A top expert who helped write the government’s latest Keystone report previously consulted on three different TransCanada projects—a fact the State Department tried to hide.
Late on a Friday afternoon in early March, the State Department released a 2,000-page draft report downplaying the environmental risks of the northern portion of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, which would ferry oil from Canada’s tar sands to refineries in Texas, passing through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. But when it released the report, State hid an important fact from the public: Experts who helped draft the report had previously worked for TransCanada, the company looking to build the Keystone pipeline, and other energy companies poised to benefit from Keystone’s construction. State released documents in conjunction with the Keystone report in which these experts’ work histories were redacted so that anyone reading the documents wouldn’t know who’d previously hired them. Yet unredacted versions of these documents obtained by Mother Jones confirm that three experts working for an outside contractor had done consulting work for TransCanada and other oil companies with a stake in the Keystone’s approval.
When the Keystone report—officially known as a “draft supplemental environmental impact statement”—was released, environmental activists ripped it as shoddy and misleading. Russ Girling, TransCanada’s CEO, cheered the report as “an important step” toward receiving President Barack Obama’s final stamp of approval for the pipeline.
via EXCLUSIVE: State Dept. Hid Contractor’s Ties to Keystone XL Pipeline Company | Mother Jones.
