http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/27/opinion/obamas-pipeline.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20140227
[Energy politics follows]
Obama’s Pipeline
By RAÚL M. GRIJALVA
FEB. 26, 2014
WASHINGTON — WHEN I was elected to Congress in 2002, George W. Bush was
president and big business wrote environmental policy. We all remember
Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force — a who’s who of mining
and oil interests — and the administration’s constant questioning of
climate science.
President Obama won the White House by running as an agent of change:
change from Mr. Bush’s way of doing business with business, and change
from Washington’s habitual corporate favoritism.
I was an enthusiastic supporter of the president then and I still am — I
consider his environmental record a tremendous improvement over his
predecessor’s.
But that record is still being written, and it is heading in the wrong
direction. If the president approves the Keystone XL pipeline on the
basis of the lobbying and bad science that has been offered to support
it, much of his good work will be undone and a business-as-usual
atmosphere will settle back on Washington like a heavy cloud. It would
be a bad end to what could still be a very strong environmental legacy.
The pipeline has drawn more critical attention than its corporate
sponsors seemed to expect, and it is important to understand why that
happened. Keystone is a bad deal for the American taxpayer on the
merits, but that’s not the only reason. More important,
environmentalists have decided that enough is enough.
We saw plenty of important decisions made during the Bush era in the
name of “streamlining,” “cutting red tape” or “using sound science” —
that is, science funded by an industry that wanted less oversight. In
November 2008, millions of Americans breathed a sigh of relief and told
themselves those days were over. Keystone has rallied the entire
environmental community because it is a visible and sometimes painful
reminder of the way things were done under Mr. Bush.
The administration’s approach to the pipeline is a throwback to the time
when endangered species were defenseless in the face of corporate
moneymaking. It is a reminder that even though our environmental laws
use science, not profits, as the basis of our environmental decisions,
any company with bottomless pockets used to be able to game the system
and get away with it.
That’s why Keystone is about more than one pipeline. It is about
establishing once and for all whether we have moved on from the
disastrous Bush-Cheney view of environmental policy. President Obama’s
own Environmental Protection Agency has said in no uncertain terms that
the pipeline will contribute significantly to greenhouse gas emissions.
That should be the end of the conversation. The fact that it isn’t —
that we’re left hanging and hoping — is more than disappointing. It is a
very troubling sign for the future.
Mr Obama's decision on the Keystone XL Pipeline is a social-economic
dilemma faced by a country running out of natural resources, and a...
As the news media has reported widely, the contractor chosen by the
State Department to assess the pipeline’s environmental impacts violated
federal conflict-of-interest rules to get the job, and nothing has been
done about it. That company, Environmental Resources Management, did
work for TransCanada, Keystone’s parent company, in the recent past and
told the State Department the exact opposite on disclosure forms that
anyone in the world can now read for herself. A report on Wednesday from
the State Department inspector general, which many outlets covered as
though it exonerated the department and E.R.M. of wrongdoing, is
actually an important example of the problem. The I.G. only looked at
whether the department followed its existing process for choosing a
contractor. It should have looked at whether that process produces
reliable outcomes.
If E.R.M.’s decision that Keystone does not pose any environmental risks
is allowed to stand, it will not just move Keystone closer to an
unjustified approval; it will re-establish the Bush-era habit of tipping
the scales in favor of corporations that want special treatment.
Anyone who believes it is unfair to make Keystone a litmus test of Mr.
Obama’s environmental record is looking at recent history backward. The
environmental community did not make any of this happen. If E.R.M. had
come clean, we wouldn’t be in this position. But it didn’t, and we are.
At some point we have to decide that it won’t happen again.
Depending on the outcome, I worry that the American public won’t just
lose faith in Keystone. It will lose faith in the government’s ability
to fund, carry out, understand and implement scientifically based
environmental policy. President Obama doesn’t want that to be his
legacy. Neither do I. And I am hardly alone.
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