Kleeb: Keystone XL will never be built

Say shit and it comes sliding in on a shovel.

Nearly twice as much as originally believed or some 407,000 gallons of oil leaked last year from a faulty Keystone pipeline in Marshall County, South Dakota just days before Nebraska officials announced its decision on an alternative for an additional TransCanada route.

Jane Kleeb of Bold Nebraska says support for TransCanada's day in court is facing its final argument.

"The Keystone XL pipeline will never be built," said Kleeb. "TransCanada clearly does not have the support necessary for this project, since the company could secure just 500,000 bpd of commitments from shippers on its 830,000 bpd-capacity pipeline — and that's only with a giant subsidy gift directly from the Canadian government. What's more, the landowners' lawsuit challenging the Nebraska Public Service Commission's approval of an *illegal* pipeline route is still set to be heard."

Read it all here.

Further construction of KXL through Nebraska won't happen for at least another year.

Landowners on Monday submitted a 36-page brief to the Nebraska Supreme Court, asking the court to nullify the Public Service Commission’s approval in November of a route for the pipeline across the state.

Get the rest here.

Besides, adding pipelines makes Vladimir Putin grumpy.

The same geology that forces engineers to rebuild I-90 through West River South Dakota every year also makes construction of the Keystone XL pipeline untenable.

While East River, South Dakota has been destroyed by industrial agriculture West River remains mostly intact but that is changing.

After years of frenetic drilling, the environmental footprint on the reservation is visible in all corners. Flaring, the practice of burning off excess natural gas that’s too expensive to get to market, is evident throughout the reservation. Environmental disasters like the pipeline leak in 2014 that spilled 1 million gallons of salt water that contaminated Lake Sakakawea are not uncommon. The contaminated water, a waste byproduct of oil production, flowed through a ravine and into Bear Den Bay of Lake Sakakawea. These same problems could occur along the shores of Lake Oahe. Is the State of South Dakota prepared to handled the higher traffic rates, the environmental concerns, and the increase in crime that follow these booms?

Read the rest here.

Meade County highway superintendent Lincoln Shuck said the six-year-old road haul agreement, signed by another county road superintendent and a largely different county commission, needs to be re-examined before any use of roads by TransCanada vehicles begins. “It should be revisited whenever there is a new commission so everyone’s on board,” Shuck said.

Read more here.

After Manape LaMere renounced his citizenship, disenrolled from the Yankton Sioux Tribe, and gave up his Social Security number he joined the resistance to the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline at the Wiconi Un Tipi Camp near Lower Brule.

He describes the current state of American-tribal relations as that of an apartheid government toward an oppressed minority. To break free from that dysfunctional relationship, tribes must break free from America completely in order to be treated as equals, LaMere said.

Read the Kevin Abourezk story at indianz.

The Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe has created a website to raise funding and awareness for the dispossession of treaty land, natural resources and to provide information about the nation's battles against the Dakota Excess and Keystone XL Pipelines.

Photos are of Caffeine Dreams taken in 2013 before they moved from their downtown Omaha location.