Oil industry wrote State Department report on Keystone
The US government report that minimized pipeline environmental impact was drafted by consultants who also work for TransCanada and the American Petroleum Institute.
State Department’s Office of the Inspector General confirmed that it will investigate evidence that the agency violated ethics guidelines when it hired an oil industry consultant to draft the Keystone XL environmental impact statement This evidence adds to the growing criticism that the State Department’s conclusion, which minimizes the Keystone XL’s profound impact on U.S. carbon pollution, is based on a faulty and biased review. In fact, the tar sands pipeline is a climate disaster waiting to happen.
In April and again in July, the Sierra Club and partner groups presented evidence of ethics violations by State and their consultant, ERM. We requested that the Office of the Inspector General investigate how and why the State Department hired ERM despite the company’s close ties to TransCanada, the company behind the pipeline proposal, and to the American Petroleum Institute, the industry lobbying group that is leading PR efforts to promote the pipeline and an organization of which ERM is a dues-paying member.
ERM was legally obliged to disclose both its connection to Big Oil as well as any way in which it might financially benefit from completion of Keystone XL. But ERM failed to disclose its conflicts of interest, and the State Department failed to verify ERM’s assertions that it had no interest in the outcome of the pipeline decision. When these conflicts first appeared in documents that demonstrated the connections between ERM employees and oil companies that would benefit from the Keystone XL, the State Department redacted these biographies on its website in an attempt to conceal the connections from the public.
This situation is, sadly, a repeat of the State Department’s hiring of Cardno-Entrix, another “conflicted” oil industry consultant, which the department hired to draft the 2011 environmental review of Keystone XL. An Inspector General investigation of that process concluded in 2012 that the consultant was biased and went on to recommend that the State Department redesign its process to ensure that consultants who might profit from a decision are not in charge of the environmental review for that decision. The State Department clearly ignored that recommendation that the fox should not guard the henhouse.
http://climateandcapitalism.com/2013/08/07/oil-industry-wrote-state-department-report-on-keystone-xl/
This happened under Sec of State Clinton
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I knew about this, but I am sure many others did not.
Cue the apologists. 
Her dirty little hands are all over the TPP as well.
