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Riddle Me This

 

What do David Daniel of East Texas, Daryl Hannah of Hollywood and three of the First Nations of Canada have in common? They are trying to stop the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline that will run from within the Alberta province of Canada to initially the Houston area of Texas and ultimately the Gulf Coast.

Who benefits from this pipeline? TransCanada and the Koch Brothers (funny how they keep cropping up on this site, ain’t it?).

Who has to approve it? Hilary Clinton and the State Department, because it crosses an international border.

Who can stop it? Lisa Jackson and the EPA. They have already classified the State Department’s analysis of the project as “inadequate” (the worst rating they can give), which has kicked it back to the State Department. If they cannot satisfy the EPA, then the football gets kicked to…

The White House Council on Environmental Quality. From there, it could very possibly wind up on President Obama’s desk for him to decide.

This is big and complicated. Understanding it means learning about oil sands, bitumen, the Ogallala Aquifer, oil pipelines, heavy oil, pre-refining, eminent domain, easements, subsurface mineral rights and so much more. My research document for this is already 35 pages long, and I haven’t even started pulling up the definitions on the technical terms.

We’re going to take it a little bit at a time. Consider this the teaser.

Because of the large amount of real estate involved, the map is kind of fuzzy, but here are the important bits: the orange blobs are the oil sands deposits in Canada; the black line is the existing Keystone pipeline which begins in Hardisty, Alberta and ends in Patoka, Illinois; the red line is the proposed expansion, the Keystone XL pipeline, also starting in Hardisty, Alberta and ending first in Houston, Texas and then branching off to Port Arthur, Texas.