State Department’s Report on the Environmental Impacts of Keystone XL: Who Did the Research and Was it Unbiased?

On March 1, 2013, the US State Department released a Draft Supplementary Environmental Impact Statement on the environmental effects of the proposed building of the Keystone XL Pipeline. The report concludes reassuringly that “environmental and climate change impacts are manageable.”  As reported in InsideClimateNews, the relatively benign conclusions of the report on the environmental impact of the Keystone proposal were based on analyses provided by companies with significant ties to the oil and pipeline industries.

On June 11, 2013 the The Huffington Post reported that the Sierra Club is sufficiently alarmed about these industry ties that it has filed a lawsuit against the State Department. The lawsuit alleges that the State Department is withholding crucial documents related to its Environmental Impact Statement, including “evidence related to potential conflicts of interest.”

Do the ties between the companies involved in preparing the report and the energy industry cast serious doubt on the independence of their conclusions? The Critical Assessment of Research (see Chapters 3 and 5) discusses the various ways in which the financial interests of researchers or the sponsors of research can affect the conclusions of the research.  Is this another case where financial self-interest trumps our need for disinterested research?