Ottawa

Keystone rhetoric and reality

Charles Pierce traces those “environmental extremists” to Nebraska.

What gets lost in all of this is that the most stalwart opposition to the crazy notion of running a pipeline of the world’s dirtiest carbon-based fuel through what is literally the bloodstream of the nation’s farm economy is coming from landowners in Nebraska. Trans Canada, the company that wants to build the pipeline, already has folded and offered an alternate route that it says would keep the pipeline out of the Sandhills. (The danger to the aquifer remains.) But the ranchers whose property abuts this new route are not yet satisfied … “We’ve been called radical environmentalists,” Frisch said, “but we’re just looking out for our livelihood.”

Separately, the New York Times’ Joe Nocera says “all of Harper’s ministers have been instructed to stop making comments that might be construed as interfering in the American presidential election.” It’s unclear (at least to me) if that much has been reported previously in Canadian media.

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