After months and even years of grassroots protests against the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, national media are starting to take notice. CNN’s Randi Kaye featured the controversial pipeline as an “undercovered” story, in a segment with CNNMoney.com’s Steve Hargreaves. Hargreaves portrayed the battle over the foreign pipeline as one of “hopes for the economy” versus “fears for the environment.” Tar sands crude is “a little bit dirtier” than conventional oil, Hargreaves conceded, but he said that the economic benefits of building a pipeline to pump tar sands crude from Canada to Texas refineries will win out:

Ultimately it is an election year and it will create a lot of jobs and it will be a lot of money and Americans are concerned about energy, they’re concerned about energy independence, they’re concerned about high gasoline prices. So to vote — to limit the amount of oil coming in to this country especially coming into it from a place like Canada would be a very difficult thing for Obama to do while facing what’s going to be a tough re-election. So most analysts, yes, they do expect it will be built.

Watch it:

Independent analysts whose work wasn’t paid for by the oil industry believe that the claims Hargreaves made are likely false. The tar sands pipeline will be as bad for the American economy as it is for the environment:

Keystone XL Could Kill American Jobs. TransCanada and the American Petroleum Institute cite a study by the Perryman Group, commissioned by TransCanada, that claims the pipeline’s construction will generate 20,000 American jobs. The U.S. State Department’s analysis, drafted by Cardno Entrix and also commissioned by TransCanada, estimates that the construction will only involve 5,000 to 6,000 workers, including non-American employees.

The only study independent of TransCanada influence, by the Cornell Global Labor Institute, finds that even the State Department’s employment figures are too rosy. In the first stages of the pipeline project, steel from Canada and India was used, and only 11 percent of workers were local hires. The pipeline will reduce air quality in both Canada and the U.S., increasing health care costs and thus killing jobs, for decades after the brief construction period of the pipeline.

Keystone XL Will Increase Gasoline Prices. Gasoline prices are expected to rise in 15 Midwest states, because the pipeline will allow Canadian oil producers to bypass that market and reach Texas refineries for export to China and the rest of the global market. In Canada, TransCanada says that one of the benefits of the pipeline is that it will raise the price of heavy crude oil in the Midwest.

Keystone XL Will Threaten Energy Independence. Canadian tar sands oil won’t reduce American dependence on foreign oil. The Keystone XL pipeline is designed to feed the global market, instead of U.S. demand. Its primary effect on American energy policy will be to increase the profits and thus the political influence of oil industry players like Exxon Mobil and Koch Industries, while accelerating the threats of global warming. Climate change, the greatest threat to global security, could reach a point of no return if Canada’s tar sands are fully exploited.

The Keystone XL debate is not economy versus environment — it’s a battle between dirty energy and clean energy.

CNN, whose campaign coverage has been sponsored for years by the coal and oil industry, has a shoddy track record of promoting dirty, risky, and expensive fossil fuel technologies, from “clean coal” to Arctic drilling.

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In a new television advertisement, oil giant Exxon Mobil promotes Canadian tar sands for “energy security and economic growth,” with the potential to create “hundreds of thousands of jobs.” The narrator, Exxon marketing manager Artis Brown, claims Exxon’s Kearl tar sands project will produce crude “with the same emissions as many other oils”:

America is facing some tough challenges right now. Two of the most important are energy security and economic growth. North America actually has one of the largest oil reserves in the world. A large part of that is oil sands. This resource has the ability to create hundreds of thousands of jobs. At our Kearl oil sands project in Canada, we’ll be able to produce these oil sands with the same emissions as many other oils, and that’s a huge breakthrough. That’s good for our country’s energy security and our economy.

Watch it:

The 30-second ad manages to say almost nothing that isn’t misleading:

“Two Of The Most Important Challenges”: Exxon deliberately ignores mention of the third related challenge that tar sands development affects: global warming. The Kearl tar sands mine contains over 5.5 billion barrels worth of bitumen — the tarry substance that gets processed into synthetic crude through an energy-intensive and ecologically destructive process. Even if the processing of the bitumen didn’t produce huge amounts of greenhouse pollution (see below), using oil from the Kearl project would emit about 2 billion tons of greenhouse pollution. There will be no “energy security and economic growth” in a world ravaged by rapid climate change.

“Hundreds Of Thousands Of Jobs”: The industry study that claims there will be massive job creation from tar sands development — mostly in Canada — admits that 82 percent of the jobs “created” aren’t actually in tar sands production. The oil and gas industry is one of the worst sectors for investment in job creation — green sectors create four times as many jobs with the same investment.

“Same Emissions As Many Other Oils”: Kearl is expected to produce 3.7 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, equivalent to 800,000 passenger vehicles. ExxonMobil is optimistic that experimental technology will reduce greenhouse pollution from oil derived from the Kearl tar sands by about 6 percent (a 25 percent reduction of production-related emissions, which are about 25 percent of total emissions, including combustion). Even with advanced technology, the tar-sands oil production will always be more polluting than conventional oil production.

Each year, the cost to civilization of each added ton of carbon dioxide increases. Exploiting the Canadian tar sands to fuel ExxonMobil’s profits would be suicidal. If Exxon has its way, climate scientist James Hansen warns, “it is essentially game over.” This is why thousands of people are heading to the White House to stage a mass protest to convince President Obama not to approve the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

Our guest blogger is Mike Casey, president of cleantech communications firm Tigercomm.

It’s baffling to see a dirty energy front group operative, Robert Bryce, getting a seat last week next to Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof on the New York Times’ opinion page, with a piece of pro-dirty energy propaganda, without having to say if he’s paid by dirty energy.

I remember from journalism school that opinion pages are run separately from the news pages. But is it really that hard for someone on the Times’ opinion page staff to ask Bryce where his host organization, the Manhattan Institute, gets its money? Don’t Times readers deserve to know that the Manhattan Institute gets a significant amount of money from dirty energy?

I’m not even expecting that the Times actually demand a factual grounding for the opinion pieces it runs. That seems to have gone out of style a while ago. The Washington Post demonstrated this new normal with its tortured sidestepping of questions about why it let columnist George Will demonstrably lie about the wide and deep scientific consensus around global climate disruption. Basically, it seems that you can lie without consequence on the nation’s most influential opinion pages.

But Bryce got away with something much more preventable: pretending he’s some sort of intellectually honest thinker when his organization has ties to dirty energy money that no one bothered to note.

The ease with which intellectual burglars like Bryce can break into the major media’s house of standards is why dirty energy underwrites dozens of PR firms masquerading as think tanks. And they have done so for decades, going back to the call to start farming these groups in the 1971 Powell Manifesto. The result is what can be described as a Front Group Industrial Complex for polluting industries, a network including the Manhattan Institute, Cato Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, and the Institute for Energy Research.

Here’s something to institute on all these “institutes”: Why not have a standard for all opinion pages for papers over a certain basic level of readership requiring opinion page submission finalists to disclose financial conflicts, direct or indirect, on the subject on which they have written?

After all, the Times applies these standards to its own news staff through its code of ethics:

Masquerading. Times reporters do not actively misrepresent their identity to get a story. We may sometimes remain silent on our identity and allow assumptions to be made ­ to observe an institution’s dealings with the public, for example, or the behavior of people at a rally or police officers in a bar near the station house. But a sustained, systematic deception, even a passive one … may be employed only after consultation between a department head and masthead editors. [emphasis added]

So, for the Times’ opinion page, why not apply the spirit of that standard on masquerading by always asking a few direct questions of guest writers about their funding? The total daily time required would be, what, 30 minutes?

I’m a PR guy paid by renewable energy companies, and I proudly say that on my firm’s website. Robert Bryce is a PR guy flacking for dirty energy sources, yet he doesn’t seem to be proudly saying that. In fact, he seems to be going out of his way to avoid discussion of his funding.

By making the polluting industry front group guys answer the funding question when they submit opinion pieces to major papers, it might inject just a little bit of honesty into what is now an all-too-frequent stream of enabled propaganda. For those working to maintain the increasingly endangered standards of good journalism, that seems like a pretty easy one to uphold.