Emails: Obama Administration Colluded With Enviro Groups To Waylay Keystone Pipeline

Senator Heidi Heitkamp, call your office.

Newly disclosed emails suggest senior policy officials at the Environmental Protection Agency and environmental groups are working closely to kill the Keystone XL pipeline, critics say.

“These damning emails make it clear that the Obama administration has been actively trying to stop this important project for years,” Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., who has long advocated for the Canada-to-Texas pipeline’s construction, said in a statement to Fox News.

The emails were obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request by the Energy and Environment Legal Institute. In one communication, Lena Moffit of the Sierra Club wrote to three senior policy staffers at the EPA, including Michael Goo, who was then the associate administrator for policy.

“Thanks so much for taking the time to meet with us on Keystone XL yesterday,”she wrote. ”Let me know if I can be helpful in any way — particularly in further identifying those opportunities for EPA to engage that don’t involve ‘throwing your body across the tracks,’ as Michael put it.”

EELI senior legal fellow Chris Horner told Fox News that as a government agency, EPA couldn’t be seen as overtly trying to kill Keystone, but was reaching out to environmental groups for other ideas on how to do it.

“On its face,” Horner told Fox News, “it smacks of classic secret dealing and an uncomfortably close working relationship and one that is known to these parties, but quite plainly not advertised to the public.”

Meanwhile oil train derailments – including one near Casselton here in North Dakota which resulted in a massive explosion and the evacuation of thousands of citizens (but, thankfully, no casualties) – are the result of a spike in oil-by-rail shipments. A situation that is obviously exacerbated by delays in pipeline infrastructure.

The Keystone XL pipeline project would take as much as 100,000 barrels per day, just over 10% of current North Dakota oil production. That’s 100, barrels per day not shipped on trucks which overcrowd our highways, or trains which crowd the rails.

But it’s not being built, because the Obama administration won’t let it be built. And, apparently, even went so far as to collude with environmental groups to stop the pipeline.

North Dakota Senator Heidi Heitkamp campaigned on building the Keystone pipeline. Will she speak out condemning the EPA’s collusion? Or will her partisan loyalty to President Barack Obama, and her financial interests in Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway, supersede her campaign promises?