State Department
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Obama will make final determination on Keystone XL
Obama has announced that the buck on Keystone XL will stop with him. This image is kind of wishful thinking — it's nice to imagine that Obama will just slice through all the conflict-of-interest BS that's currently going down with TransCanada and the State Department, but the likelihood is that this will not end well. Still, […]
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State Department rejects 94,000 public comments on Keystone XL
The Sierra Club's Beyond Oil campaign collected 296,000 written comments on Keystone XL, and submitted them by email to Cardno Entrix, the TransCanada-affiliated firm that evaluated the pipeline. When a bunch of the comments ended up "lost," they resubmitted them to the State Department. But, says Inside Climate News, the State Department didn't want 'em. […]
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Democrats ask for investigation into Keystone XL
Congressional Democrats decided to stop being polite and start being real about the Keystone XL approval process. Twenty representatives had already petitioned Secretary of State Clinton to look into the issue, and now 14 members of Congress are calling for the State Department's inspector general to investigate. Given that at least some of the problem seems […]
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Sorry, kids: Halloween candy is a human rights nightmare
Here's a really scary story for your Halloween: The candy you're handing out might have been made by foreign students who were tricked into factory labor. Hershey's, which also distributes Cadbury candy in the U.S. and Nabisco candy in Canada, charged students up to $6,000 for a "summer work and travel" program, which actually consisted of drudgery at the packing plant.
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House members say Keystone XL approval process is tainted
Twenty members of the House of Representatives have signed a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, asking her to reject the Keystone XL pipeline on the grounds that the approval process has been tainted by conflicts of interest. The legislators are worried about reports that the State Department hired a TransCanada-affiliated firm to do the pipeline's environmental evaluation. "These relationships alarmingly suggest that the process may not have been objective," they write, "and this decision is too important to be clouded by even the appearance of impropriety."
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State Department picked less-than-objective company to review Keystone XL impact
Sometimes you wish government bureaucrats would just stop and think. It's been clear for a while now that the State Department favors the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. But one would think that they'd like to at least preserve the appearance that they were conducting a thorough and unbiased review of the pipeline’s environmental impacts.
Apparently that wasn't a particular concern, because the department allowed TransCanada, the pipeline operator, to participate in the selection of the company conducting the environmental review. Perhaps less than surprisingly, Transcanada recommended Cardno Entrix, which considers TransCanada a "major client," to do the job. -
State Department and Keystone XL are BFFs, say emails
Hillary Clinton's former deputy national campaign director is now lobbying Clinton and the Department of State on behalf of TransCanada, the company that wants to lay 7,000 miles of pipe between Canada's tar sands and Texas refineries.
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Public disservice: Pipeline hearings run by Keystone XL contractor
State Department public hearings on federal approval for the proposed Keystone XL tar-sands pipeline are being run by a contractor for TransCanada.
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State Department concludes Keystone XL has 'no significant impacts'
The State Department issued its final environmental review of the Keystone XL pipeline, finding it would bring no significant environmental impacts.