State Department Watchdog Finds No Problem With Oil Industry Contractor Writing Keystone XL Report
The State Department’s Inspector General on Wednesday released its long-awaited report on the Keystone XL pipeline and whether the contractor hired to write the Supplemental Draft Environmental Impact Statement had a conflict of interest.
This report is narrowly targeted at the internal process used to select contractor Environmental Resources Management (ERM) to write the report State will use to base its decision on the Keystone XL pipeline. ERM has worked for Chevron and Shell, two oil companies working to develop the tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Another contractor, EnSys Energy, has worked for ExxonMobil, BP, and Koch Industries. These large corporations are invested in the continued development of the Canadian tar sands oil deposits.
The Inspector General’s report was a chance to shed more light on how these companies were chosen to write Environmental Impact Statements
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“The inspector general was only asked to examine whether the State Department followed its own flawed process for selecting a third party contractor,” Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) said.
“The fact that the answer is ‘yes’ doesn’t address any outstanding concerns about the integrity of ERM’s work, the State Department’s in-house ability to evaluate its quality, or whether the process itself needs to be reformed. This isn’t evidence that there’s no problem here — this is evidence of the problem.”
Earlier on Wednesday, Grijalva announced he was asking the General Accountability Office to look into the process State uses to select contractors free of conflict-of-interest.
Last year, Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) sent a letter to the State Department urging the agency to review the contribution the proposed Keystone XL pipeline would have on U.S. carbon emissions.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/02/26/3337221/keystone-state-oig-report/
In other news, they have not seen any problems with fox writing report about security of henhouse.
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