The U.S. State Department handed President Barack Obama a poisoned chalice when it delivered its review of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline linking the U.S. Gulf Coast to the Alberta tar sands. Then, the industry and the Harper government made matters worse for themselves.

Leaders of advanced economies know that whatever they may do behind the scenes, they cannot afford to look like they are playing last-century oil baron politics in this age of climate change. But the State Department threw open the curtain by first getting caught hiring oil industry consultants to write “their” report and then giving it to industry and Canadian government ahead of time.

Before the State Department even released its report, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and Conservative ministries were spinning the report as a green light. And moments after the release the Harper Conservatives released advertising claiming that the State Department had said Keystone would have “no significant impact on greenhouse gas emissions.”

That is a crucial point since Obama has said his approval will hinge on ensuring that the project will not worsen climate change. But the claim was invented (before the report was read) apparently in the hope that the president and his staff will not read their own department’s findings.

In fact, the State Department report finds that Alberta oilsands cause more greenhouse gas emissions than any other oil and that the pipeline would increase American emissions. The report carefully breaks down the expected range of increase in U.S. climate pollution if the pipeline were approved.

Had the State Department presented its findings like a government agency analyzing the public interest, Obama would be in a much different position. Instead, caught spinning with Canada and the industry, the State Department comes off as in bed with Big Oil at the expense of its own president.

The most pro-pipeline nugget in the report is the conclusion that if oil consumption and prices remain high, that KXL will not affect extraction rates because the tar sands oil will find a market anyway. This reasoning has been thoroughly rebutted by the actions of the Harper government itself.

If this is true, you really have to wonder why millions of Canadian tax dollars have been shoveled into U.S. advertising campaigns and the full court press by the federal and Alberta governments. If the pipeline doesn’t matter to the tar sands, why has so much public money been spent in Washington, D.C., lobbying on behalf of the most profitable industry in the world?

If proponents try to reason that Keystone’s almost 40 million cars worth of new emissions don’t matter when compared to global emissions, they are in effect arguing that all new emissions don’t matter, since where would we ever draw the line? Nowhere.

While preaching austerity to the likes of veterans, the Harper government has poured millions of taxpayer dollars into mismanaging this file. U.S. representatives right up to the ambassador level have talked publicly about the need for some tangible environmental action by Canada so that Obama can point to something to offset the Harper government’s anti-environmental reputation and the impacts of the tar sands.

Instead, the Harper government keeps gutting environmental laws, believing that PR is more powerful than reality, and bullies ahead buying even more ads around Washington. It is an enormous irony that a government so committed to Big Oil has undermined its bedmate in such a hamfisted way.

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Canadians deserve better, as do our American allies. Canada is ranked the absolute worst performer in the industrialized world for action against climate change. Our climate pollution keeps increasing even as U.S. emissions have been decreasing.

There is a growing sense that the Canadian government has chosen the way of the past and are doubling down like schoolyard bullies even as their actions come back to bite.

Tzeporah Berman is a founder of ForestEthics and PowerUp Canada, and a former co-director of Greenpeace International Climate and Energy.She currently works on tar sands and pipeline campaigns in Canada, the U.S. and Europe with many environmental organizations and First Nations.

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