Last year, when the Keystone XL pipeline first emerged as a flashpoint in the American climate movement, Barack Obama bought himself some time by punting his final decision on whether to approve it until the State Department could complete a second, more thorough environmental impact statement.
That report has just been completed, and the verdict is in: the pipeline is cool with the State Department. The massive 2,000 page report argues, essentially, that the approving the Keystone—a 1,700 mile pipeline that would ship crude tar sands oil from Alberta to Texas—would have little discernible negative impact on the environment, that building it would not much speed the development of the site where the crude is mined, and that the potential for spillage is not great enough to warrant halting the project.
Activists, environmentalists, and folks whose homes lie in the pipeline's path disagree.
Perhaps the key section of the report, highlighted by The New York Times' Andy Revkin, is this (pdf):
Based on information and analysis about the North American crude transport infrastructure (particularly the proven ability of rail to transport substantial quantities of crude oil profitably under current market conditions, and to add capacity relatively rapidly) and the global crude oil market, the draft Supplemental EIS concludes that approval or denial of the proposed Project is unlikely to have a substantial impact on the rate of development in the oil sands, or on the amount of heavy crude oil refined in the Gulf Coast area.
The State Department believes that because there are alternative methods of transporting the tar sands crude, building the Keystone XL won't cause them to mine, transport, or burn any more of it. This is the gist of the non-oil industry pro-Keystone folks' argument from day one: The oil is there, in the ground, so of course somebody's going to find a way to dig it out and sell it. If not via the Keystone, the to China. Or anywhere else.
But those who follow Keystone issues know that this really isn't necessarily the case. There's a reason TransCanada is fighting so hard to build this particular pipeline, after all, and it's not for the 20-100 permanent American jobs it's going to create. No, First Nations tribes have successfully thus far blocked the pipeline's westward expansion, and it's far more expensive to turn to rail or other options. Other routes have been deemed infeasible or too expensive; few locations outside the Gulf have the adequate refinery infrastructure to deal with that much oil.
So, yeah. It seems pretty tough to argue that a pipeline that's going to allow oil companies to pump 830,000 barrels per day won't further speed development of the Alberta tar sands—which is visible from space, and is referred to as the most destructive project on earth by activist groups—or increase the amount of emissions-heavy oil sold on the market and eventually burned. But that's what the State Department has decided.
As such, there's not much in the report that Obama or our new Secretary of State John Kerry can use as reason for halting the pipeline. They still have the ultimate call, and they still faced the organized opposition of the environmentalist movement, but conservatives and Keystone supporters will trump this report loudly and widely. That call just got harder to make.