Mr Ellis's List: Keystone XL Pipeline

• David Daniel knows this all too well. He built his dream home on 20 acres of lush wilderness, alive with panthers, wild boar, and deer, in Winnsboro, East Texas. Then a nightmare called tar sands appeared on his doorstep.

• Tar sands are sandy soils laden with a tar-like substance called bitumen. Getting oil out of them is a dirty, dangerous, and deadly process. Daniel knew none of this when a neighbor phoned in the fall of 2008 to say that he'd seen trespassers on the property. "I went back [from work] and I found survey stakes that cut my property in half," he recalls. Several months later, an eminent domain letter arrived, telling him that a pipeline carrying oil from Canada's "oil sands" would cut through his pristine property. When he complained to TransCanada, the company in charge, its lawyer responded with a veiled threat: "Should I put the letter in the ‘cooperative' or the ‘uncooperative pile?'"

   

  So began the Daniel family's struggles with TransCanada, whose powerful US backers include Koch Industries (best known for its stealth attacks on the federal government, and big spending on climate-change-denial campaigns). By the time TransCanada's surveyors entered the Daniels' lives, the corporation was already hard at work pushing a pipeline that would run from the Canadian border to Texas's Gulf Coast, along the way slicing through the Daniels' land and the properties of countless other Americans.
• At no time did TransCanada's representatives volunteer information about tar sands, leaving Daniel to do his own research. When he asked how tar sands oil would affect the pipeline, TransCanada responded only that the effects would be determined after the pipeline was put in place. "They made us feel like lab rats on our own property," he says.
• Let me repeat that: the US imports more oil from Canada than (yes) Mexico, which ranks second, and (believe it or not) Saudi Arabia, which ranks only third. Tar sands are largely responsible for Canada's new petro-status. Nearly a million barrels of tar sands oil arrive in the US every day. By 2025, Canada is expected to be producing 3.5 million barrels of tar sands oil daily. Most of that, says Ryan Salmon of the National Wildlife Federation, will be imported to the US And believe me, when it comes to energy ugly, tar sands could take the cake.
• The tar sands' great selling point in the US is that it comes from a friendly neighbor.

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• This "ethical oil" argument comes from Ezra Levant, a Canadian political commentator and the group's cofounder. A middle-aged man with an easy smile and expressive eyebrows, he comes across in his speaking engagements as a personable, straightforward guy with a commonsense argument.
• Levant's deceptively simple arguments have been gaining traction among the champions of Alberta's tar sands, and they were even picked up recently by US Energy Secretary Steven Chu. Yet they neglect some key facts: In a global oil market, escalating demand ensures that the Saudis will never want for customers, no matter how much the US takes from Canada.
• If you're familiar with the tobacco industry's all-out campaign to downplay the adverse health effects of cigarettes, Levant's rhetorical style might sound familiar. From June 2009 to June 2010, Levant was a registered lobbyist for Rothmans Inc., a subsidiary of Phillip Morris International. During his stint with Rothmans, he successfully convinced regulators to crack down on cigarette smuggling instead of increasing the size of health warning labels on cigarette packages, claiming that smuggling posed the greater public health risk.
• That lobbying paid off. Six months after Levant concluded his work for Rothmans, Health Canada abandoned its plans to increase the size of warning labels on tobacco products and announced that it would instead focus on fighting contraband cigarettes.

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• However, existing Canadian oil pipelines all go to the Midwest, where the only buyer for their crude is the United States. Keystone XL would divert Canadian oil from refineries in the Midwest to the Gulf Coast where it can be refined and exported.
• The idea that Keystone XL will improve U.S. oil supply is a documented scam being played on the American people by Big Oil and its friends in Washington DC.
• From Canada's perspective, the problem with existing pipelines is they all end in the U.S. Midwest and only allow one buyer - the United States.
• the Canadian government has put the brakes on the two pipeline proposals to export tar sands through its provinces due to the need to take more time to listen to its own public's concerns about water and safety.
• Keystone XL would be Canada’s first step in diversifying its energy market.
• In fact, TransCanada refused to support a requirement that oil on Keystone XL be used in the United States in a recent Congressional hearing. Earlier this month, Representative Edward Markey asked TransCanada's President Alex Pourbaix to support a condition that would require the oil on Keystone XL to be used in the United States. Mr. Pourbaix refused, saying that a requirement to keep oil on Keystone XL in the United States would cause refineries to back out of their contracts. That very well may be the case as Valero, one of the largest prospective purchasers of Keystone XL's crude, has already told its investors the its future business is in international export. 
• Simply stated, Keystone XL is a way to get Canadian oil out of the United States, not into it.

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• boycott tar sands oil and, specifically, the refineries that process it

• Construction of the proposed Project, including the pipeline and pump stations, would result in hiring approximately 5,000 to 6,000 workers over the 3 year construction period. As indicated above, it is expected that roughly 10 to 15 percent of the construction workforce would be hired from local labor markets, thus 500 to 900 local workers throughout the entire region of influence would be hired.