By Tom Kenworthy

Before long the tar sands issue won’t be just about imports from Canada via pipeline.

Utah, which has never met a dirty fuel it didn’t love, has been encouraging efforts to develop a home-grown tar sands industry. Construction on a project located on state lands in the eastern part of the state could begin by the end of the year, according to a story in Environment and Energy Publishing’s Energy Wire:

“It’s not just something that’s up in Canada,” Utah Tar Sands Resistance member Raphael Cordray told E&E. “People don’t know it’s here in Utah. Our goal is to get the citizens of Utah to recognize that there’s a proposed tar sands site in Utah that could become the first commercial site in America, and what is at stake.”

Utah has about a third of the roughly 36 billion barrels of tar sands oil thought to be located in the U.S. Not all of that is estimated to be technically or commercially recoverable, however.  Tar sands contain a form of petroleum called bitumen that can be refined into gasoline. But the process is costly, energy-intensive, and on a life-cycle basis releases far more global warming pollutants than conventional oil refining operations.

U.S. Oil Sands, the Canadian based company that is working to develop the Utah deposits, has leases on about 32,000 acres of land in the state. The company was granted permits to begin production by the state in 2009. But it faces a legal challenge from an environmental group, Living Rivers, which fears tar sands production will harm Utah’s desert and mountain landscapes.

Meanwhile, supporters of another dirty fossil fuel, oil shale, have been making a political ruckus in a number of counties in Utah, Colorado and Wyoming — organized by a former Bush administration Interior Department official who now directs a Utah state office focused on energy development on federal lands in the state.

A number of county boards in the region have approved, or considered approving, a resolution taking the Obama administration to task for scaling back plans by the Bush administration to develop oil shale resources. Combined with efforts on Capitol Hill, this represents the beginning of an all-out election year push by Republicans to agitate for massive developments of dirty and impractical fossil fuels.

Oil shale – not to be confused with shale oil deposits like those in the Bakken field in North Dakota – is an energy developers’ pipe dream. Though oil shale deposits in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah may contain an estimated 1.5 trillion barrels of recoverable oil, it has never been proven to be commercially viable in the U.S.

Oil shale is a rock that contains kerogen and must be heated to very high temperatures to release a synthetic oil. It has “one-third the energy density of Cap’n Crunch!“ Shale oil is conventional oil trapped in reservoirs found in shale rock formations.

Development of oil shale could have a significant impact on already stressed western water supplies, according to a 2010 study by the General Accounting Office. And a recent report by Western Resource Advocates shows that oil shale development would take huge amounts of energy, would have emit large amounts of global warming pollutants, and would increase air pollution problems in the interior West.

Tom Kenworthy is a Senior Fellow with the Center for American Progress Action Fund

Our guest blogger is David Turnbull, the former director of Climate Action Network – International who is chronicling his month-long road trip across the nation in a hybrid car.

There’s a lot that I could write about today — the way driving on country roads rather than interstates lets you have a feel of the land and country you’re driving by, images of the colorful diner where I had lunch in the middle of nowhere in western Oklahoma, the sublimely random and awesome retro ’80s bar I happened upon tonight in Tulsa, etc etc etc.

But tonight I’m going to focus on one experience: I drove through Cushing, Oklahoma today.

Cushing, for those who don’t know, is known as the “pipeline crossroads for the world.” I’m aware of it because it’s been one of the cities at the center of the Keystone XL pipeline debate. The Keystone XL pipeline would, if constructed, transport the world’s dirtiest oil from Canada through the heartland of America to the Texas coast to be refined and, for the most part, shipped overseas. It’s a terrible project, and the President was right to reject it not once, but twice…and yet it keeps coming back like a zombie waking from the dead. Cushing would be a major point in the pipeline, and even today sits at what could be a crucial junction of the Southern portion, which it seems Obama may unfortunately be ready to push forward.

I drove into Cushing late in the afternoon today. When I got there I decided I’d go see a bit of downtown. There were signs talking about a “historic downtown,” so I figured I’d have a look. What I found was depressing, in as much as any town that’s struggling with hard economic times is depressing.

It’s a town where half of the storefronts are closed and boarded up. The main street, the street that is supposed to be the epicenter of the town: nearly deserted. The few people who were actually walking around looked depressed…but maybe that was just me, projecting my own feelings onto my perception of them.

After a quick tour of downtown Cushing, if you can call it downtown, I drove south of town. To where the oil sits. Read more

An amendment by Sen. John Hoeven (R-ND) to force immediate approval of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline failed to get the 60 votes it needed, on a 56-42 vote. Democrats Max Baucus (MT), Begich (AK), Casey (PA), Conrad (ND), Hagan (NC), Landrieu (LA), Manchin (WV), McCaskill (MO), Pryor (AR), Tester (MT), and Webb (VA) voted with Senate Republicans to strip authority for the pipeline’s approval from the president of the United States. Despite the intensity of climate activism in the region, New England Republicans Ayotte (NH), Brown (MA), Collins (ME), and Snowe (ME) stayed with the Republican bloc in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline. The amendment was attached to the unrelated highway funding bill.

Moments earlier, Republicans killed an amendment that would have approved the pipeline if it used American steel and kept the oil for American use.

On Monday, dozens of Native Americans in South Dakota set up a roadblock to prevent trucks from shipping massive tar-sands equipment to Canada until tribal police intervened, arresting five. The Black Hills Sioux Nation Treaty Council and Oglala Sioux Tribe are adamantly opposed to the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline because it crosses through two reservations and their rural water supply system.

The trucks were transporting “treater vessels” across the Pine Ridge Reservation’s Treaty territory, a route that was purportedly worked out in an agreement between the state of South Dakota and Totran Transportation Services, Inc. without the consent of the Oglala Lakota Nation. The truck drivers entrusted with hauling the equipment were instructed to cut through Oglala lands in an attempt to avoid paying South Dakota $50,000 per truck — or $100,000 — in fees to use its state highways.

The Texas semi-trucks, transporting 1.25Million-dollar “Treater Vessels” used in oil, gas and element separation, were stopped in their tracks as they approached the human roadblock…

…The drivers were questioned by those forming the blockade as to why they were crossing Oglala lands. One of the drivers responded that they did not know they were crossing Indian land, only that they were following company directives regarding their assigned routes and that their Canadian Corporation had received this particular route information as a result of a partnership with the State of South Dakota, whose elected officials have always supported the Keystone XL pipeline.

Oglala Tribal police arrived on the scene immediately, and after asking the crowd of around 75 people to disperse, handcuffed five demonstrators and charged each with disorderly conduct. The policemen then escorted the semi-trucks and their payloads back onto the main highway.

Because the Keystone XL pipeline is routed through the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Indian Reservations, it crosses the Oglala Sioux Rural Water Supply System in two places, potentially endangering anyone who might rely on that particular water supply to perform typical daily functions.

-Fatima Najiy

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.

A broad coalition of the grassroots progressive movement is launching a 24-hour effort to mobilize 500,000 people opposing Republican efforts to approve the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. GOP senators “plan to file an amendment mandating the project to the Senate transportation package Monday,” the Hill reports. In a Daily Kos diary, 350.org founder Bill McKibben — who led thousands of Americans who got arrested last summer in front of the White House in opposition to the pipeline — explains the “powerful, unified fight” to “keep this pipeline dead“:

We’re going to war at noon eastern today–non-violent war, but a powerful, unified fight against the heart of right-wing power, the fossil fuel industry. We’re out to collect half a million emails in 24 hours telling the Senate: back up the president and keep this pipeline dead. It’s going to be the most concentrated burst of environmental activism this millennium–and it needs you.

This effort includes a diverse coalition of the national environmental movement — including the Environmental Defense Fund, Rainforest Action Network, the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the National Wildlife Federation and Green For All. As McKibben said, it’s “everyone else who’s ever tried to save a whale, clean a lake, build a park, find a solar job.”

The 24-hour push isn’t just a “green” cause, but one of the American progressive movement. Other organizations participating in the petition drive include MoveOn, Credo, Democracy for America, Public Citizen, Change.org, the Labor Network for Sustainability, and businesses like Patagonia.

Bill McKibben will be on the Colbert Report tonight to discuss the effort to prevent the destruction of our climate for the profit of foreign oil companies.