by Zack Beauchamp
The Obama Administration seems set on building the Keystone XL pipeline, which has created quite a furor. Dan Stone explains the basics:
[The environmentalists'] issue is a new project know as the Keystone oil pipeline that would transport oil from Canada’s tar sands fields to refineries in the Gulf Coast. The State Department has given the environmental go-ahead for the project, leaving it to the president to make the final decision. But environmentalists like McKibben see it as an expansion of America’s dependence on dirty fuels and are trying to pressure President Obama to nullify the permit and halt the Keystone project.
Mark Engler summarizes the Green left's uprising:
The protests don’t need to become front-page news in order for them to have an impact. McKibben correctly notes that the primary effect of this advocacy is to raise the stakes for Obama in terms of his support among his base in the environmental community.
Walter Russell Mead makes the case in favor:
Here’s what the greens ignore: the oil is coming out of the ground whether or not the US allows a pipeline to be built. The Canadians want to produce it, and if we don’t buy it, the Chinese will. The pipeline that would take the dirty tar sands oil from Alberta to Canada’s Pacific coast would pass through pristine Rocky Mountain wilderness, across land belonging to some of Canada’s last native tribes, to the beautiful British Columbian coast, home of the amazingly rare “Spirit Bear” and one of the world’s few temperate rain forests, loaded on supertankers and shipped through treacherous coastal waters, very near where the Queen of the North lies on the ocean floor, rusting and leaking diesel fuel, a testament to the perils of sea navigation in these waters. But don’t take my word for it: read it in National Geographic.
Lawrence MacDonald looks at the international implications.
The Dish 