From Esquire

LINCOLN, NEBRASKA-There are two unsung major players in the eight-year saga of our old friend, the Keystone XL pipeline, the continent-spanning death funnel and current conservative fetish object. One of them is orange and black and it has six legs. The other one doesn't. However, the two of them were among the first people to throw a spanner into the works of what looked like a done deal. One of them is a very good interview. The other one isn't.

Since it can't speak for itself, let us speak on behalf of the American Burying Beetle. The American Burying Beetle is an endangered species, which is something I learned covering this story, and because I thirst for knowledge. Anyway, in 2011, the federal Fish and Wildlife Service prevented a researcher from relocating the American Burying Beetle from the proposed pipeline route on behalf of TransCanada, the Canadian energy behemoth that would own and operate the pipeline. As it happens, TransCanada was trapping and moving the beetles before TransCanada had received permission from the State Department to do any work on the pipeline route at all. Environmental groups sued and won, and the American Burying Beetle became the first plaintiff to beat TransCanada in court. This delayed the project.

(Catching and moving the American Burying Beetle is not the glamorous job it might appear to be. The American Burying Beetle is a carrion beetle. Catching it requires a five-gallon bucket. And a dead rat.)

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The second unsung player is a fellow named Sean Sweeney, a Ph.D economist with the Cornell University's Institute for Labor Relations. He does not have to use dead rats in his work. Around the same time that the American Burying Beetle was gumming up the works on the ground in Nebraska, Sweeney and a colleague named Lara Skinner published a report that was the first major shot below the waterline of what were then TransCanada's rather ludicrous predictions concerning the number of jobs the Keystone project would produce.

"We were approached by the Tar Sands Action and they said a study commissioned by TransCanada, sponsored by the Perryman group, is claiming this number of jobs for the pipeline. At that time, I'd barely heard of the pipeline, it wasn't a big news item," Sweeney said. "We started asking the basic question-how did they arrive at this number, 119,000 jobs? Usually, you would get to that number by a certain amount of data would have to be inputted and a certain number of jobs would have to come out the other end.

"We started asking the basic question-how did they arrive at this number, 119,000 jobs?"

"We quickly found out that the data was proprietary, and the preface to the report said we can't tell you what data we used to reach this conclusion. It was going to be difficult right from the start. So we went to the State Department to see the numbers that TransCanada had submitted as part of its application, and those numbers were not consistent with Perryman's numbers. They were considerably lower, both for the direct jobs and for the indirect jobs. It was not substantiated, their claim of 119,000 jobs. It was probably-direct jobs for the entire pipeline-was probably in the realm of 4,500, which is their numbers, which they submitted to the State Department."

Sweeney's report detonated. The New York Times wrote an editorial based on it that was intensely critical of TransCanada, and the report was the first real dent in the company's sales campaign. The Perryman report disappeared from the corporation's website, never to return. Between them, Sean Sweeney and the American Burying Beetle were responsible for delaying the project for the first time for long enough for the opposition to get organized, and for the people and their representatives to look seriously at the project. Not that the propaganda war ceased: Sweeney was red-baited by several conservative outlets, and John Boehner was still using the obsolete 119,000 jobs figure as late as 2014.