David Wilkins, a lobbyist for Canadian oil interests and a prominent supporter of the Romney presidential campaign, has guaranteed approval of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline if President Obama is defeated. In an interview with the Financial Post, the former ambassador to Canada during the George W. Bush administration said that the risky tar sand project would “absolutely be approved if a Republican gets elected president”:

Q: What will be the fate of the Keystone XL pipeline, in your opinion?

WILKINS: It will absolutely be approved if a Republican gets elected president. I am hopeful it will be approved [under Obama]. There are two schools of thought on this: If Mr. Obama gets re-elected, he will listen to his base and never approve it. The other school of thought believes Mr. Obama will approve it as he no longer has to rely on his environment base – I don’t know which one it is.

A long-time South Carolina legislator, Wilkins chaired the 2004 Bush re-election efforts in that state before being picked as ambassador to Canada. He then joined the Nelson Mullins lobbying firm, where he advocates for Alberta, Canada oil and timber interests. Wilkins is a registered lobbyist for the province of Alberta, the tar sands company Nexen Inc., Alberta Energy, and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

Wilkins supported the candidacy of Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) before joining the Romney campaign in January. Announcing his endorsement of Romney, Wilkins cited the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

Showing remarkable gall, Canadian environmental minister Peter Kent took time from a climate change summit with the United States to promote the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. At the summit, Kent and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced a coalition to reduce short-lived climate pollutants. Kent called the deal, to which Canada has pledged $3 million, a “critical step forward” in the fight against climate change. Kent also pushed Clinton to approve the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, which alone would add five billion tons of greenhouse pollution to the atmosphere over its lifetime:

Environment Minister Peter Kent on Thursday pressed U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the merits of the Keystone XL pipeline and affirmed the Harper government’s belief the Obama administration’s rejection of the $7-billion project had “nothing to do with the merit of the application.”

But Kent, in Washington for a summit on climate change, pointedly declined to weigh in on current efforts by congressional Republicans to strip the U.S. State Department of its authority to approve a new application for the 2,700-kilometre [1700 mile] oilsands pipeline.

Kent’s promotion of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline made a mockery of the climate pollution deal covering methane, hydrofluorocarbons, and black carbon, to which the United States has pledged $12 million and Canada $3 million. The Keystone XL pipeline is a $7000 million project.

“Action on short-lived climate pollutants will have clear benefits for particularly vulnerable regions like the Canadian Arctic,” Kent said. “The fragile Arctic environment is susceptible to the impacts of short-lived climate pollutants which may be partly responsible for the accelerated warming trend that we are recording there.”

The worst thing Canada can do to the “fragile Arctic environment” would be to mine and burn the “carbon bomb” of the tar sands.

If the short-lived pollution deal is a “critical step forward” in the fight against global warming, then investing billions in the exploitation of Canada’s tar sands is a giant leap backward.

“Spoil,” a 45-minute documentary by the International League of Conservation Photographers, highlights the potential environmental and social disaster that could result from the construction of the Enbridge Northern Gateway tar sands pipeline, through the eyes of some of the world’s top nature photographers. That pipeline would go from Alberta’s tar sands, over the Canadian Rockies, and through a fragile rainforest ecosystem in British Columbia to feed the energy-hungry Asian markets. The entire documentary is free to watch online:

Although Keystone XL advocates like to portray the flowing of tar sands crude to China as inevitable, the dangerous Northern Gateway pipeline is just as controversial.

Ahead of today’s hearings on the controversial Northern Gateway tar sands pipeline, Canada’s Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver called opponents to tar sands development foes of Canada who undermine national interest.

Oliver’s unexpectedly frank open letter charged that environmental groups attract “funding from foreign special interest groups” and draw “jet-setting celebrities,” referring to donations from U.S. charitable foundations. His flippant treatment of tar sands opponents highlight the divide between national self-interest and environmental concern on the issue:

These [environmental] groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda. They seek to exploit any loophole they can find, stacking public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill good projects. They use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest. They attract jet-setting celebrities with some of the largest personal carbon footprints in the world to lecture Canadians not to develop our natural resources. Finally, if all other avenues have failed, they will take a quintessential American approach: sue everyone and anyone to delay the project even further.

Now, the pro-oil sands group Ethical Oil is seeking to ban all foreigners from the discussion. An Ethical Oil spokesperson bluntly said, “Foreigners and their foreign hired hands should butt out.” However, many foreign companies are involved in the tar sands and the issue reaches far beyond Canada. NASA climatologist James Hansen has said if they are developed as planned, it’s “essentially game over” for the climate.