Guest Column: Keystone Pipeline: Money is key

Oil spills in Kalamazoo, Mich., and Mayflower, Ark., are ominous signs of the Keystone XL Pipeline’s future as it is heading for territory threatened by the New Madrid earth quake fault. If a tremor in 1812 made the Mississippi flow northward, how would a spindly pipeline respond to another quake? Earth could splinter KXL in a second, leaving the Ogalalla aquifer in dire straits. Lou Dubose, writing in the April 1 Washington Spectator lines up the supporters and opponents of KXL. $60 million was pumped into the project by Transcanada Pipelines, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Conoco Philips, Shell Oil, EXON Mobil, National Taxpayers Union, Deere & Co., American Petroleum Institute, New England Fuel Institute. Internaional Brotherhood of Teamsters, Devon Energy Co. and a host of other organizations including AFL-CIO.

Up against $60 million came $1 million from less powerful protectors of Earth: 350.org, Corporate Ethics, Sierra Club, Defenders Of Wildlife, League of Conservation Voters, EarthJustice Legal Defense and, Indigenous Environmental Network.

“Canada’s tar sands contains twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history,” he wrote. When leaving Port Arthur, Texas, where the oil will be refined, Dubose asked an elderly man if he was bothered by the fumes. “Not me, he said, “That’s the smell of money.”