Canadian ambassador will push for pipeline,
The future of a controversial pipeline oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf Coast will be central to speeches Canadian Ambassador Gary Doer will give Friday in Austin.
The Keystone XL Pipeline could carry 830,000 barrels of oil a day from Canada, through East Texas, to the Gulf Coast.
The project is opposed by many environmental groups for a host of reasons, including that it encourages dependence on climate-harming fossil fuels. But a U.S. State Department report released in January found the pipeline would not significantly worsen carbon pollution.
Public comment on that report closes Friday.
The Canadian government has promoted the pipeline, and Doer, as ambassador to the United States, has played a key role in pressing the project on American soil.
Doer will speak in the morning at the University of Texas’ student activities center. He then will give a luncheon speech downtown at the Austin Club to the Austin Economic Club.
“If you say ‘no’ to the pipeline, you’re saying ‘yes’ to higher greenhouse gases,” Doer said in an interview, citing the State Department report, which forecast that if the pipeline project were killed, oil would be extracted from Canada at the same rate and shipped by rail instead.
A handful of environmental groups have announced plans to use the occasion of Doer’s visit to protest the pipeline at the south gates of the Capitol.
“Doer is coming basically to sell this pipeline to energy-savvy people,” Vanessa Ramos, an organizer with Public Citizen said. “But Austin is a place where we want to know more about clean energy, not a climate-killing project not in our national interest.”
The pipeline project is the subject of an Austin-produced documentary premiering Monday at the SXSW film festival at the Paramount. The documentary, titled “Above All Else,” is about a tree-top blockade of the pipeline in East Texas.