Keystone XL Pipeline Research Articles

Trespassing across America: One Man’s Epic, Never-Done-Before (and Sort of Illegal) Hike across the Heartland by Ken Ilgunas

Reviewed by: Trespassing across America: One Man’s Epic, Never-Done-Before (and Sort of Illegal) Hike across the Heartland by Ken Ilgunas Patrick Dobson Trespassing across America: One Man’s Epic, Never-Done-Before (and Sort of Illegal) Hike across the Heartland. By Ken Ilgunas. New York: Blue Rider Press, 2016. 264 pp. Map, illustrations, bibliography. $16.00 paper. In 1995 I walked from Kansas City to Helena, Montana, and canoed home on the Missouri River. Great Plains denizens, particularly those of modest or little means, proved to be the most generous and open, albeit hard-headed and sometimes backward-looking, people I’ve met in my lifetime. Ken Ilgunas now reports Great Plains dwellers’ character has changed little in the intervening years. Trespassing across America is, on the surface, the story of Ilgunas’s quest to follow the controversial Keystone XL pipeline through the heart of the Great Plains from the Alberta tar sands to the Valero refinery in Port Arthur, Texas. To pursue his journey, he hikes the pipeline route as closely as he can. Finding roads often far from the pipeline path, he hops fences, at first with reservation and then unabashedly. Meanwhile, locals open their homes to him and warn him that landowners let rifles do the talking. He finds, however, that landowners forgive more than they reprimand (or shoot) and almost everyone offers more than Ilgunas asks. While informative about the various aspects of the pipeline controversy, Ilgunas’s story is an exquisite travel memoir celebrating individual effort and Great Plains social diversity. It shows us the people of the Great Plains in all their wealth and poverty, pride and tatters. It walks the line between love of the people he meets and criticism of their (and our society’s) small-world views. Trespassing is as much celebration of Great Plains life as it is a cautionary tale. Ilgunas demonstrates acuity in several levels of narration. Relating the history and background of the XL pipeline and the intricacies of climate science, he contemplates the intersection between human and nature. He weaves technology and Great Plains homespun wisdom into the 1,915-mile trip. Detailing the individuals with whom he forms relationships, he also shows cultural differences between provinces and states. He also informs us enough of his own travails, successes, and humor to make him an apt and welcome travel partner. Ilgunas finds that for all their generosity, strength, and individual spirit, many Great Plains dwellers sacrifice “local” thinking for corporate-brewed nostrums, reactionary political talking points, and groupthink. He finds many reject climate science and sidestep social good for jobs propaganda, pointing out the pipeline promises to create only about 30 full-time positions along its route. “What happens to our country’s core will affect the rest of the body,” Ilgunas writes (79). He shows us the healthy and diseased aspects of Great Plains life, and hopes the negatives don’t constitute an incurable infection. Ilgunas begins and ends Trespassing an opponent of the pipeline. But this is no polemic. He enlightens us about the complications of the Keystone XL debate, the interests involved, and the pipeline’s implications for global warming. He holds little hope for a solution to the increasing greenhouse gas emissions the pipeline will enable. But he believes that in the long term, Americans, and perhaps the world, will figure their way out of a tangled and urgent conundrum—How do people addicted to oil maintain their habit and keep from smothering themselves? [End Page 209] Patrick Dobson Johnson County Community College Overland Park, Kansas Copyright © 2018 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Pipeline Infrastructure Developments Under the Trump Administration

In recent years pipelines have become so much more than just a method of transport for oil and gas resources. They have become an unfortunate icon, rallied against in the name of environmental justice. Even more so, they have become a political symbol used to draw partisan lines on the industry as a whole in the United States. Just last summer thousands gathered to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline, a project rejected by President Obama and then fast-tracked by President Trump this year. The change in presidency brought a sudden shift in policy in regards to pipeline infrastructure, finally placing pipeline developers in a position to achieve so-called victory in terms of advancing their long-delayed projects. While the Obama presidency repeatedly stalled and rejected pipeline proposals, the Trump administration has taken a vastly different approach and has called for expediency in approving proposed projects. This, of course, has caused unrest and litigation from opponents hoping to continue stalling until a new President can be elected. In a world where demand for crude oil is up and the only other viable ground transportation option is rail, this paper will examine the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Keystone XL Pipeline, focusing on the barriers they have faced until this point and their current status.

Who Speaks? Thirtieth Anniversary Dossier: Interventions

Who Speaks? Thirtieth Anniversary Dossier: Interventions

Oil Sands in European Media: Representations of the Canadian Oil Sands in European Newspapers, 2008–2013

This article examines how leading European newspapers reported on oil-sands production in Canada between 2008 and 2013. Based on content and critical discourse analysis of news reports published in major daily newspapers in the United Kingdom, Germany, and France, it compares the interpretative frames and dominant storylines. The data analysis suggests that overall, European coverage adopted a critical perspective based on the environmental impacts of oil-sands development, with very particular differences in environmental frame building among the national media analyzed. The British coverage focused mainly on narratives based on a combination of factors such as cultural ties between the two countries and social and cultural practices of reporting on annual shareholders’ meetings. In contrast, the later German and French environmental frame building was embedded mostly in the European debate over the Fuel Quality Directive or in discussions of the Keystone XL pipeline project. This article aims to provide a broader picture of how a prominent Canadian public policy issue is reflected in Europe and to contribute to the assessment of Stephen Harper’s goal of fostering the international image of Canada as an energy superpower. The results of the empirical analysis suggest that Canada’s position in the oil market did not allow it to actively lead the international energy discourse and instead fractured its ability to efficiently influence this aspect of its international image. As a result, oil-sands production had important destabilizing effects on Canada’s international image in European media.

The Keystone XL Pipeline and the Dormant Commerce Clause: Would Action by Congress Preclude Adequate Environmental Regulation at the State Level?

The Keystone XL Pipeline and the Dormant Commerce Clause: Would Action by Congress Preclude Adequate Environmental Regulation at the State Level?

Explaining Attitudes Toward U.S. Energy Extraction: Offshore Drilling, the Keystone XL Pipeline, and Hydraulic Fracturing

ObjectiveThis research develops and tests several individual‐level explanations of citizen attitudes toward offshore drilling, the Keystone XL pipeline, and hydraulic fracturing.MethodsUsing survey data from the Pew Research Center, logistic regression models analyze the effects of partisan and ideological considerations, presidential approval, affect for various levels of government, and a number of demographic considerations.ResultsFindings indicate that partisan, ideological, and core value considerations are highly influential in shaping individual sentiment toward the energy policies. Further, evidence for the affect heuristic suggests important empirical divides are also found with respect to patterns of citizen orientation to President Obama, his energy policies, and to federal and local governments.ConclusionThese results are important in the context of previous assertions that energy policy and its regulatory character have changed over time and remain highly partisan and politically polarized. Additionally, citizen patterns of orientation, including measures of affect as encapsulated by the affect heuristic, also provide citizens with important shortcuts when developing attitudes toward the three policies.

Democracy and Legitimacy in Investor-State Arbitration

In January 2016, the Canadian infrastructure company TransCanada Corporation filed a notice of intent to sue the United States government in a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Chapter 11 arbitration over the Keystone XL pipeline. At the center of this dispute is the State Department's refusal to permit the construction of an oil pipeline between Canada and Nebraska. TransCanada claims that the State Department ignored its own favorable environmental assessments of the pipeline multiple times and rejected the proposal to placate misinformed activists and foreign governments. The State Department acknowledges that it denied the permit to enhance the Obama Administration's credibility at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, with the long-term goal of reducing emissions through collective political action. This Essay situates the TransCanada arbitration within the history of investment arbitration, highlighting recent collisions between arbitral regimes and the modern regulatory state. After briefly discussing the history of investment arbitration, we discuss in depth the collision's most startling fallout so far- the Clayton v. Canada award on liability. Finally, we suggest how the TransCanada tribunal should view the Clayton award.

Trump Today

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump vowed to “Make America Great Again” by way of a new isolationism of the US. In the first 100 days of his presidency, he has restricted immigration, pursued aggressively the deportation of undocumented immigrants, and drastically reduced the US State Department. Judged in terms of transnational American Studies, his policies have employed a new nationalism to disguise a one-way global agenda. Trump’s withdrawal from the Transpacific Partnership has reconfigured economic relations across the Pacific and in East Asia. His approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline project has enriched a Canadian corporation. Even his appointment of Elizabeth Devos as Secretary of Education has obscured his close relations with her brother, Erik Prince, the infamous founder of Blackwater Security, an international corporation that supplies mercenaries to governments around the world. Transnational American Studies has an ethical obligation to continue its work of understanding US politics, economics, and culture in terms of its global consequences.

Community action and climate change

President Obama's rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline in 2015 established the viability of grassroots mobilization modelled on the social movement organization Bold Nebraska. This set a precedent for communities fighting energy projects that threaten natural resources and contribute to climate change.

Invited Essay: Pipelines, Protest, and Property

Invited Essay:Pipelines, Protest, and Property Jessica A. Shoemaker (bio) That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. That land yields a cultural harvest is a fact long known, but latterly often forgotten. —Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac Let us put our minds together and see what life we can make for our children. —Chief Sitting Bull of the Hunkpapa Lakota, quoted in David Archambault II, "Taking a Stand at Standing Rock" Introduction At the end of 2016, more than 2.7 million miles of pipe carrying natural gas, crude oil, and other hazardous liquids crisscrossed the United States (PHMSA 2017). Most of these pipelines were built without major conflict. They required numerous government approvals and many, many property transfers of private rights-of-way to pipeline developers. These pipelines contribute to critical infrastructure for energy transmission and distribution, and pipeline proponents have declared the safety and efficiency of pipelines as compared to rail, highway, or other alternatives means of transport. Developers also cite a boost to local economies from new pipeline construction. Meanwhile, technological changes in oil and gas production are creating new infrastructure demands as emerging production centers—largely in the northern Great Plains—need new pathways for transport (Klass and Meinhardt 2015). Now, this relatively conflict-free pattern of pipeline development seems to be changing. Two recent oil pipeline projects in the Great Plains—the Keystone XL Pipeline, intended to transport oil from Alberta to Nebraska, and the Dakota Access Pipeline ("DAPL"), currently operating between North Dakota and Illinois—have sparked unprecedented protests and resistance. Many of the policy and legal disputes regarding these two particular pipelines are ongoing as this essay goes to press (in late summer 2017). Keystone XL still requires Nebraska approval prior to construction and is subject to other litigation. Oil is currently flowing through the DAPL pipeline, but its continued operation is subject to legal challenges as well. This essay does not attempt to resolve the important underlying substantive questions about whether these pipelines are the right infrastructure investment for present and future needs. These pipelines bring up difficult, multilayered challenges involving [End Page 69] the US energy future, environmental and climate effects of fossil fuel dependence (especially fuels from oil sands and hydraulic fracturing), pipeline safety, national security, tribal sovereignty, and the economy. Without attempting to resolve these essential disputes, this essay instead seeks to situate the recent Keystone XL and DAPL resistance in a wider reflection about the meaning and significance of private property, especially as it relates to the future of the Great Plains. Framing Private Property Private land ownership predominates across much of the Great Plains. Stemming from its frontier history and pattern of homesteading development, private land ownership is a core feature of many Great Plains stories and identities. For many of us, private property symbolizes freedom, independence, and individual control. William Blackstone famously opined: "Property is that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe" (Ehrlich 1959, 113). Property, at least according to Blackstone, is the legal space where we can post a "Keep Out" sign to the rest of the world, enjoy perfect control over what happens within a bounded domain, and be totally free from everyone else in the universe. Blackstone's simple vision of property hits some roadblocks in the complexity of the real world, but this common ethos of private property—with its primacy on the individual right to exclude outsiders from a private space—persists in both popular perceptions and legal theories (e.g., Merrill 1998). For example, under a Lockean labor theory, exclusive property ownership is our reward for and the product of hard work—an individual entitlement earned over time when we (or our ancestors) mixed our efforts (and our self) with an otherwise unowned thing. Property's exclusion is also valued for its protection of individual liberty. In this liberty-oriented theoretical...

The Baseline Bar

“It is horrifying that we have to fight our own Government to save our environment.” (Ansel Adams) The road to sustainability for the planet’s people and natural ecosystems does not include rampant extractivism. A recent study suggests that more than 80 percent of the world’s known hydrocarbon reserves must remain in the ground to avoid runaway climate change. This article challenges the dominant paradigm as to why the “no action” alternative provision of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is used more as a tool of assessment to move a project forward than instead as a tool of prohibition to halt a project and its deleterious environmental impacts. To strengthen the “no action” alternative, this article recommends a more detailed analysis to conserve delicate environmental spaces and alleviate the phenomenon of environmental racism. Increased detail and specificity would establish what I refer to as “the baseline bar,” the point at which environmental, social, and economic metrics for a proposed federal agency action lead to a recommendation of “no action.” The baseline bar can be achieved through NEPA’s “no action” alternative as well as through other environmental laws, including the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, inter alia. The baseline bar would operate to halt project development once specific metrics are not satisfied or delay them so they become economically unfeasible. Manifestations of the baseline bar have led up to the earlier rejection of extractive industry projects, such as Alaska’s Pebble Mine and TransCanada’s Keystone XL Pipeline. Yet these projects and many other hydrocarbon and mining enterprises now face rebirth. Adherence to NEPA’s procedural requirements could delay or inhibit such projects. The lack of a baseline bar is evident in the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and the armed standoff over grazing rights in Oregon. Further, this analysis of the baseline bar will work toward understanding the next wave of environmental lawsuits and dispute resolution.

Native American Almanac: More Than 5,000 Years of the Cultures and Histories of Indigenous People Yvonne Wakim Dennis, Arlene Hirschfelder, and Shannon Rothenberger Flynnby

Reviewed by: Native American Almanac: More Than 5,000 Years of the Cultures and Histories of Indigenous People Yvonne Wakim Dennis, Arlene Hirschfelder, and Shannon Rothenberger Flynnby Cameron Shriver Native American Almanac: More Than 5,000 Years of the Cultures and Histories of Indigenous People. By Yvonne Wakim Dennis, Arlene Hirschfelder, and Shannon Rothenberger Flynn. Canton, MI: Visible Ink Press, 2016. vi + 625 pp. Illustrations, index. $24.95 paper. In this reference work, the authors “have tried to present a historical overview of Native communities in what is now the United States” (ix). The book is intended for a lay audience, and to that end Dennis, Hirschfelder, and Flynn have broken their subject into regional chapters with many concise sections. For example, the Northern Plains chapter has information on “From the Woodlands to the Plains,” “Traditional Life” (Cultural Expressions, Drama, Literature, Technology, Games and Sports), “Colonial History,” “Selling Energy,” “Contemporary Concerns” (in which the Black Hills, Cobell Settlement, and Keystone XL Pipeline garner abstracts), and summaries of many tribes in the region. Each regional chapter includes a valuable series of short biographies of important people, arranged chronologically. These describe both a long past and a vibrant present, incorporating recent figures such as Gyasi Ross and Shoni Schimmel. As a single volume designed for the uninitiated, the book is well illustrated and has a bounty of biographical information. Additionally, it introduces a broad array of current Indian Country issues. Unfortunately, it also has too many errors of fact. Despite the authors’ assertion, the French did develop “permanent settlements in the interior” of Canada (4). The 1795 Treaty of Greenville did not relinquish “all of present-day Ohio” (10). The Miami Tribe of Oklahoma was not terminated in 1897, nor did they have a “longhouse culture” that was revitalized by oil revenues (242–43). While the community that became the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma was forcibly removed from Ohio to Oklahoma in 1832, it was a fraction of the 50,000 the authors claim (245). Matters of emphasis compound these missteps. For example, the authors narrate the Mexican-American War (1846–48) without discussing the many Native people vying for power in the Southern Plains. This is a lost opportunity because recent historical work has illuminated the ways in which Indian polities—Comanches, Apaches, and others—were central to the causes and course of that conflict. The short section on colonial history of the Northern Plains is essentially a description of nineteenth-century epidemics among the Mandan. What of Lakota [End Page 242] expansion? The authors argue that most modern Northern Plains nations were pushed from the east by European expansion and Native forces. Yet whether Algonquian and Sioux communities were pushed or pulled to the Northern Plains is disputed. Native American Almanac is surefooted in its goal of providing an overview of modern topics of interest for those without prior knowledge. Readers familiar with Native American scholarship may prefer the encyclopedic Handbook of North American Indians series, including its two-volume “Plains” edition edited by Raymond DeMallie. The authors of Native American Almanac likewise employ a regional approach and, also like the Handbook, include a history of Indian-white relations. For those interested in specific events, communities, or historical processes, I recommend looking elsewhere. Cameron Shriver Postdoctoral Research Associate Miami Tribe of Oklahoma Copyright © 2017 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Assessing the Climate Impacts of U.S. Trade Agreements

Meeting the ambitious goals of the Paris Agreement will require the United States and other major greenhouse gas (GHG) emitters to integrate climate change considerations into all relevant areas of economic policy. The United States, however, has conspicuously failed to do so with regard to international trade negotiations. International trade agreements tend to increase GHG emissions due to the economic effects of trade liberalization, including increases in the scale of economic activity and changes in the composition of the affected economies. Trade agreements can also affect climate change in less quantifiable but potentially more significant ways by restricting the ability of governments to implement measures designed to mitigate climate change. Trade and investment rules in U.S. trade agreements have already been invoked to challenge a number of policies relevant to climate change, ranging from renewable energy programs to the Obama administration’s decision to reject the Keystone XL pipeline. Yet despite the growing evidence of the relevance of trade policy to climate change, the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) largely ignores potential climate impacts when preparing environmental reviews of proposed trade agreements as required under Executive Order 13141. This Article explores how the USTR could address climate change within the environmental review process to both assess the potential economically driven and regulatory impacts of proposed trade agreements for climate change and identify options for mitigating those impacts.

The Great Sioux Nation V. The 'Black Snake': Native American Rights and the Keystone Xl Pipeline

The Keystone XL Pipeline has been shrouded in controversy almost since its conception. As a structure intending to cross the Canadian border into the United States, the pipeline must receive presidential approval before construction can commence. Since 2008, TransCanada has attempted to obtain this approval unsuccessfully. Criticism against the pipeline has focused largely on the negative environmental impacts that will likely accompany its construction and utilization, and it is precisely these environmental concerns that have ultimately stymied presidential approval and made international headlines. In November 2015, the U.S. government denied TransCanada’s application, effectively killing the Keystone XL project. While the Keystone XL project no longer poses a physical threat to the environment, an overview of the U.S. government’s consideration of the project reveals drastic flaws in process, specifically in regards to the human rights of a substantial portion of individuals who would be negatively affected by the Keystone XL Pipeline — the Sioux Nation.The pipeline is set to run through a substantial portion of the Black Hills of South Dakota — the sovereign and treaty lands of the Great Sioux Nation. This “black snake” threatens not only the environment of the Sioux lands, but also sites sacred to the tribes. The Sioux Nation has risen up in defense of their lands, and their right to free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) before the state can undertake projects on their indigenous lands. While the U.S. government maintains it has complied with domestic standards regarding Indian consultation and with its perverse interpretation of the right to FPIC protected under the U.N. Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, its actions have fallen drastically short of those expected by the United Nations and required by the inter-American system. This paper argues that under the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man, the United States is obligated to obtain the fully informed consent of the Sioux Nation before approving the Keystone XL pipeline.

Measuring Congressional Partisanship on Energy and the Environment in the Age of Obama: The Cases of Offshore Drilling in Alaska and the Keystone XL Pipeline

The hypothesis for this article is that partisan voting in the US Congress since the 1980s prompts the need to confirm it empirically as a baseline for exploring other variables that may influence public policy decisions. It is worthwhile to measure that partisanship in two key energy-environmental policies during the Obama Presidency. First, how did partisan voting affect the decision by Shell to cease offshore exploratory drilling in the Arctic in 2015? Moreover, was partisanship a factor in President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline that year? I found the degrees of congressional partisanship to be very high on key votes in both cases, but relatively lower in the Keystone case. The inference is that legislative party politics can offer a partial explanation for policy continuity or change. These findings set the stage for further inquiry on other explanatory variables both within and external to the political system.

A pipeline of tweets: environmental movements’ use of Twitter in response to the Keystone XL pipeline

ABSTRACTSocial movements often amalgamate otherwise diffuse public political interests. In recent years, social media use has allowed both groups and individuals to engage with political issues both online and offline. How do organizations use Twitter to mobilize networked publics? To what extent do groups promote both ‘connective action’ online and traditional activism offline? How do their strategies differ according to whether they seek to promote or combat the status quo? And how do they balance encouraging and reinforcing individualized expression through group messaging? The ways pro-Keystone XL pipeline and anti-Keystone XL groups differed in their Keystone-related action on Twitter from January 2010 until October 2014 are analyzed. Boolean searching and Natural Language processing are used to analyze more than three million tweets. The results demonstrate that the frames within Twitter conversations have significant implications for how communities understand, develop, and mobilize around environmental issues.

Determinants of voting behaviour on the Keystone XL Pipeline

ABSTRACTAfter lengthy debate, the Keystone XL Pipeline bill passed in January 2015. We use this event to better understand the determinants of Senator voting behaviour. Specifically, this article attempts to examine the relative impacts of political and economic influences. This is accomplished through the use of a binary logit regression model with legislator vote as the dependent variable. Results indicate that while legislators do appear to be representing their political constituency, the role of campaign funding plays an important role as well. The economic effect of such funding, controlling for other factors, is quantitatively small.

Blockadia Rising: Rowdy Greens, Direct Action and the Keystone XL Pipeline

TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline has encountered opposition from Indigenous peoples, landowners, and environmental activists across North America. Cropping up wherever extractive projects such as hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and tar sands expansion are found, Blockadia (Klein in This changes everything: Capitalism vs. the climate, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2014) is a roving, transnational conflict zone that has become host to the showdown between environmental activists and the fossil fuel industry. Utilizing increasingly confrontational direct action tactics such as marches, mass arrests, lockdowns and blockades, “rowdy greens” such as 350.org are seeking to address climate change by taking to the streets, while other groups such as Tars Sands Blockade take to the trees to obstruct oil sands infrastructure projects. With the battle over Keystone XL still undecided, President Obama is faced with a crucial decision: approve the pipeline and allow further state facilitation of corporate crime within the fossil fuel industry, or reject the project and reaffirm the vital role of mass social movements in creating change.

(Re)constructing the Pipeline: Workers, Environmentalists and Ideology in Media Coverage of the Keystone XL Pipeline

Environmental protection is presumed to damper economic growth and media accounts of resource extraction often portray trade-offs between jobs and the environment. However, there is limited evidence that environmental protection universally costs jobs and heavily polluting industries provide few jobs in comparison to environmental impacts. Therefore, how has media discourse contributed to the taken-for-granted division between the economy and the environment? This paper uses the Keystone XL pipeline controversy as a case of the symbolical conflict between supporters of growth and conservation to explore the role of ideology and power in media discourse. I use frame analysis of newspaper articles to explore the representations of labor and the environment and how hegemonic ideology legitimizes resource extraction. My analysis reveals binary framing that constructed the pipeline as a political controversy over the trade-off between the environment and the economy, which made conflict between workers and environmentalists sensible, and silenced alternatives.

Keystone XL Pipeline: Rhetoric vs. Economics

Tech 101 There are about 180,000 miles of oil pipeline in the United States, but all of this mileage put together has not generated 1% of the controversy as a pipeline that would add a mere 1% to the total— the Keystone XL Pipeline connecting Alberta’s oil sands to refineries in Texas and Louisiana. Since it crosses an international boundary, Keystone requires US State Department approval, which has not been forthcoming under the Obama administration. Keystone has become a cause célèbre on both sides of the political aisle. President Obama has made numerous statements criticizing the pipeline and has vetoed the legislation mandating its approval. Conversely, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had promised to make Keystone the first legislative priority in Congress when he took office. Many arguments have been advanced against Keystone. First and foremost, opposition to the pipeline rests on environmental objections. Environmentalists deem crude oil produced from Canadian oil sands to be uniquely damaging due to its carbon intensity when compared with other types of crude. When the environmental arguments failed to gain considerable traction, opponents shifted to economic arguments. These include assertions that Keystone will not reduce at-the-pump gas prices in the US, and that most Keystone oil will be exported. Unfortunately, these political and environmental arguments have created more heat than light. A straightforward economic analysis of Keystone demonstrates that its benefits will not be as great as its advocates say, but they will be material. The environmental effects are likely modest and outweighed by the economic benefits. The Economics of Keystone The direct economic effect of Keystone is quite straightforward. It would reduce the cost of transporting crude oil from Canada to the US Gulf Coast. Without Keystone, rail is the most economical way to transport the oil to the Gulf refineries. US government reports estimate that rail shipment costs about USD 10/bbl more than transportation via Keystone. This means that the benefits in terms of reduced transportation costs are on the order of USD 8 million/day, which is USD 10/bbl multiplied by the 830,000 BOPD Keystone can transport in lieu of more expensive trains.