Greg Awtry

Most of you have played poker at one time or another.

You risk treasure in hopes of benefiting by holding the winning hand. That’s what is happening between TransCanada and Nebraskans. They want us to risk our most valuable treasures, land and water, while all the time they hold the winning hand that will benefit them by the billions.
C – Cornerstone Bank

Finally the table stakes have risen too high, as more Nebraskans are unwilling to gamble on a foreign company’s word that a 36-inch pipe full of poison chemicals will have no impact on our land and water, forever.

And to make things worse, the people of Nebraska are playing with a short deck. All the Jacks, Queens and Kings (Federal Representatives, Senators and the Governor) have gone to the TransCanada side of the table. Nebraskans have tried to go to the draw but have pulled a pair of real losers in Adrian Smith and Lee Terry.

Adrian thinks pumping toxic oil through his district is fine. He also doesn’t want to put the eight cents per barrel tax on Canadian oil right now, even though American oil has to pay the tax to replenish the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, which could be tapped in case of a large spill. He has yet come up with a logical explanation for that one.

Lee Terry, knowing the final public hearing would be in Nebraska, bulldozed ahead with his short-sighted legislation to bypass the State Department, nullifying our voices and obviously not giving a damn about what Nebraskans would say at the public hearing. How disgusting is that?

It is time to stop being politically correct with these two. In regards to the Keystone XL, Adrian Smith has been about effective as a plunger in an outhouse, while Lee Terry needs to run off and join the circus where his talent as a clown will get the respect he can’t get from folks who desperately want to protect our land and water.

And while we are at it, Governor Heineman and Senator Mike Johanns were the two who wrote Obama and Clinton expressing their deep concerns over the pipe’s original route through the aquifer, only to completely flip-flop when TransCanada did its so called “re-route” where it now plans to go over even more miles of the Ogallala Aquifer!

If they used their heads on this critical issue, one could only assume it was so their mouths could make noise, their brains could hold their hair up, while their ears were of no use at all, as they too made up their minds before the final public hearing in Grand Island.

Oh, then we have Sen. Deb Fischer, a self proclaimed land and water lover. She told the Lincoln Journal Star last week that the Obama administration should “move ahead” with the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.

In the same interview she said, Obama should “review comments made at the final hearing.” Which is it Deb, move ahead, or listen to the people? The Third District put her in office and now she wants a foreign corporation to slice us open like a butchered hog, place a poison tube right through our middle, sew us back up and tell us to go home and we’ll be OK? Deb needs to take a trip to Kalamazoo, Mich., and Mayflower, Ark., then get back to us.

Let’s get serious. The nation’s final KXL environmental hearing was held at the same venue as the Nebraska State Fair. Had this been an actual state fair, this current crop of elected officials would have been thicker than flies over at the bovine barn. But their minds were made up and nothing their constituents would say, nor over 800,000 comments submitted to the State Department, means anything to them. That says a lot about their view of democracy, doesn’t it?

Their absence was a glaring embarrassment on a day when the nation came to Nebraska to listen to the people, and our state leaders didn’t want to hear a word.

Now that the environmental phase is closing, the final phase in the review process begins. That is to determine whether the Keystone XL is in the “national interest” of the United States of America.

Eight different federal agencies will weigh in, along with a comment period for the citizens. But once again, Nebraska’s Washington contingency will lend deaf ears to the debate because they have already made up their minds.

Over the coming weeks we’ll be addressing why a foreign company, TransCanada, whose only interest is to ship foreign oil to the coast of Texas where it will be refined and much of it loaded on ships destined to foreign markets, is neither in the best interest of the U.S. nor the state of Nebraska. It would be nice if we could have that conversation with open-minded Nebraska politicians, but they have played their cards and left the parlor.

In Kenny Rogers’ famous ballad he sings, “You got to know when to hold’em, know when to fold’em, know when to walk away, know when to run …” Last week’s public hearing clearly shows Nebraskans are no where close to walking away from this issue, showing TransCanada we’ll be staying strong until “the dealin’s done!”

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In 10 days the entire international oil industry will be focused on a small rural town in Nebraska.

Or will it?

On April 18, 2013, the U.S. State Department will hold the nation’s final Keystone XL public hearing in Grand Island, Nebraska.

In conjunction with the hearing, the public has been submitting electronic comments to the State Department for weeks, but there is one small catch. The State Department won’t make these “public” comments public!

It seems the State Department contracted with a company to handle all these comments, a company called Environmental Resources Management (ERM), ironically the same company TransCanada hired to help them with their environmental study.

ERM will then roll all these comments up in a nice tidy package to be used by President Obama and John Kerry when they finally make the decision on the Keystone XL.

Now we find out the public comments will not be made public unless a Freedom of Information request is filed with the State Department, and the chance of receiving any information before the pipeline decision will most likely be too late! This smells worse than toxic odors in the Mayflower, Ark., tar-sand spill!

You might ask why Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry must decide. Two reasons: (1) the pipeline crosses an international border and (2) Obama and Kerry must determine if the foreign company’s (TransCanada) request to make billions by slicing open our nation’s heartland is in our “national interest.”

Listen folks, this pipeline is clearly not in the United States’ national interest. First of all it is a publicly held foreign company simply trying to make money for its stockholders.

Second of all it would be constructed to do one thing and one thing only: to pipe foreign oil to Texas refineries so it can be sold on the world market which is about 25 percent higher than the price tar-sand oil is selling for in Canada.

In other words the price of this oil will go up once it reaches our southern coast. Yet there are people, including Nebraska’s own Third District Congressman Adrian Smith, who tell us it may lower the price of fuel. What economics class did he take!

Will the Keystone XL create jobs? Sure it will, temporary ones, and nowhere close to the over-exaggerated claims made by TransCanada, politicians and the national media.

When the dust settles on the construction of this pending disaster, real numbers say it will create 35 permanent jobs in America, 13 of them in Nebraska according to the this state’s own DEQ report. By contrast a typical super Wal-Mart will employ nearly 200 people. Now you tell me is the Keystone XL is in our national interest?

Some folks say because Canada is one of our largest trading partners, denying the pipe will make them mad. Hey, Canada doesn’t own that oil, oil companies do, and don’t for a minute think all those oil companies are in Canada and the U.S. China has already invested billions of dollars into the Canadian tar sands, as has Korea, Thailand, France, England and the Netherlands.

That’s who owns the oil that will be pumping through Nebraska’s Sandhills and the Ogallala aquifer! National interest? Certainly, but whose? Not ours, that is for certain!

So, let’s talk about safety. TransCanada would have us believe this pipe, nine times larger than the pipeline that spilled in Arkansas, will be safe. But Scientific American reported just last week that “pipelines in the upper Midwest that routinely carry oil from tar sands have spilled 3.6 times more oil per pipeline mile than the U.S. average.”

The facts are that pipeline companies are having a very difficult time keeping this highly pressurized DilBit oil inside the pipes, evident by major spills in the Yellowstone River, the ongoing disaster in the Kalamazoo River and now the Mayflower, Ark., spill, along with dozens of other smaller spills.

TransCanada talks about how it can detect leaks and shut down the pipeline. But in many cases the public finds the spills first.

In Michigan, the Enbridge control booth operators misread the readings for 17 hours, and never did detect the nearly 1,000,000 gallons of tar-sand oil that was gushing into Talmadge Creek, and ultimately into the Kalamazoo River. The public found the spill. Just imagine if that were to occur in the remote and sparsely populated Sandhills.

The bottom line is that big oil money, and millions of TransCanada dollars, have bought public opinion. We know big oil is a major contributor to political campaigns, and one could make the case that it has worked considering Nebraska’s entire Washington contingency and governor are in favor of the pipe.

Well, thank goodness for the people of Nebraska. Hundreds of courageous landowners and concerned citizens in our state have done nearly everything in their power to counter big money with common sense. Their love of the land is born from a pioneering spirit that is alive and well.

They have proven Nebraskans can make up our own minds, and they have shown our opinions are not for sale at any price! Had it not been for these brave stewards of the land, the Keystone XL may have already been buried in our soil, just ½ inch away from our water supplies.

Now these dedicated people, who have sorted through all the corporate and political spin to expose the real truths of this pipeline, and who are trying to save our most valuable resources from being decimated by a foreign company, deserve your support.

They will line up by the hundreds to testify. Their comments won’t be hidden from public view because the York News-Times will be there in your behalf, when they gather a week from Thursday in the small Midwestern town of Grand Island, Nebraska to fight for all of us.

Publisher’s note: Let this editorial serve as an invitation to York’s mayor, the entire city council, York county commissions, Speaker of the state legislature, state senators, Nebraska’s federal congressmen and senators and our governor to attend this final opportunity to hear from the people who put them in office. There could be nothing on their respective pubic calendars more important than this project which will have a lasting and potentially dangerous effect Nebraskans. Let’s see if they can show the courage of their constituents and be in Grand Island on April 18, to hear the people of this great state.

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I hope I can keep my propensity to use four letter words to a minimum, because right now I am mad.

I just finished reading an Omaha World-Herald article about Adrian Smith and his ill-conceived views on the Keystone XL pipeline.

The article states, “Smith told The World-Herald last week that he has been impressed with what he’s heard about the environmental safeguards that come with the Keystone XL pipeline.” Can you believe that! Adrian has been consistently saying he would base his determination on science, but now says “what he hears” is good enough.

I am guessing what he hears is mostly from TransCanada, the foreign company that wants to slice Nebraska wide open to transport Canadian tar-sand oil, complete with toxins that kill, to the Gulf of Mexico so it can be refined and exported. If Smith was truly listening, he could hear the hundreds of Third District landowners who are desperate to have their congressman help save the Sandhills and the Ogallala Aquifer forever.

Adrian also says, “We know that we want to protect a tremendous natural resource, that being the aquifer and water in general, and we can do that with a good amount of technology.” Or, Mr. Congressman, you could stand with the courage of your constituents and demand they avoid the Sandhills and aquifer all together.

I think what upsets me more than what was written in the OWH article, was the stuff not written.

Surely the reporter knew Adrian Smith voted for the new Pipeline Safety Bill that was signed into law early in 2012. That bill requires two federal studies directly aimed at the tar-sand DilBit oil. One studies the corrosiveness of DilBit to see how it affects the pipe.

The other studies the leak detection practices of pipeline companies. Both must be followed by a review period and regulatory process that won’t be done for a couple years, yet Smith wants to bury the pipe now. I wouldn’t call that basing his decision on science, would you?

Surely the reporter knew that Adrian sits on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee. This committee, back in 1980, declared tar-sand to be neither oil nor petroleum, so when an “anonymous company” recently asked the IRS to make a ruling on tax liabilities based on current law, the IRS had no choice but to rule the 36 million gallons of this toxic brew, gushing just a half inch away from Nebraska’s Ogallala Aquifer every day, will not be subject to the eight cents per barrel Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund Tax.

(American oil has to pay this tax, but the Canadian tar-sand oil gets a free pass, thanks to Adrian’s House Ways and Means Committee determination.)

Adrian has been informed that a spill in Nebraska similar to the one in Michigan could cost up to a billion dollars to repair and restore, and TransCanada is only liable for the first $350 million. After that, the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund is tapped, but remember, based on Adrian’s committee, the Canadian oil going through the Keystone XL does not have to pay the $23 million a year tax to replenish the fund … only American oil has to pay.

We have asked Adrian to change that provision. He is reluctant to do so, saying he might have to get the Department of Transportation and Department of Energy involved. All right then Mr. Smith, as one well known Nebraskan might say, “Git-er-done!”

We don’t need more ‘timid’ from you on this issue.

March into the next House Ways and Means Committee meeting and say, “Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a problem. I am not about to sit around and let this dangerous oil pass though the nation’s largest fresh water aquifer and cross all of Nebraska’s major waterways without contributions to the Oil Spill Fund. That’s not right and everyone in this room knows it.”

That’s what a leader would do and it’s what we desperately need from you!

But the chances of that happening are about as likely as the chance the pipe won’t leak – slim to none. Instead, Adrian says about the pipeline opponents, “… some people simply don’t want to add any more fossil fuels to the nation’s energy supply.”

That may be true. Some people don’t. But if you, Adrian, had been listening to Nebraskans instead of Canadians, you would have heard loud and clear the issue in your home state of Nebraska has never been about oil. Had you been listening, you would have known all along it is about water.

Well, now Congressman Adrian Smith, you have your chance. On April 18, the State Department will conduct the last hearing in the United States of America on the Keystone XL pipeline. Know where it is going to be? It will be in the largest city in your Third District, Grand Island.

And since you are basing your decision on what you “hear,” then I am sure there is no way you would miss this public hearing. I mean, how could a sitting congressman not take this opportunity to hear from hundreds and hundreds of your constituents regarding not just the issue of the day, but the issue of a lifetime in our state?

For crying out loud, do your %#@& job! (I knew I couldn’t make it all the way through this column without one of those four letter words.)

One last thing, Congressman Smith, since you should be there, you might want to ask Johanns and Fischer to tag along. It is obvious they have been listening to your pipeline sources as well, and a good dose of Nebraska common sense could do the both of them some good too.

The media has two fundamental responsibilities.

The first is to report on what we see and hear. This is the easy part. But
what if what we see and what we hear is not truthful? Does the media have any
responsibility to investigate comments that may be in question, or do we just
report what was said and move on?

Take the highly controversial TransCanada Keystone XL pipeline. We first
began reporting on this story in June 2008. Back then, five years ago, we
reported only what we saw and heard.

Since this pipeline story was gaining national interest, and the actual pipe
would be located just a couple miles from our newspaper office, as the only
daily newspaper in Nebraska
located on the Keystone XL route we realized many of our readers could be
affected by this project.

So, we decided to look behind what the national press and the Canadian
company, TransCanada, were touting so we could better inform our readership of
the consequences of the Keystone XL pipeline project.

What we began to uncover was startling.

We first became skeptical because we couldn’t understand if this pipeline
was so darn good for America
and so darn good for Nebraska,
then why were they trying so darn hard to “sell” us on the idea?

We began to question TransCanada’s claims of the number of jobs this project
would create. Turns out we were correct in doing so, as the actual number of
jobs, now coming out, is nowhere close to the company’s original claims.

We began to find out who actually owns the tar sand oil and exactly where it
was headed. Turns out a lot of countries have a financial interest in the tar
sands and contrary to what TransCanada reps were telling us, much of the
refined product from the tar sand oil will be exported.

We questioned what would happen to the price of fuel in the Midwest if the pipeline went through. Sure enough, this
too was a good thing as we found where TransCanada reps said the price of the
Canadian oil would actually increase once it reaches the gulf coast.

We also began questioning what exactly would flow through the pipe.
TransCanada reps use the term “crude oil.” Turns out this is not correct
according to the House Ways
and Means Committee.

What will flow through the pipe is Diluted Bitumen (DilBit), which is the
gooey tar sand diluted with lighter petroleum products so it can be transported
through a pipe under extreme pressures. Benzene levels of this mixture are
high, and benzene is a known carcinogen. Millions of gallons of benzene will be
traveling just ½-inch away from our water supplies.

We asked TransCanada representatives if this were to spill, then what? We
were repeatedly told, the product would float on water and TransCanada would be
responsible for cleanup.

This, too, turns out to be not the whole truth. Some of the DilBit sinks and
cleanup, as in the case of the Enbridge Kalamazoo River DilBit spill, has been
difficult and is now into its third year at close to a billion dollars.

Then we find out the Canadian oil that goes through the pipe will not be
forced pay the 8 cents per barrel tax to the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund,
but American oil producers will.

That saves the producers and/or refiners of the Canadian oil about $23
million a year that should be paid into the Spill Fund in case of a
disaster. We repeatedly informed Rep. Adrian Smith, who sits on that
committee, asking him to work to change this. After all, the spill in Nebraska will be on his
third district soil!

We also investigated the new Pipeline Safety Bill that passed both houses of
Congress by unanimous consent. Turns out there are two studies directly
impacting DilBit pipelines, one on the corrosiveness of DilBit, the other on
companies’ leak detection practices.

The final study won’t be completed until 2015, yet Nebraska’s
elected officials are pushing hard for the pipeline to be buried in Nebraska’s soil before
the studies are complete … studies they voted for!

We find out that Nebraska’s
own DEQ did not complete the “Risk Assessment” portion of their study before
Gov. Heineman decided the route over the Ogallala Aquifer was fine after all,
even though earlier he pleaded with the president and the secretary of state to
not allow this to cross the aquifer, as did Sen. Johanns.

Call me stupid, but I think the Risk Assessment Study (not completed) should
have been a critical report on which Heineman could base his decision.

We spoke with landowners who have been threatened with eminent domain if
they fail to sign an easement, which lasts forever. TransCanada has denied the
threats yet we have seen the letters sent to these landowners.

There is a lot more, so one has to ask, “Where is the national press on
this?” You might ask, “Where is the Nebraska
press on this?” My take is, for the most part, they are just passing along the
TransCanada corporate sales pitch, and thus are failing the people of Nebraska by not
questioning the real consequences of this project.

The people of this great state deserve to know more, like what exactly will
happen to the price of fuel if this goes through, or where is the worst case
disaster study if a spill were to happen in a shallow area of the aquifer, and
what are the health risks to people along a river or stream if such a spill
would occur.

Is it true the DEQ states only 13 permanent Nebraska jobs will be created to maintain
and operate the pipe once it’s in our soil? Do we actually need a 50-year
export oil pipeline when most agree that in 10 years American will produce
enough oil of its own?

How much money does big oil contribute to Nebraska politicians and does that have any
effect on their inexplicable support of this project? Can foreign companies
(TransCanada) actually take American’s land just so they can make more profit?

It is time the press starts doing the hard work of investigative reporting
and stop spewing a one-sided view of the Keystone XL.

There are a lot more “dirty little secrets” that need explained before this
“dirty oil” pipeline is literally buried beneath our feet.

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You have all seen and read the ads and news accounts about the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.