Canadian petroleum giant TransCanada has been pimping a controversial kind of oil extraction method from an area of Alberta called the Tar Sands. There are vast untapped amounts of oil in this area, but the extraction of the oil is an incredibly dirty business, and transporting the oil requires thousands of miles of pipeline that cuts through private and public property, over water supplies, and through natural reserves. In addition, the oil that is extracted from these areas is filled with course particulates and toxic chemicals needed in the extraction process, which corrodes the pipes and leads to major failures along the lines. TransCanada is still cleaning up a 21,000 gallon oilspill from a corroded pipe in early 2010 in North Dakota, one of 14 spills since that line opened last year. Now, in a bid to expand their current Keystone pipeline, they're receiving major pushback from environmental organizations and agencies, and American citizens that don't want these noxious pipelines traveling through their backyards and over their water supplies.

On June 7th, the State Department released results from an environmental impact study the agency ran on the Keystone XL, the proposed expansion of TransCanada's existing pipeline. The results were flagrantly doctored, run through with omissions, deletions, and tortured data. The Environmental Protection Agency called the study "insufficient", citing the neglect of some major components to the Keystone XL pipeline; among them were not addressing possible climate change impact, ignoring rivers and water aquifers the pipeline might endanger (among those the Ogallala Aquifer, the largest in the country), ignoring wetlands that will be torn up or destroyed in the building of the pipeline, and the inadequate leak-detection systems of TransCanada. This according to Desmogblog.com, a policy-wonk watchdog out of Vancouver.

The only explanation for such grossly inadequate coverage of the pipeline's environmental impact is that the federal agency did not think people would look at it, or they were attempting to push it through. TransCanada has been promoting the building of this pipeline as an investment in the U.S. economy (even though the company is Canadian). It will, they claim, create jobs in the construction of the pipeline, increase revenues from the various supporting services in the Gulf for oil production, and will increase the nation's oil security. The pipeline is supposed to transport 900,000 barrels of tar sands oil a day across the Midwest. The problem, of course, is that the jobs will be temporary and that the revenues will go to TransCanada, and those supporting services in the Gulf aren't hurting because the U.S. government is already giving them massive subsidies. This is corporate misinformation in the form of a promotional campaign.

A result of the EPA's downturn of the State Department's study in June was that they went back and, supposedly, "restudied" it. The "final environmental impact report" from the State Department reads almost exactly the same with some "limited modifications". In a recent article by the Huffington Post, they report that the Ogallala Aquifer system "supplies 78 percent of the public water supply and 83 percent of irrigation water in Nebraska as well as 30 percent of water used in the U.S. for irrigation and agriculture." However, the State Department's report read, "no sole-source aquifers, or aquifers serving as the principal source of drinking water for an area, are crossed by the proposed pipeline route." I'm not sure how that is possible when the Ogallala Aquifer covers massive portions of Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, South Dakota, and some of North Dakota; all principal states in the expansion of the Keystone XL. The ultimate consensus of the report? The Keystone XL will have "no significant impacts" on the environment or public health.

It's one thing for a corporation, driven by profit and productivity, to intentionally mislead people in order to increase either one. However, for a federal agency to be complicit in that misinformation, and to use taxpayer money in order to mislead American citizens is fraudulent. As Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, of the Natural Resources Defense Council stated, "Once again, the State Department has failed to do its homework, and they’re leaving the American public to suffer the consequences...It is utterly beyond me how the administration can claim the pipeline will have ‘no significant impacts’ if they haven’t bothered to do in-depth studies around the issues of contention." A whitewash that will no doubt come back to haunt the administration, and the unfortunate individuals that are made to suffer for another big oil company's rampant greed.