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An apparent result of Obama’s hold on the Keystone XL pipeline, which has forced oil to be transported from Canada by rail: A mile-long train hauling oil from Canada derailed, spilling 30,000 gallons of crude in western Minnesota on Wednesday, as debate rages over the environmental risks of transporting tar sands across the border. … There has been a rapid increase in rail transport of crude in the last three years as booming North American oil production has outgrown existing pipeline capacity.

There have been many misconceptions swirling around down south about Canada. While lack of knowledge about America’s closest neighbor and ally is certainly not uncommon, current issues such as the Keystone XL pipeline have brought many to the surface. In an effort to better educate our American cousins, here’s a quick primer on all things Canada.

Oil prices could rise to anywhere between $150 and $270 a barrel by 2020 as demand growth in emerging markets like India and China out paces expected supply, the OECD said Wednesday. The report shows the central role that Asian oil demand will play in determining prices, even as the U.S. reduces its need for energy imports amid a surge in its unconventional hydrocarbons production. Earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Energy reported China overtook the U.S. as the world's largest net oil importer.

The Senate voted 62 to 37 Friday in favor of constructing the Keystone XL pipeline, the controversial project that would transport heavy crude oil from Hardisty, Alberta, to Gulf Coast’s refineries. The bipartisan amendment to the Senate budget resolution, authored by Sens. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) and Max Baucus (D-Mont.), has no binding authority. But it shows the significant support the proposal enjoys on Capitol Hill...

Senate Democrats finally released their first budget plan in four years this month: It offers nearly $1 trillion in new taxes, an end to sequester budget savings, and almost no new spending restraint. Despite the failure of the 2009 stimulus package, Democrats also want an extra $100 billion to create jobs on infrastructure projects, few of which would be “shovel-ready” enough to hire workers anytime soon. President Obama won’t release his own budget till April, but he has a golden opportunity to improve on the Senate budget and create real jobs. All he has to do is end his four-year...

Finally, President Obama has seen the way, the truth and the light. Let all unicorns praise him, along with the little children! Help President Obama to save us!According to this article at National Review, President Obama may approve the Keystone pipeline but manage to have it delayed for years. Bloomberg reports that the Obama administration “is preparing to tell all federal agencies for the first time that they should consider the impact on global warming before approving major projects.” Up to now, under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), federally approved projects had to consider potential impacts like dangerous spills...

While many have long seen America as the global bad boy, everybody likes Canada. If Uncle Sam tucks his pack of Marlboros under his T-shirt sleeve and plays by his own rules, the Canadian moose — or whatever their Uncle Sam equivalent is — always wears his blue blazer and school tie and does his chores without being asked. Canada is a global citizen, a good neighbor, a northern Puerto Rico with an EU sensibility that earns its gold stars from the United Nations every day. This fact should have relevance below the 49th parallel. Right now, we’re all waiting...

House Republicans' big meeting with President Obama on the Hill yesterday didn't yield any sudden changes of heart on reaching some kind of big deficit bargain (shocking, considering how pure and straightforward I'm sure the president's motives were, hem hem), but the president also kept his cards close to the vest on energy and how his administration is going to play the Keystone pipeline when Republicans pushed him on it. The White House insists that he didn’t provide any clues as to which way internal deliberations are leaning, but he did take a moment to rag on the economic benefits...

I HOPE the president turns down the Keystone XL oil pipeline. (Who wants the U.S. to facilitate the dirtiest extraction of the dirtiest crude from tar sands in Canada’s far north?) But I don’t think he will. So I hope that Bill McKibben and his 350.org coalition go crazy. I’m talking chain-themselves-to-the-White-House-fence-stop-traffic-at-the-Capitol kind of crazy, because I think if we all make enough noise about this, we might be able to trade a lousy Keystone pipeline for some really good systemic responses to climate change. We don’t get such an opportunity often — namely, a second-term Democratic president who is...

Last Friday, at 3:40 p.m., the State Department released its “Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement” for the highly contentious Keystone XL pipeline, which Canada hopes to build to move its tar sands oil to refineries in the United States. In effect, the statement said there were no environmental impediments that would prevent President Obama from approving the pipeline. Two hours and 20 minutes later, I received a blast e-mail containing a statement by James Hansen, the head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA — i.e., NASA’s chief climate scientist. “Keystone XL, if the public were to allow...

PRESIDENT OBAMA began his second term with a promise to push harder on energy and climate change. The events of the past week remind us that he wonÂ’t have to contend just with Republicans and coal-state Democrats determined to oppose reasonable measures to combat global warming. He will also have to sidestep environmentalists demanding that he fight the wrong battles. Last Friday, the State Department released a new draft analysis of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, opposition to which has become a counterproductive obsession of many in the environmental movement. In its 2,000 pages, the report dismantled the case that...

Ed. note: This piece was first published on Robert Rapier’s R-Squared Energy Blog.If not for the US government’s latest demonstration of incompetence that played out at the end of last week (a.k.a. sequestration), the top news story might have been a report issued by the US State Department late Friday.The report was the Draft Supplementary Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) for the Keystone XL Pipeline project, and it was unwelcome news for environmentalists who have been protesting the crude pipeline extension that would link Canada’s oil sands to Gulf Coast refineries.It may seem arbitrary, given the large number of oil and...

When progressives talk of government, it is in an alluring can-do spirit. Making the case for more spending, President Barack Obama invokes the 19th century as a heroic age that built government-supported railroads. MSNBC hosts pose in front of monumental 20th-century public-works projects and speak of what all of us can do together. This is all well and good as nostalgia, but is utterly detached from the spirit and the practices of 21st-century government. We don’t excel at building things. We excel at studying things, and putting up obstacles to building them. We delay, cavil, and sue. We protest and...

War On Energy: In yet another clean bill of health, the State Department's draft review says the pipeline from Canada will not affect global warming or harm aquifers it crosses. But it will create jobs and economic growth. The U.S. State Department's second Keystone XL supplemental environmental impact statement, which represents the project's fourth environmental review, finds the pipeline would not accelerate global greenhouse gas emissions or significantly harm the natural habitats along its route. This sent the administration's environmentalist base into spasms of hysteria. Greenies had warned that the extraction of crude from Alberta's oil sands would release dangerous...

The Obama administration today moved one step closer to approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, concluding in a draft environmental impact statement that the project would not accelerate global greenhouse gas emissions or significantly harm the natural habitats along its route. The report, done by the State Department,  suggests that the proposed 875-mile pipeline, which would carry 830,000 barrels of crude oil per day from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to Steele City, Nebraska, has cleared a significant hurdle on its way to President Obama’s desk for final consideration.“The approval or denial of any one crude oil transport project,...

TransCanada has only been waiting for the go-ahead for the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline for, oh, four or so years now, and the State Department has now several times concluded that the pipeline poses no real reason for environmental alarm — despite the vociferous protestations of its eco-critics. After having released an environmental impact review in 2011 that basically concluded that the project poses no real threats, State released another revised environmental impact review on Friday afternoon that… also basically concludes that the project poses no real threats. It very carefully avoids making any recommendations for specific action on the...

Environmental groups gathered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Sunday and marched on the White House for a climate change rally largely aimed at pressuring President Obama to reject the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline. Organizers said 35,000 activists attended the rally, where speakers portrayed the battle over the pipeline as a struggle between grassroots green groups and deep-pocketed special interests. “They’ve got the lobbyists. They’ve got the super-PACs. They made the campaign contributions. They’ve got this town in their pockets — they have got the situation under control. And then you show up. And then we show up....

<p>Lawyer and environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and 47 other Sierra Club members were arrested Wednesday after tying themselves to the White House gate to protest the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada.</p> <p>Proving the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, RFK Jr.’s son Conor Kennedy was also cuffed. The last we heard about the 18-year-old Kennedy scion was when he was wrapping his arms around his then-girlfriend Taylor Swift last summer.</p>

HOUSTON, TEXAS -- With Alberta bitumen languishing for want of pipelines to refineries and tidewater, on the other end of the proposed TransCanada Keystone XL pipeline, the Texas Gulf Coast is crying out for Canadian crude. Over a plate of steaming crawfish at Houston's Ragin' Cajun, David Holt, president of the North American-based Consumer Energy Alliance, says hope for the Keystone's a bi-national thing: Canadian crude is already America's number one energy partner, so a conduit to bring the safe, abundant, reliable supply of energy -- and some needed job revitalization -- into the Gulf Coast is essential. "The bottom...

Republicans jumped on the news that the Obama administration is delaying judgment on the Keystone XL pipeline by another six months. “Americans have already waited >4yrs for #KXL, time for POTUS to say ‘yes,’” said a 11:14 a.m. tweet from the office of House Speaker Rep. John Boehner. Americans have already waited >4yrs for #KXL, time for POTUS to say “yes” #4jobs j.mp/WCTYV3 via @housecommerce — Speaker John Boehner (@SpeakerBoehner) February 1, 2013