Pipeline of Payoffs: Keystone XL Op-Ed Tarred by Dishonesty

Foreign Affairs, perhaps the most influential journal of international relations in the world, recently published an article arguing that the Obama administration has spoiled its relationship with Canada. 

The number one reason? Obama’s decision to delay permissions enabling TransCanada Corp to build an oil pipeline from Alberta through the heart of the U.S. to refineries in Texas.

The article’s authors, Derek Burney and Fen Osler Hampson, rail against Obama’s decision, citing economic short-sightedness and decrying the president for “cav[ing] to environmental activists.”

But there may be more at play here than pure concern for U.S.-Canada relations.

Burney serves on the board of TransCanada, where his current and deferred stock holdings are worth an estimated $1.7 million. In 2008, he earned $194,000 in fees and retainer just for sitting on the board.

Burney and Hampson use their Foreign Affairs platform to extol the benefits of the pipeline:

"The completed project would have shipped more than 700,000 barrels a day of Albertan oil to refineries in the Gulf Coast, generated tens of thousands of jobs for U.S. workers and met the needs of refineries in Texas that are desperately seeking oil from Canada." 

But here's what they don’t say:

A TransCanada executive admitted on CNN that permanent jobs as a result of the pipeline would number “in the hundreds, certainly not in the thousands” from Montana to Houston.

According to a State Department Environmental Impact Statement, just 6,000 temporary construction jobs would be generated, and as few as 20 permanent ones.

Burney and Hampson continue: “The project posed little risk to the landscape it traversed.” 

Really? TransCanada's pipeline, if approved, will transport crude tar sands oil over 1,700 miles through the heartland states, including Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma.

Pipelines built by Enbridge, a company already exploiting Canada’s tar sands, leaked more than a million gallons of oil in 2009 into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River; 275,000 gallons in a suburb of Chicago; and 126,000 gallons in Neche, North Dakota, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

And tar sands extraction can be deadly: A report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that the oil sands industry currently releases 13 chemicals that are considered primary pollutants under the Clean Water Act into the Athabasca River and its watershed. Communities living downstream from the extraction sites, like the Fort Chipewyan First Nation have seen a rise in cancer rates.

If the chemicals don’t kill you, try the pollution. Tar sands extraction releases three times the carbon dioxide emissions of conventional oil extraction.

In a recent New York Times op-ed, NASA climate scientist James Hansen argued, “Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas, and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era…Global temperatures would become intolerable. Civilization would be at risk.”

In other words, the Keystone XL pipeline project threatens much more than just the landscape it traverses. 

Foreign Affairs might seem obscure to the general public, but it is “read and reread and stored for reference by almost every state department, every major espionage agency, every political-science department, every international scholar,” according to an AP article about its influence.

Burney and Hampson’s article is already making waves—a number of high-profile Canadian papers have run op-eds based on their conclusions. Few mention Burney’s ties to TransCanada. In the original version the article, Foreign Affairs did not disclose Burney’s financial conflict of interest. 

Seventy-nine percent of Foreign Affairs' readership is in the U.S. Here’s hoping that American decision-makers can read between the lines.

Do you believe that the U.S.-Canada relationship was strained by President Obama's decision to punt on the Keystone XL pipeline? Tell us in the comments.

Alison Fairbrother is the director of the nonpartisan Public Trust Project, which investigates and reports on misrepresentations of science by corporations and government. She has written for the Washington Monthly, the Washington Spectator, Grist, and Politics Daily, among others. Alison is based in Washington DC. @adfairbrother