“During the past two years, environmentalists have coalesced around opposition to the seventeen-hundred-mile Keystone pipeline, which would carry oil from northern Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf of Mexico,” Ryan Lizza writes in the Sept. 16 issue of The New Yorker.
“Because the project crosses an international border, it requires the approval of the State Department and the President; a decision is expected in the coming months,” Lizza writes in an in-depth article that runs to more than 9,000 words.
Lizza sums up the controversy over the pipeline thusly: “Supporters of Keystone consider it essential to reducing the United States’ reliance on oil from the Middle East and unstable countries like Venezuela; its critics view it as Obama’s best chance to make a clear stand against one of the dirtiest fossil fuels contributing to climate change.”
