The Nebraska Public Service Commission on Monday approved our old friend, the Keystone XL pipeline, the continent-spanning death funnel and longtime conservative fetish object. The vote was 3-2, with one Republican member of the PSC jumping to the opposition. This will be celebrated as the final victory for the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel—and for TransCanada, the land-grabbing foreign behemoth that trafficks in it. (Here’s Exhibit A, from The Washington Post.) But there’s many a slip twixt Alberta and Houston, as they’re saying around Marshall County, South Dakota these days.

First of all, there’s no question that the 210,000 gallons of noxious gloop that spilled all over Marshall County last week had an impact on the final PSC vote, making it closer than it might have been. This would indicate that at least part of official Nebraska is increasingly nervous about running tar-sands through or near the most important aquifer on the continent. However, because of skids that were, ah, greased earlier in the process, the state was not allowed to review or to govern on the issues of spillage and public safety. This was ludicrous at the time and looks even more so in the light of current events.

Second, and this is the most important part, the PSC tossed a joker into the deck that most people will overlook. Luckily, we have The Omaha World-Herald to suss the whole thing out.

In a 3-2 vote, the Nebraska Public Service Commission OK’d the so-called “mainline alternative route” for the controversial 36-inch crude oil pipeline, a path that would parallel about 100 miles of the route of the existing Keystone pipeline across the state. TransCanada built the Keystone and has proposed to build the Keystone XL. The decision, while giving the Canadian firm a route across Nebraska, raises many questions. One is that about 40 new landowners, along the 63 new miles of the alternative route, must be contacted to obtain right-of-way agreements for the underground pipe.

Back in the good old days, before the people of Nebraska got their backs up concerning the high-handed way TransCanada was treating them, the company simply would have grabbed up some of the land along the new route while paying off the owners of the rest of it. But now, Nebraska’s had quite enough of the company, its officials, its pipeline, and the entire project in general. The 40 landowners on the route that the PSC approved likely will avail themselves of all the due process that they are, well, due.

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As Crystal Rhoades, a member of the PSC who voted against the pipeline, wrote in her dissenting opinion:

“The route violates the due process of landowners. There are at least 40 landowners along the approved route who may not even know that their land is in this pipeline’s path. Since they might not know that they are in the path of the pipeline, they may not have participated in this proceeding.”

In addition, the State Department hasn’t approved this new route, so that whole process has to begin again. And even if you assume that State will rubber-stamp the new route, and even if you assume that Rex Tillerson has left enough people in place in that department to turn the lights on in the morning, I’d say it’s two more years, minimum, before TransCanada even gets a chance to uncrate its shovels. And that’s not even taking into account the inevitable appeal, the equally inevitable blizzard of new lawsuits, or the promised campaign of civil disobedience. Does the company really want two more years of protracted squabbling, or worse, before it even can begin? That remains an open question.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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