This page opposes the building of a 1,700-mile pipeline called the Keystone XL, which would carry diluted bitumen — an acidic crude oil — from Canada’s Alberta tar sands to the Texas Gulf Coast. We have two main concerns: the risk of oil spills along the pipeline, which would traverse highly sensitive terrain, and the fact that the extraction of petroleum from the tar sands creates far more greenhouse emissions than conventional production does.

The Canadian government insists that it has found ways to reduce those emissions. But a new report from Canada’s environmental ministry shows how great the impact of the tar sands will be in the coming years, even with cleaner production methods.

It projects that Canada will double its current tar sands production over the next decade to more than 1.8 million barrels a day. That rate will mean cutting down some 740,000 acres of boreal forest — a natural carbon reservoir. Extracting oil from tar sands is also much more complicated than pumping conventional crude oil out of the ground. It requires steam-heating the sands to produce a petroleum slurry, then further dilution.

One result of this process, the ministry says, is that greenhouse gas emissions from the oil and gas sector as a whole will rise by nearly one-third from 2005 to 2020 — even as other sectors are reducing emissions. Canada still hopes to meet the overall target it agreed to at Copenhagen in 2009 — a 17 percent reduction from 2005 levels by 2020. If it falls short, as seems likely, tar sands extraction will bear much of the blame.

The U.S. State Department is in the final stages of deciding whether to approve the project, which is very controversial in the United States. More than 100 people were arrested at the White House over the weekend protesting against approval.

Environment Minnesota, in an email to supporters, blasted Klobuchar for her votes last week. “With these votes, Sen. Klobuchar had a choice: stand up for the health of our children, elderly citizens and other vulnerable populations, or do the bidding of America’s biggest polluters. And Senator Klobuchar chose to side with polluters.”

ThinkProgress called Klobuchar one of the 17 “dirty Democrats.”

Klobuchar voted for the Baucus amendment which would have exempted agriculture and small emitters. It failed with the GOP opposing it for not being strong enough and only a handful of Democrats voting “aye.” Klobuchar also voted for the Stabenow amendment which would have put restrictions on the EPA enforcement of greenhouse gases for two years.

Phil Kerpen of the Koch brothers–backed Americans for Prosperity trashed those measures calling them “phony amendments that only pretended to stop the EPA’s job-crushing regulations.”

The White House praised the Senate for rejecting the efforts that Klobuchar backed.

“The administration is encouraged by the Senate’s actions today to defend the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to protect public health under the Clean Air Act,” President Obama said in a statement. “By rejecting efforts to rollback EPA’s common-sense steps to safeguard Americans from harmful pollution, the Senate also rejected an approach that would have increased the nation’s dependence on oil, contradicted the scientific consensus on global warming, and jeopardized America’s ability to lead the world in the clean energy economy.”

The Senate cast its votes to curtail the EPA’s authority on greenhouse gases last Wednesday, and the House — with the help of a few Democrats — attempted to add them to the budget resolution that almost shut down the government.

Rep. Peterson was at the heart of those efforts.

He was a cosponsor of the attempt to curtail the EPA. According to the New York Times, he offered legislation because of “all this stuff the EPA is doing to ethanol and every other damn thing they are doing.”

In a statement, Peterson cited agricultural concerns.

“This bill hits the pause button on EPA’s current efforts to regulate greenhouse gases,” he said. “America’s farmers and ranchers are committed to preserving our natural resources for the next generation, but what we’re seeing from EPA could potentially interfere with conservation efforts already underway. EPA’s regulations would not only make it harder for agriculture producers to meet increased demand but raise costs on all consumers. If Congress fails to act the economic effects could be devastating.”

The measure was cosponsored by Peterson as well as Republican Reps. John Kline and Michele Bachmann, and was eventually pulled in the final budget agreement late Friday night.

Environmentalists are concerned that a common method of natural gas drilling can release dangerous chemicals into groundwater. (Bryan Smith/ZUMApress.com)

Less than two hours after President Obama suggested in a post-midterm press conference that Republicans and Democrats could find common ground on proposals to develop the country’s natural gas resources, Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune underscored environmentalists’ love-hate relationship with the fossil fuel.

“To be clear, natural gas is not clean, but it’s cleaner than some dirty energy,” he told reporters at a separate Nov. 3 press conference on the prospects for energy and climate legislation in the new Congress.

[Environment1] Natural gas is shaping up to be one of a small handful of energy issues that could get significant attention in the next Congress. As a result, environmentalists are being forced to grapple with the complexities surrounding the expanded use of natural gas. On the one hand, burning natural gas produces about 40 percent less greenhouse gas emissions than coal; on the other hand, natural gas drilling presents its own set of concerns that make environmentalists cringe.

“We want to make sure natural gas is not viewed as some kind of magic bullet,” said Franz Matzner, climate legislative director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “But we need to look at ways in which we can reduce our carbon footprint now and it’s appealing that it has a smaller footprint. It’s not a replacement for getting renewables online.”

Meanwhile, hoping to ride the momentum from Obama’s high-profile remarks last week, the natural gas industry is preparing to push next year for a number of provisions that favor natural gas. One natural gas industry official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said natural gas will be a key issue in any bipartisan energy bill next year. “There is some potential to gather bipartisan support for an energy proposal that involves promotion of natural gas,” the official said. “There can be some kind of adjustment policy that allows for the benefits that natural gas provides: stable pricing, domestic production and plentiful resources.”

The natural gas industry plans to lobby for the inclusion of natural gas as an option for meeting a renewable energy standard, which would require that a certain percentage of the country’s electricity come from renewable sources like wind and solar.

In a Nov. 5 letter to President Obama obtained by The Washington Independent, the heads of the country’s four major natural gas industry groups laid out their policy priorities. “Should Congress move forward on a renewable or clean electricity standard, natural gas generation should be included as a compliance option,” the letter said.

Environmentalists and clean energy advocates say they will oppose such an effort. “Natural gas is not a renewable energy source,” said Dan Weiss, senior fellow and the director of climate strategy at the Center for American Progress. “Therefore it does not belong in an RES.”

David Hamilton, director of global warming and energy programs at the Sierra Club, echoed Weiss’ sentiments. “We really would need to look at the details,” Hamilton said. “But we’ve traditionally been protective of what gets called clean.”

A third clean energy advocate with close ties to Congress dismissed the prospect that environmentalists would be willing to compromise on including natural gas in an RES. “We would rather have nothing than that,” the clean energy advocate said.

But Weiss suggested there is room for negotiation on the issue. He said a proposal to pass a separate low-carbon electricity standard requiring that a certain percentage of the country’s electricity come from natural gas, coal with carbon capture technology and nuclear power “is something that we’d look at seriously.”

Any proposal that would allow natural gas to compete on the same footing as wind and solar, however, would face major opposition, Weiss said. “A low-carbon standard would incent low-carbon kinds of energy, but it would not compete directly with renewables,” he explained. For example, Congress may choose to pass a 15 percent RES and then an additional low-carbon standard of 10 percent, Weiss said.

The first natural gas-related piece of legislation is slated to come up for a procedural vote next week in the lame-duck session. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has scheduled a cloture vote for Nov. 17 on the Promoting Natural Gas and Electric Vehicles Act of 2010, which would provide incentives for electric and natural gas vehicles. The proposal has bipartisan support and is likely to be the only energy-related bill to see floor action in the lame duck.

While environmentalists support the vehicles proposal, they also say that any effort to encourage natural gas production should be coupled with natural gas drilling reforms. Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” involves injecting chemicals, sand and huge quantities of water into the earth to loosen large underground deposits of natural gas. It is currently the cheapest and most widespread method for extracting natural gas from the ground. But environmentalists say the chemicals used during fracking can contaminate groundwater and cause significant damage to the land.

Hamilton, of the Sierra Club, suggested that environmentalists and liberal Democrats would be more likely to support efforts to expand natural gas development if Congress also considers drilling reforms. “We are very much of the mind that the regulatory structure for fracking should be in place before there’s more drilling,” Hamilton said. “The quicker that regulatory structure gets in place, the less resistance they’re going to get.”

Matzner, of the NRDC, called on lawmakers to pass natural gas drilling reforms that, among other things, require companies to disclose the amount and types of chemicals that are used in fracking and tighten regulation of the practice.

“There’s space here to put policies in place to make sure that natural gas is done in a more responsible way,” Matzner said.

There are proposals on the table in the House and the Senate that would address many of these issues. The Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals (FRAC) Act would give the Environmental Protection Agency regulatory authority over fracking. But the EPA is currently conducting a study on fracking that won’t be completed until 2012. Some have suggested it’s best to wait to address the issue in Congress until the study is finished.

Amy Mall, senior policy analyst at NRDC, has been working on fracking issues for years. Based in Colorado, she has seen the environmental impacts of the practice firsthand. Yet she recognizes that natural gas is a necessary part of the country’s energy mix, underscoring the complicated relationships environmentalists have with the fossil fuel. She, like many environmentalists see natural gas as a “bridge fuel,” or an interim step on the way to broader reliance on renewables.

“Our country needs a lot of energy,” she said. “Our first priority should be efficiency, then conservation. In the short term, we can’t meet all of our energy needs. We support natural gas as a bridge fuel, but we don’t think it’s a silver bullet solution.”

The EPA was required by the Supreme Court to regulate emissions under the Clean Air Act, if it found them to endanger the public — which it did last December. Murkowski’s resolution would have, in effect, ruled that the EPA was wrong in its scientific assessment that greenhouse gases posed a threat.

The Democrats joining all Republicans in voting for the resolution were: Evan Bayh (Ind.), Blanche Lincoln (Ark.), Mary Landrieu (La.), Ben Nelson (Neb.), Mark Pryor (Ark.) and Jay Rockefeller (W.Va.).

Even if it had passed the Senate, the resolution would have faced steep odds in the House and a certain veto from President Obama. Still, it would have sent a powerful sign about the Senate’s willingness to tackle carbon emissions ahead of the upcoming debate on energy and/or climate legislation.

In other words, the lawmakers are blasting the Environmental Protection Agency for trying to protect the environment.

“While the EPA conducts an unnecessary re-examination of the mining permitting process under the guise of environmental stewardship, the troubling reality is that the EPA’s unsolicited policy changes are aimed solely at the coal industry and more specifically, Appalachian coal,” Reps. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) wrote Monday in an op-ed in Roll Call.

Unilaterally implementing some of the most sweeping regulatory changes in recent history, the EPA is supplanting well-established, Congressionally justified water quality programs in six Appalachian states and running roughshod over commonly agreed upon principles and practices.

It’s tough to know how the lawmakers would define “recent history” here, but evidently they don’t wish to go back too far. Not to 2002, for example, when the Bush administration unilaterally reclassified mining “waste” as mining “fill,” thereby allowing companies to fill streams more easily. And not to 2008, when the Bush White House gutted a 25-year-old rule prohibiting the disposal of mining debris within 100 feet of streams.

Here’s how The Washington Post described the 2002 change:

The “fill rule,” as the May 2002 rule change is now known, is a case study of how the Bush administration has attempted to reshape environmental policy in the face of fierce opposition from environmentalists, citizens groups and political opponents. Rather than proposing broad changes or drafting new legislation, administration officials often have taken existing regulations and made subtle tweaks that carry large consequences.

And last year, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar pointed out the reasoning behind the 2008 “stream-buffer-zone” change when he noted that it “allows coal mine operators to dump mountaintop fill into streambeds if it’s found to be the cheapest and most convenient disposal option.”

But company expense and convenience, Salazar said in proposing to abandon Bush’s rule, shouldn’t be the only considerations when issuing permits.

We must responsibly develop our coal supplies to help us achieve energy independence, but we cannot do so without appropriately assessing the impact such development might have on local communities and natural habitat and the species it supports.

Whether they can succeed in the face of industry opposition — opposition evidenced by today’s Rogers-Capitol op-ed — is another question.

“The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean,” Hayward said. “The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”

The shrimpers, crabbers, hoteliers and ferrymen of the region would likely disagree.

BP reportedly made some progress over the weekend, inserting into the gusher what’s effectively a big straw that’s pulling about 1,000 barrels a day to barges floating on the Gulf’s surface. That’s a start, but it does nothing to plug to leak.

LaHood emphasized that the new guidelines will benefit not only the planet, but also American drivers, who will see their fuel costs drop as vehicles become more efficient.

“Putting more fuel-efficient cars on the road isn’t just the right thing to do for the environment,” he said. “It’s also a great way for Americans to save more at the pump.”

Jackson, who called the guidelines “historic” and a “win-win program for our economy and the environment,” added that they will also benefit American innovators, who will work to develop more efficient car parts and new batteries, and will mean “$2.3 billion that can stay at home in our economy rather than buying oil overseas.”

In response to a question from FOX News about whether this move has implications for further regulation of greenhouse gases, Jackson said the program will show people that emissions can be easily regulated, without harmful consequences to the economy. “It puts to rest these doomsday scenarios” about greenhouse gas regulations, she said. This is only the first step in regulating emissions, she emphasized; “the president’s big plan for dealing with energy and climate is new legislation.”

The guidelines drew immediate praise from the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which has long advocated national emissions and efficiency regulations rather than patchwork state-by-state rules.

“America needs a roadmap to reduced dependence on foreign oil and greenhouse gases, and only the federal government can play this role,” Dave McCurdy, president and CEO of the Alliance, said in a press release. “Today, the federal government has laid out a course of action through 2016, and now we need to work on 2017 and beyond.”

Update: Elana Schor has some more details on the new guidelines, which would raise average vehicle efficiency to 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016. The rules are more lax for luxury car manufacturers like Mercedes and BMW; they will have extra time to comply.

Sen. Barack Obama today softened his opposition to new offshore drilling, saying in a speech at Michigan State University that he is “willing to consider” allowing additional drilling in a limited number of offshore areas if it helps Congress pass energy legislation.

And that, it seems, is the political calculus behind today’s announcement to expand the spots where offshore drilling will be allowed. But here’s a note to the White House: It’s not working.

Even as environmentalists are screaming bloody murder, GOP leaders are already pouncing on the plan — which would open large expanses of the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico and the waters north of Alaska to oil drilling — as too limited in scope. It’s the same type criticism we heard on health care reform (even after Democrats dropped the public option). It’s the same type of criticism we’re hearing on financial reform (even though Democrats have scrapped the stand-alone consumer protection agency). And now we’re hearing it in the energy debate — as if the art of compromise doesn’t involve meeting the other side somewhere in the middle.

If this doesn’t prove the claims that the Republicans have been politically motivated to oppose everything the Democrats propose, nothing will. As an experiment, President Obama should endorse John Boehner for re-election in November. The House minority leader would probably vote for his challenger.

Peterson, at the time, seemed pleased. “We have reached an agreement that works for agriculture and contributes to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States,” he said in a statement announcing the deal. Just days later, Peterson voted in favor of the bill. But that was then, and this is now.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported over the weekend that Peterson would no longer vote for the climate change bill — even if the concessions remain.

The Agriculture Committee chairman said he was “stuck voting” for the bill (which awaits Senate action) in June because House Speaker Nancy Pelosi granted his requests for broad agriculture concessions, but he won’t support it again if it remains unchanged….

“First of all, this isn’t going anyplace in the Senate,” Peterson said. “But if it did and we ended up with a bill that was similar to what came out of the House and that was going to become law, I would vote no.”

In an election year, with unemployment still hovering in double digits, it’ll be hard enough for Democratic leaders to pass legislation addressing global warming. Peterson’s defection — should it be indicative of a trend among moderate Democrats — only adds to the party’s headaches.

The result? Of the new vehicles sold under the program, the top three were all Japanese — the Toyota Corolla, Honda Civic and Toyota Camry — and only two of the top 10 were built by one of Detroit’s Big Three automakers.

Fast forward five months, and the same lawmaker who designed the program is now blasting the Japanese for excluding American models from Japan’s own clunkers initiative. The Washington Post reports today that Rep. Betty Sutton (D-Ohio), who sponsored America’s clunkers program, filed a resolution Tuesday “calling for the U.S. trade officials to initiate a trade case against Japan if its program continues to exclude U.S. brands.”

“It’s outrageous,” Sutton said Wednesday. “They specifically designed it to exclude the participation of U.S. auto imports.”

This is no black and white issue. The foreign transplants do plenty of manufacturing in the U.S., creating thousands of jobs, particularly in the Southern states. Still, if the goal was to boost sales in Detroit, Sutton might have fought harder to limit the program to vehicles made in the U.S., as her initial proposal would have done.