Is the Keystone Pipeline Really Dead?

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/is-the-keystone-pipeline-really-dead-20111123

Not since the days of George W. Bush's "Clear Skies" and "Healthy Forests" initiatives has America been presented with a project as cravenly corporate and backward-looking as the Keystone XL pipeline. The 1,700-mile-long pipeline, designed to funnel tar sands oil from Canada into refineries along the Gulf Coast, was sold as a cure for America's energy crisis and a way to put thousands of Americans to work. In fact, it was nothing but a giant boondoggle, propped up by industry lobbying and corrupt science. If it were built, it would have helped cook the climate and made our addiction to oil even tougher to kick.

But thanks to a surprise decision by President Obama, the Keystone XL is dead in its tracks. Because the $7 billion pipeline would have crossed an international border, it needed a special permit from the State Department – giving Obama the power to cancel the project. "In effect, whether or not to build this pipeline was Obama's call," says Bill McKibben, the climate activist and author who played a lead role in organizing protests to stop the pipeline. On November 10th, the State Department announced that it was postponing a decision on the pipeline's permit until 2013 at the earliest, pending further review of the project's proposed route. The White House immediately released a statement emphasizing the president's "support" for the decision – giving environmentalists a rare reason to celebrate. "I wish the president would have killed Keystone outright, but he did the smart thing politically," says Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth. "By kicking the can down the road until 2013, he both stalled the construction of the pipeline and defused it as an election-year issue."

Obama was apparently swayed, in part, by the widespread demonstrations organized to protest the pipeline. The permitting process ran into stiff opposition from a loud and diverse coalition, from Nebraska ranchers who feared that a pipeline leak could pollute the state's drinking water to Tea Party activists who were pissed off that a foreign company could be granted the right to confiscate private property from U.S. citizens to clear a path for the pipeline. Only four days before Obama's decision, 10,000 anti-pipeline activists built a human chain around the White House; many carried signs that challenged Obama with his own words: "Let's be the generation that finally frees America from the tyranny of oil."

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/is-the-keystone-pipeline-really-dead-20111123#ixzz1edg4a08W

Then Obama will approve it and it will go through.

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