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Pipelines don't emit carbon. It's a pipe. The oil goes down the pipe. It takes less energy to send the oil down the pipe--especially if it is designed well, than it takes to transport it by truck or rail. So, actually, of the available options, the Keystone would actually emit less carbon dioxide than other means of transportation.

I don't think Carbon Dioxide is the problem.

It is difficult to find a region of the United States that would cheer more loudly if Duh-1 were to fall into a pit and be eaten by rabid gerbils than the region which could really use the jobs (especially with the oil patch contracting by 2/3) the pipeline would generate.

I'm a geologist, and we didn't have enough takeaway capacity when the Bakken boom was just getting started back in 2000, and that still hasn't improved enough after a million barrel a day increase in oil production.

Dithering and diddling through all this has been the Federal Government which couldn't seem to make up its mind whether to allow the equivalent of running a hose from the spigot to the kiddie pool.

In the meantime, the Feds have upped their estimates of oil in place (significantly, a few times) after lowballing them for years (which is justifiable, considering).

Attacks on the industry have come from every media quarter, from newspapers circulating wild-eyed e-mails about people fighting over pallets of merchandise in Walmart to allegations of drug crazed violence in the streets and rampant sex trafficking to just plain traffic (that one justified).

Fracking has been presented as the evil of the millennium, used as a swearword in the media, who generally have no clue from the nonsense they write what hydraulic fracturing actually is conceptually, much less in practice.

The Feds (EPA) went so far as to drill test wells in the vicinity of Pavillion, Wyoming (which has always had bad water), construct them very badly, and attempt to 'prove' that hydraulic fracturing was contaminating groundwater (it hasn't--only a few limited surface spills have had any effect, and that effect is local to the event).

When that effort failed to produce the data desired to try and halt the boom, the EPA (yes, EPA!) gave a million acres of Wyoming to the Wind River Tribe for reservation land, including Riverton, WY and Pavilion, despite the fact that it is illegal for a Federal Agency to change the boundaries of a State without Congressional approval.

As far as I know the matter is still under litigation (Wyoming isn't happy about the land grab, either, nor the revenue shift from oil fields and gas processing facilities on the Riverton Dome), but the change in government for the area would preclude further and independent study of the historically bad water in Pavilion.

When enterprising people in ND and MT saw the need for increasing transport capacity due to the then fledgling Bakken boom and started building rail terminals to load crude oil onto unit trains, rail transport was attacked--but not poor procedures on the part of railroads, nor their inability to keep the trains on the tracks, rather the attacks focused on "highly explosive fracked* Bakken oil". (* just a note, but oil doesn't get fracced, the rock formation does)

No one blames a load of toilet paper or lumber for a train derailment, but here, the oil was presented as the problem, not bad track maintenance or operating procedures.

The State of ND imposed a maximum vapor pressure on rail shipped crude, to standardize maximum volatility levels--ahead of any Federal regulatory edicts.

Flaring wellhead gas, both while waiting for feeder pipeline tie-ins and for processing infrastructure to come on line has recently been under attack, and the worst locations for flaring, ironically enough, are those on land where the surface and mineral interests are controlled by the Federal Government. The permitting process for feeder pipelines is far more convoluted on Federal acreage than on private land, because so many federal agencies are involved. The net result is that a much higher percentage of the gas produced with the oil on Federal Leases (dissolved in it at depth, 'fizzes' out when it gets to the surface and the pressure comes off--much like opening a warm soda) ends up getting burned off at the surface because it can't be trucked out. The value of the oil is much greater than the gas, which has been considered just a by-product. As oil prices have come down, that ratio improved, and the effort was already underway to capture that resource as well.

Production locations on private land have made huge strides in reducing gas flaring, despite the tremendous increase in production, by contrast.

Because of the number of variables involved, from infrastructure capacity to changes in gas/oil ratio in the formation to other wells coming on line in the feeder system, there will always be some flaring.

But in the Federal Arsenal, all other attacks having failed thus far, there remains the ability to diddle around for a decade over letting a company build a pipe to transport oil, not only from Canada, but from this region as well.

The pipe would reduce some of the things the government and environmentalists have been raving about, would improve energy security, would provide jobs for a region, and enhance revenues for a sector that has kept the economy alive for much of America.

What's not for a Liberal (Communist, Foreign Muslim, America Hater) to hate?

The added bonus of stringing along the pipeline company at a cost of millions of dollars while waiting for a 'decision' is just a bonus for the anti-capitalists and envirowhackos in the Executive Branch.

As for the oil industry, it will find a way. Maybe not the least expensive of the acceptable options (and that will be reflected in product prices), but we've managed to continue a fine tradition of overcoming difficulty so far and still keep America moving.