Keystone XL history and legacy, now in handy book form

InsideClimate News, the folks that won a 2013 Pulitzer for their coverage of the Dilbit Disaster, the million-gallon spill of Canadian tar sands oil into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River in 2010, have a new book out today on the history of the battle over the Keystone XL pipeline.

The pipeline (also known as KXL, and covered extensively in these pages) is a focal point in a battle between big energy interests and their supporters in Congress and those concerned with the pollution and climate implications of opening a fat spigot for Canadian reserves of this thick, carbon-rich oil — with the Obama White House trying to find a politically palatable middle.

The ICN book, Keystone and Beyond: Tar Sands and the National Interest in the Era of Climate Change, which is available for a brief time as a free download, is an origins story, of sorts, tracing the KXL controversy to the earliest days of the Bush-Cheney administration. But given, after all, that this is InsideClimate News, it promises to finish with a close look at the oil pipe’s place in the current president’s increasingly visible push to define his climate policy legacy.

Needless — or perhaps needed — to say, helping anyone unearth the carbon found in Canadian tar sands is believed by most climate scientists to prove a very ominous mark on that legacy.

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