Legacy – April 2013 Wild Game Fish Conservation International 2013 – Year of the Wild Salmon!
Draft Assessment of Tar Sands Pipeline "Devastatingly Cynical" March 2, 2013 The U.S. State Department late Friday released a draft environmental impact assessment of a contentious pipeline project that simultaneously acknowledged the dangers posed by climate change while also noting the project would “not likely result in significant adverse environmental effects”. Scientists and advocates have reacted with significant alarm, warning that the new report, officially a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS), is merely recycling deeply flawed conclusions offered in previous such assessments. Since the project was first proposed by a Canadian company, TransCanada, in 2008, it has been beset by local and national opposition in both countries, including drawing some 40,000 protesters to Washington last month. “Here we are again, with the State Department producing basically the same report they produced before, saying there will be no big impact from this pipeline – a conclusion that is at odds with every scientist, diplomat and every other observer that has looked at this project,” Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, an environment advocacy group, told reporters immediately following the SEIS release. “The 1.4 million public comments that poured into the State Department on this project seem not to have made much of an impact, nor has the testimony of leading scientists in this country and around the world.” Known as the Keystone XL project, the pipeline would stretch from “tar sands” in south-central Canada to refineries in the southern United States, on the Gulf of Mexico. It would carry a noxiously dirty form of oil, known as bitumen, that releases around 17 percent more greenhouse gases than conventional oil. Scientists say the tar sands would be able to be mined for around 50 years. According to a 2012 report by the Congressional Research Service, the U.S. Congress’s research wing, bitumen from the tar sands would release the same amount of carbon dioxide as adding four million more cars to the roads. Others have put this figure even higher, the equivalent of six million additional cars. Climate scientists, meanwhile, say that by itself the tar sands bitumen would release around half of the carbon dioxide left before the planet reaches a global temperature increase of two degrees Celsius, currently seen as a critical cut-off point by the United Nations, among others. “This is the most important issue for the environmental movement here in a very long time,” McKibben said. “More people have gone to jail for [protesting] Keystone than for any issue in this country in the last 30 years. To have their concerns, and those of our leading scientists, blithely dismissed for a reiteration of the same tired boilerplate is very sad.” He continued: “However, we’re hopeful that [Secretary of State John] Kerry and President Barack Obama will figure out that the bureaucrats have done a poor job here.”
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