Lobbying and Keystone Pipeline

(Community Matters) Surge of Lobbying Fuels Keystone XL Pipeline Project – OpenSecrets Blog | OpenSecrets

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio): “This [approving Keystone] is the right thing to do, the American people support it.”

During the 2010 election cycle, all oil and gas industry interests contributed $22.5 million to federal candidates, about three-fourths of whom were Republicans. To further aid the pipeline’s progress, last year TransCanada hired Paul Elliott to lobby federal agencies such as the Department of State, where Hillary Clinton serves as the secretary. It was Clinton’s State Department that conducted the final environmental review, which approved the project. And Elliott himself formerly worked as the national deputy director of Clinton’s 2008 presidential run. This relationship has led environmental groups to call on the Department of Justice to investigate Elliott and TransCanada’s lobbying.

“Everybody chooses their own advocacy strategy,” Kerekes, American Petroleum Institute. “We’ve been engaged from the beginning. We worked on the draft and supplemental and final environmental impact statement.”

despite my comments and concerns, I don’t know the answer as to whether or not this pipeline should be built. And, I wish the decision would be made based on untainted science as well as economics