From Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/environment/elizabeth-warren-comes-down-hard-against-global-warming-separates-herself-hillary
Warren stands up to a project that could enrich the Koch brothers by tens of billions.
By Eric Zuesse
December 21, 2013
On Friday, December 20, Democratic U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren finally separated herself clearly from former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, regarding the issue of climate change and global warming.
TransCanada Corporation wants to build the Keystone XL Pipeline to carry oil from Alberta Canada’s tar sands to two refineries owned by Koch Industries near the Texas Gulf Coast, for export to Europe. Hillary Clinton has helped to make that happen, while Elizabeth Warren has now taken the opposite side.
Secretary of State Clinton, whose friend and former staffer Paul Elliot is a lobbyist for TransCanada, had worked behind the scenes to ease the way for commercial exploitation of this, the world’s highest-carbon-emitting oil, 53% of which is owned by America’s Koch brothers. (Koch Industries owns 63% of the tar sands, and the Koch brothers own 86% of Koch Industries; Elaine Marshall, who is the widow of the son of the deceased Koch partner J. Howard Marshall, owns the remaining 14% of Koch Industries.)
David Goldwyn, who was former Secretary Clinton’s Special Envoy and Coordinator for International Energy Affairs, is yet another lobbyist for TransCanada. So, TransCanada has two of Hillary Clinton’s friends working for it. Elliot and Goldwyn worked with Clinton’s people to guide them on selecting a petroleum industry contractor (not an environmental firm or governmental agency) to prepare the required environmental impact statement for the proposed pipeline.
Secretary Clinton’s State Department allowed the environmental impact statement on the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline to be performed by a petroleum industry contractor that was chosen by the company that was proposing to build and own the pipeline, TransCanada. That contractor had no climatologist, and the resulting report failed even at its basic job of estimating the number of degrees by which the Earth’s climate would be additionally heated if the pipeline is built and operated. Its report ignored that question and instead evaluated the impact that climate change would have on the pipeline, which was estimated to be none.
Continue reading at: http://www.alternet.org/environment/elizabeth-warren-comes-down-hard-against-global-warming-separates-herself-hillary
