TransCanada is a pipeline company based in Calgary, Alberta, about 400 miles south of the world’s third-largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. There’s enough petroleum in Alberta’s Athabasca oil sands that TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline — 1,960 miles from Canada to Texas Gulf Coast refineries — could help to nearly eliminate Middle East crude imports, according to a report commissioned by President Obama.
But enough controversy is stirring over the pipeline to keep its 1.3 million daily barrels of oil out of the United States and instead send it to China. A pipeline from the oil sands could just as easily go west as south, and end up in a tanker terminal on Canada’s Pacific coast, filling ships bound for points east. Chinese-controlled Sinopec has already invested $5.5 billion in such a planned pipeline to the Pacific.
Big Green sees the Keystone XL proposal as an opportunity, not a threat. It looks like the “Big Scary Issue” they’ve hoped for since the economy tanked. They cynically make it look scary to others and urge Obama to block its construction.
The scary stuff is what’s in the pipeline: The raw material is an energy-rich hydrocarbon called bitumen, dug from porous layers of sand in a vast stretch of Alberta. Bitumen is a thick, natural goo found in the “tar sands,” as greenies love to call them, that has to be processed and turned into synthetic crude oil.
Big Green’s message relies on exaggeration: Developing tar sands requires “carving up boreal forests,” which are carbon dioxide sinks and host to numerous bird species. Tar sand processing is far more carbon-dioxide intensive than producing most U.S. crude oils. Worse, the pipeline would be unsafe and leak toxic chemicals into the Midwest’s vital Ogallala aquifer.
Late last year, the New York Times ran a story on the rising anti-pipeline movement. “Radio, television and print ads produced by the No Tar Sands Coalition, an assemblage of several environmental groups, are already trumpeting that message.”
The No Tar Sands Coalition? Who’s that? An assemblage of several environmental groups?” Which ones? Oh, it’s another one of those diffuse coalitions with no official organizational structure, not incorporated, and no accountability. But they’re really on the payroll of a big foundation they’re not even aware of. It’s as synthetic as Alberta crude.
Using modern databases, you can find out who the coalition really is and who’s really running it. The first “tar sands” record I found in the Foundation Center’s database showed that the Rockefeller Brothers Fund gave $250,000 in 2009 “for its campaign to reduce demand for tar sands oil” to Corporate Ethics International.
Public records will tell you that Corporate Ethics International is a San Francisco group with $1.6 million annual revenue, and that its executive director is Michael J. Marx, whose salary is $106,000.
Grant records show that he is the “secret” coordinator of the No Tar Sands Coalition, and helps to direct foundation grants to properly motivated activists.
The crass moneyed elites that pay for this ideological war care nothing about our national energy security, nor about affordable energy for our most vulnerable citizens. Certainly, No Tar Sands Coalition activists like to march and feel self-righteous, but they have no idea that they’re puppets on the strings of big foundations.
Leading activists don’t even care if they win the pipeline war. Kate Colarulli, associate director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Oil campaign, told a New York Times reporter that losing the battle over Keystone XL could provide a longer-term benefit for her side. It will help recruit new activists.
Examiner Columnist Ron Arnold is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.
