A significant victory for the environmentalists came this week with the announcement of the delay of the decision on the fate of the Keystone XL Pipeline. The Obama administration has announced that the decision has been postponed until after the 2012 election, presumably to save what is left of the support group for Obama’s reelection and redeem the opponents of the Keystone XL Pipeline. With this delay, it becomes more plausible for the pipeline to be rejected and the project to be halted. TransCanada is not happy with this decision and it is unclear how it will affect the time-sensitive contracts. Hopefully it will have enough of a negative effect on the contracts that the pipeline will become less of an option and the controversy will die out. That is very unlikely, but this is still an event to celebrate for the environmentalists and all of the other people protesting the pipeline.
The two articles this week highlighted the victory for the supporters of rejecting the pipeline, except in different ways. The article from the International Business Times merely stated the facts regarding the decision being pushed back past the 2012 presidential election. It also covered the diversity of the opposition group and reiterated a few statements from the environmentalist point of view, mainly highlighting the thought that it should have not taken this long to get such strong support for opposing the pipeline. The article from the Huffington Post took a different approach and tried to discredit the claims of the supporters of the pipeline. It did a good job of detailing the falsities of the pipeline’s supporters’ claims, but provided only a small voice for the supporters, leading to a very biased article (as usual). There were many valid issues that it brought up, but it is basically preaching to the choir since the Huffington Post is not read by very many people who would support the pipeline.
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/248191/20111112/environmental-groups-celebrate-keystone-xl-pipeline-success.htm
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-tullis/keystone-xl-supporters_b_1088976.html?ref=green