Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton he has “serious concern” about TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipelineReid — in an Oct. 5 letter to Clinton first reported on by The Washington Post — weighs in on the pipeline project for the first time and gives critics more ammunition from Capitol Hill in their battle to get the State Department to deny a permit for the project.
In the letter, the Nevada Democrat echoes other Democrats and a range of environmental groups in voicing concern about the potential environmental impacts of the pipeline, which would carry oil sands-based crude oil from Alberta to refineries in Texas.
“The proponents of the pipeline would be wiser to invest instead in job-creating clean energy projects, like renewable power, energy efficiency or advanced vehicles and fuels that could employ thousands of people in the United States rather than increasing our dependency on unsustainable supplies of dirty and polluting oil that could easily be exported,” Reid wrote Clinton. “The fastest and best way to break our addiction to oil and free our country and our economy from the dangerous grip of OPEC is to develop and deploy new technologies and clean affordable alternatives that destroy demand for oil not exacerbate it.”
“I have been contacted by many people across the nation who believe the Final Environmental Impact Statement fails to adequately consider any meaningful alternatives to the proposed pipeline and the threats it poses to our air, land, water, climate and public health,” Reid wrote. Those critics want the analysis to be rejected and reworked, he wrote.
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