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Greenpeace USA President Phil Radford sent a formal complaint this week to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) calling for an investigation into TransCanada’s use of wildly inflated jobs figures in promoting its application to build the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. The letter asks the SEC to review the false and misleading claims made by TransCanada on a number of matters related to the pipeline. Greenpeace recieved confirmation from the SEC that the complaint had been referred to its Division of Enforcement.

Although President Obama rejected the company’s first proposal to build the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, industry-friendly Republicans continue to push for its construction, often citing vastly inflated jobs figures. The Perryman Report commissioned by TransCanada is the source of much of the bogus pipeline jobs information. 

Despite the fact that the State Department and independent reviews definitively debunked the claims to “20,000 jobs” and even “hundreds of thousands of jobs” tied to the Keystone XL project, the lie lives on like a zombie, parroted by the echo chamber led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, API’s Jack Gerard, and of course Mitt Romney and the GOP.

This lie must be stopped or it will continue to contaminate the public discourse.

The Greenpeace SEC letter [PDF] states:

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American Petroleum Institute President Jack Gerard today announced the oil and gas industry’s latest election-year scare campaign to threaten the demise of the U.S. economy unless Big Oil gets its every wish in Washington. This year the wish list includes approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, expanded offshore drilling on both coasts, opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and more federal lands in the West to drilling, and smaller buffer zones between drilling operations and drinking water supplies.

What if Washington doesn’t comply by delivering Keystone XL and the rest of the wish list? Gerard, the oil industry’s chief bully, threatens “huge political consequences” for Barack Obama. 

You can almost set your watch to this industry’s tired plays on this front. If it’s January of a presidential election year, it must be time for the oil industry to threaten Washington politicians to ensure they continue to do the industry’s bidding. The threats are delivered in the form of outlandishly expensive advertising campaigns and punditry tours, aided by a captive media that serves its role as stenographer for the industry’s inflated jobs figures and misleading claims.

The API campaign is nothing more than a fresh skin on a very old and stale argument – that President ______ (insert current name) needs to continue opening up more of the nation’s lands, particularly public lands, for oil and gas drilling, OR ELSE ______(insert latest political talking point), in this case “jobs jobs jobs” will be lost (a bogus argument). 

CNN notes the close correlation between API’s target states and some of the hottest states in the 2012 U.S. elections – hint: they’re the same.

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BP, the oil major responsible for the biggest offshore oil disaster in U.S. history, is officially returning to deepwater oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. The Obama Interior Department "awarded" BP $27 million worth of leases for oil-and-gas exploration in the Gulf waters into which the company and its accomplices dumped roughly 5 million barrels of oil in April 2010.

The Interior Department conducted its first Gulf lease sale since the BP disaster and announced today the winning bids from 20 different companies totaling $712 million. Adding a strange insult to injury, the lease sale was conducted in New Orleans, home to many fishermen and small business owners whose livelihoods were imperiled by BP's reckless drilling disaster.

In its coverage, BP Awarded $27 Million in Leases for Gulf Oil, Gas Exploration, the National Journal reports that:

BP bid a total of $109.9 million on 15 leases and won 11 for $27.4 million, Interior's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management reported in a list of sales posted on its website.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said:

“This marks a milestone with respect to the greatest overhaul in the America’s history,” Salazar said of the offshore-drilling safety reforms and changes implemented by Interior since the April 2010 explosion of a BP well in the Gulf led to the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history. “We believe we can move forward with oil and gas development.”

The only milestone this really marks is the renewed guarantee that the oil industry will continue to destroy the Gulf of Mexico one disaster at a time in its pursuit of dangerous, extreme energy. 

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Brave New Foundation, which is producing a series of videos called "Koch Brothers Exposed" taking a close look at many aspects of the billionaire Koch Brothers' business interests, just released a new installment probing the link between a cancer cluster in Crossett, Arkansas and the nearby operations of Georgia Pacific, a Koch Industries subsidiary.

The Brave New Films project may ring a bell with DeSmogBlog readers. Earlier this year, I wrote about a previous installment in the series taking a look at how the Kochs stand to profit from the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, if it is ever built. (That video is even more interesting to watch on the heels of a must-read InsideClimate News article from earlier this week indicating that the Kochs have offered misleading explanations to Congress and the media about how much they stand to benefit from the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.) 

Now the Brave New series is taking a hard look at another Koch disaster already in progress in an Arkansas community ravaged by cancer. The residents living (and dying) on Penn Road in Crossett suspect that air and water pollution from the town's only manufacturer - Koch subsidiary Georgia Pacific - is making them ill. Georgia Pacific's facility - a plywood, paper mill and formaldehyde resin plant - has dumped millions of gallons of wastewater into open ditches nearby, in violation of the Clean Water Act.

Regular readers of this blog might also hear bells ringing since it was my predecessor, former DeSmogBlog managing editor Kevin Grandia, who first broke the story about Koch Industries' intense efforts to attack the science linking formaldehyde and cancer. 

Grandia wrote on DeSmogBlog in September 2010:

For his commendable charitable work, David Koch was appointed to the National Cancer Advisory Board,a committee of the US National Cancer Institute, in 2004 by President George W. Bush and remains a member today [pdf].

Our research has uncovered very strong ties between Georgia-Pacific, a company co-owned by David Koch through Koch Industries, and a political lobby group called the Formaldehyde Council that is involved in efforts to downplay the dangers posed by formaldehyde to human health. 

As it turned out, David Koch left the NCAB post behind, either in the same month that Grandia exposed the Koch formaldehyde science attack, or six months earlier as Koch Industries claims on KochFacts.com. Either way, his company's involvement in attacking the formaldehyde cancer link is indisputable, as Jane Mayer demonstrated in her Koch expose in The New Yorker. 

Watch the new video "Exposed: Koch Industries and Cancer Risk" below:

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With over 700 people arrested so far in the Keystone XL tar sands action taking place at the Obama White House, and widespread distrust and criticism of the State Department’s final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), this is a critical moment in the fight against a disastrous proposal to build a tar sands pipeline between Alberta and oil refineries along the U.S. Gulf Coast. 

Given the scientific certainty that tar sands oil is a recklessly dirty form of energy - as well as fresh evidence from Oil Change International debunking the claims that increasing our dependence on Canadian oil would be helpful for U.S. national security - it should be a no brainer for the Obama administration to say no to TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline.

But powerful oil industry lobbying, as well as pressure from the Canadian government, seem to have deflated and cast aside this administration’s stated commitments to science-based decisionmaking. Rather than working to transition the nation to a clean energy future now, an Obama administration approval of Keystone XL would further solidify our dirty fossil fuel addiction.

To highlight the influence of oil industry lobbyists over Hillary Clinton’s State Department and its unscientific review of TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline proposal, DeSmogBlog presents a video animation created by artist Mark Fiore, depicting the not-so-far-fetched “State Department Oil Services” led by Hillary Clinton:




Visit DeSmogBlog’s Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline Action Page for more information.

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Below is a compilation of fact sheets, information resources and action items from environmental groups, governments and other groups surrounding the Keystone XL pipeline and the Canadian tar sands. Please contact us or comment below if you know of additional resources we should add to this page.

TarSandsAction.org - Coalition organizing the White House protest and a 10,000+ strong petition urging President Obama to say no to the Keystone XL pipeline.

Friends of the Earth's Keystone XL pipeline resource page, petition and report "Dirty Business: How TransCanada Pipelines bullies farmers, manipulates oil markets, threatens fresh water and skimps on safety in the United States."

NRDC's Stop Dirty Fuels: Tar Sands - Fact sheets about tar sands, Switchboard blogs on the Keystone XL pipeline, and a BioGems petition to stop the Keystone XL pipeline.

National Wildlife Federation's Keystone XL Pipeline page and Tar Sands page- numerous fact sheets on Keystone XL and tar sands.