the pipeline would travel.2

The statement that Canada will extract for eventual burning all that Tar Sands 'oil' (it's bitumen actually, and worse than oil) without the pipeline anyway is unproven.3 Canadians themselves are resisting a pipeline be built of this dirty, difficult and expensive to extract and environmentally devastating bitumen in their own country.4

Why should we allow it? For several thousand jobs for a couple months? The U.S. is unlikely to even use most of that 'oil', which is slated for foreign export.5 So that can't be it. The ONLY people to benefit in the long-term are the owners of the oil company and the refinery on the Gulf. That's it.

LET'S PLEASE think of the long-term for the rest of us. The long-term damage this pipeline will help wreak far outweighs any other benefits, for the few and fleeting, it could provide.
We must work with Canada on renewable, affordable, non-destructive energy, and to leave this obsolete, climate-changing dirty oil in the ground, forever. If the State Department is truly looking after our best interests and enforcing its Environmental Impact Statement duties, denying this permit is the only choice to make.

1 Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/science/earth/09climate.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

2 Pipeline leak brings crude reality to Arkansas http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/01/us/arkansas-pipeline-spill/ There are currently over 720 billion litres of toxic tailings on the landscape in the Athabasca oil sands area. There is currently a lack of publicly available information on the rate and volume of seepage from oil sands tailings ponds, despite known incidents involving tailings seepage. http://www.resilience.org/stories/2009-09-22/environmental-impacts-oil-sands-development-alberta
What does environmental devastation look like? http://www.ted.com/talks/garth_lenz_images_of_beauty_and_devastation.html http://www.nrdc.org/wildlife/borealbirds.pdf Wildlife/birds http://www.nrdc.org/wildlife/borealbirds.pdf Impacts http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5287

3 Estimates by the Environmental Protection Agency found that Keystone would increase annual carbon emissions by “up to 27.6 metric tons, or the equivalent of nearly 6 million cars on the road.” Without the pipeline, tar sands production is estimated to fall flat by 2020.  http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/03/03/1663291/states-keystone-report-is-the-tar-sands-pits/

4 While it is entirely possible that Canada could and will choose to ship its oil sands crude to Asia, that would require a another pipeline that some native groups in Canada have opposed in the past.  http://science.time.com/2013/03/01/state-dept-build-the-keystone-pipeline-or-not-the-oil-sands-crude-will-flow/#ixzz2MVuHbF48

5 By skipping over refineries and U.S. consumers in the Midwest, tar sands producers will be able to send Canadian crude to the Gulf Coast refineries in tax-free Foreign Trade Zones, where it can be refined and then sold to international buyer--at a higher profit to big oil.
http://priceofoil.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/KXL_undermine_energy_security_2page_Web.pdf