Quigley Statement On the Proposed Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline

Congressman Quigley submitted the following statement during the June 29 hearing on the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

"Thank you for taking the time to hold this important hearing on the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

Recently, I joined many of my colleagues on a letter to Secretary Clinton expressing concerns regarding the permitting process for TransCanada's proposed Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline. This pipeline would deliver up to 900,000 barrels per day of tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada over 2,000 miles to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast, more than doubling U.S. consumption of tar sands oil.

Tar sands are strip mined and drilled from beneath the pristine Boreal Forest, one of the last remaining intact ecosystems. Tar sands require huge energy inputs to upgrade and refine. In fact, extraction and upgrading"to produce synthetic crude oil from the tar sands"causes about three times more greenhouse gas emissions than the production of conventional crude oil.

The environmental devastation resulting from tar sands production goes beyond its impact on the climate. Tons of forest and soil must be cleared and dumped to access the tar sands below. In addition, in the mining, oil companies use three times more fresh water than fuel produced. This water is polluted in the process and is dumped into massive, toxic "tailing ponds, where it stays for decades. These toxic waste dumps are so large they can be seen from space. Upgrading the tar sands also results in high levels of dangerous air pollutants.

Chicago, my hometown, is also the hometown of over 500,000 asthmatics. We're dealing with skyrocketing rates of death due to asthma - giving Chicago the unfortunate title of the "Nation's asthma capital". But, we're not the only city with this problem. A report released by the American Lung Association reported nearly 60 percent of Americans live in areas where air pollution has reached unhealthy levels that can make people sick. These people are sick because of pollutants like tar sands.

As Al Gore wrote in 2005, "it is now clear that we face a deepening global climate crisis that requires us to act boldly, quickly and wisely. Tar sands are a piece of the larger climate crisis, a crisis that has a hefty cost - the cost of carbon."

So, we can burn coal, creating sodium, thallium, mercury, boron, aluminum and arsenic which is pumped out of the factory and into the air.

We can blow the tops off mountains, allowing streams of concentrated toxicity to leach coal slurry poison into wells and aquifers.

We can send tar sands 1,700 miles across American soil.

Or, we can stop stripping our land, polluting our air and waters and do what's right - turn away from crutches like tar sands and toward a pragmatic plan to address carbon."