North America

“Landowners’ worst fears came true,” Jane Kleeb, the head of Bold Nebraska, told DeSmog after news broke about the latest Keystone pipeline oil spill. “When you have a pipe running through your farm or ranch-land all you think about is: it could break today.”  

TransCanada, the owner of the recently-nixed northern leg of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, has won a bid from Mexico's government to build a 155-mile pipeline carrying gas from hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) in the United States to Mexico's electricity grid. 

Is our weather getting funny?

Some bushes and flowers started to bloom near the end of January this year, and in the spring cherry blossoms were blooming weeks early. This capped a winter with extremely low snowfall in the Cascade Mountains. The abnormal heat, combined with the drought now covering 80% of Oregon, has actually raised temperatures in the Willamette River above 70 degrees, recently killing chinook salmon as they made their way up-stream to spawn.

Carl Weimer, director of Bellingham-based nonprofit Pipeline Safety Trust, thinks that the intense focus on Keystone has taken the wind out of conversations around safety issues at the 2.5 million miles of already-existing pipelines as well as for the new ones being proposed. “In the past, pipeline safety has been pretty bipartisan,” Weimer says. But Keystone has polarized the discussion. “Either you’re for oil or against it,” he added.