Keystone Xl

Oil and money Re "Proposed oil pipeline draws deep divisions," Oct. 3 Your Oct. 3 front page had an image of someone holding a sign touting jobs from the Keystone XL pipeline. Look at all the jobs the Fukushima nuclear power plant created! A Keystone pipeline in Nebraska leaked 21,000 gallons as recently as May. The tar sand oil the pipeline would carry would be shipped to an international terminal in Texas; most of this would not be oil for America. Those who think this carbon bomb has positive value for our country are very confused.

After being pummeled for months by both left and right over the Keystone XL pipeline, the Obama administration is trying to start over — this time with a new name. In January, the administration turned down an application to build the pipeline from Canada's tar sands region to the Gulf Coast. TransCanada, the company that wants to build the pipeline, more recently announced plans to go ahead with the southern portion of the route, starting from Cushing, Okla., which White House officials maintain is more urgently needed.

WASHINGTON - The Justice Department and the state of Arkansas filed suit against the oil giant ExxonMobil over a March 29 pipeline rupture that spilled 210,000 gallons of oil into a residential neighborhood and waterways in the small town of Mayflower. The spill prompted evacuations, killed wildlife, polluted wetlands and a lake, and stirred health complaints from people living near the rupture site, north of Little Rock. In the suit filed in federal district court, the Justice Department seeks civil penalties for violations of the Clean Water Act. The Arkansas attorney general is also pursuing civil penalties for violations of the Arkansas Hazardous Waste Management Act and the Arkansas Water and Air Pollution Control Act. The state also seeks to have ExxonMobil pay for all cleanup and removal costs under the federal Oil Pollution Act. The ExxonMobil Pegasus pipeline split open just as the Obama administration entered the final phases of review for the far bigger, controversial Keystone XL pipeline, handing ammunition to opponents who say that Keystone's path from Canada through major rivers such as the Platte and the Missouri and over the Ogallala aquifer, the main freshwater source for the Great Plains, could lead to a catastrophe.

At a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania in early April, President Obama was asked about a bitter fight between industry and environmentalists over a proposed $7-billion, 2,000-mile pipeline to ship crude from Alberta's oil sands to Gulf Coast refineries. Because the pipeline crosses the U.S.-Canadian border, a decision on a permit is pending at the State Department. Obama avowed neutrality: "If it looks like I'm putting my fingers on the scale before the science is done, then people may question the merits of the decision later on. " But a 2009 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa suggests the scale may have already been tipped.

WASHINGTON - The State Department issued a long-awaited environmental review of the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline that concludes it would have a minimal impact on the environment, increasing the chances that the project might be approved in the coming months. The State Department underscored that the supplemental environmental impact statement is only a draft and does not offer recommendations for action on the $7-billion project, which would bring petroleum from the oil sands of Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Gulf Coast of Texas. Nonetheless, the review says “the analyses of potential impacts associated with construction and normal operation of the proposed project suggest that there would be no significant impacts to most resources along the proposed project route.” Because Keystone XL crosses a U.S. border, it needs a permit from the State Department.

The State Department has concluded that the highly controversial proposal for the Keystone XL pipeline would not have “significant impacts” on the environment, removing a major barrier to the construction of a $7-billion project that would ship oil sands crude oil from Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast. The State Department's findings, part of the final environmental impact statement for Keystone XL, were hailed by the oil industry and sharply criticized by environmentalists. Though other pipelines from Canada have sailed through the government approval process with little reaction from industry or environmentalists, Keystone XL has become a fraught issue in Washington and the Midwest, and it threatens to become a significant political liability for President Obama, whatever the outcome.  The final environmental impact statement is not the last word on the project.

SAN FRANCISCO - Mark Zuckerberg is the public face of one of the world's most prominent companies. But now it's his actions as a private citizen that are making him - and Facebook Inc. - a target of environmentalists and progressive activists, highlighting the pitfalls of political involvement at a level rarely attempted in Silicon Valley. The 28-year-old billionaire co-founder and chief executive of Facebook has funded a political advocacy group called Fwd.us that has come under fire for spending millions on television ads that support expansion of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline and oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Activists battling a new oil pipeline chained themselves to bulldozers in Texas on Wednesday, temporarily halting route-clearance work in the latest protest against the Keystone XL project to carry oil from the tar sands of northern Canada. But TransCanada, the company that hopes to build the pipeline, took an important step forward with a proposed new route for the northern segment of the line. The company says the route would skirt the delicate Nebraska Sandhills, the permeable sands that lie atop one of the nation's most important agricultural aquifers.

"Dilbit" - drop the word in casual conversation and listeners might think you're talking about the comic strip engineer who can't get a date. But dilbit actually stands for "diluted bitumen," a heretofore obscure oil industry term that may soon be trending on your search engine as controversy deepens over the Keystone XL pipeline, a project to carry oil from the Alberta tar sands to refineries in Texas that has become the nation's most contentious battle between conservative fossil fuel backers and liberal environmentalists.

Re "Trying to prove their love," Column One, April 4 Your poignant story about Gerardo Herrejon and Ana Verdin-Hernandez - who fell in love when he was 63 and she was 22, but whose marriage is under question by U.S. immigration officials because Ana is an undocumented immigrant - brings to mind one of the most famous romances of the 20th century. After three failed marriages, acclaimed actor Charlie Chaplin met the love of his life - Oona O'Neill, daughter of the playwright Eugene O'Neill - when he was 54 and she was 17. They had eight children and she never married after he died.