A major political victory for environmental activists was partially reversed Thursday after President Barack Obama appeared in Oklahoma to announce that his administration has fast-tracked the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline, a massive project that aims to connect Canada’s tar sands to oil refineries on the Texas gulf coast.

Speaking to Raw Story, environmental author and activist Bill McKibben suggested the Obama administration’s latest move may be due to Washington rhetoric pushing the president to appear that he’s doing something to ease rising oil prices.

“The irony of [this situation] is that Keystone won’t bring down gas prices a bit,” he explained. “In fact, it will raise them significantly across the midwest, precisely because that glut of oil in the region is helping to depress prices for now. That’s one of many ironies. The biggest, of course, is that all this is happening on the week when America is seeing March temperatures completely unheard of in the historical record.”

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Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is leading an effort to crack down on “excessive” Wall Street speculation, said that President Barack Obama’s decision to veto the Keystone XL pipeline has not contributed to high gas prices by sending the wrong message to traders in oil futures markets.

The Daily Caller asked Sanders, “Do you think the [Obama] administration stopping the Keystone Pipeline could have contributed to sending the wrong message to speculators?”

Sanders responded, “We’re dealing with a lot of aspects of energy policy. But once again, if people think that the problem is supply and demand, the facts contradict that. There is more supply than there was three years ago; there is less demand than since 1997. Prices should be going down, not up.”

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WASHINGTON — The contract assigning a third-party company to investigate the environmental impacts of the Keystone XL project adds to questions about the impartiality of the study, after the document was shown to be a binding contract between the outside company and the company building the pipeline, not the State Department.

The contract, posted quietly to a State Department website on Friday in response to a request by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), shows that it is a signed agreement between Entrix, an outside consultant, and TransCanada, the pipeline builder.

The posted version was also heavily excised, with most names and numbers, as well as some entire pages, blacked out.

“What appears to have happened was Entrix was doing an environmental study intending to minimize the potential environmental impacts of Keystone XL,” said Anthony Swift, an energy lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It’s sadly not incredibly surprising. We were dealing with an environmental review that was done by Entrix on TransCanada’s behalf, and that does not pass muster of environmental law.”

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Yesterday, Politico’s website ran a story titled: “Keystone XL handled well by State Department, inspector general says.” The story asserted that “there is no evidence of conflict of interest or bias in the State Department’s review of TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline.”

Well, not quite. The IG found that there wasn’t any technical conflict of interest when the State Department selected the firm Cardno Entrix to perform an environmental impact review of the project, but the report did highlight plenty of flaws in the review process—and also recommended the State Department change its contracting processes going forward.

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The report by the State Department’s Office of Inspector General “determined that the department did not violate its role as an unbiased oversight agency.” But it found that the State Department was hampered by its lack of expertise in handling an environmental review on the scale of Keystone XL, a $7-billion, multiyear oil transport project that would wind 1,700 miles from Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf Coast of Texas. The report said most key staff members handling the review had no relevant experience and had to learn “on the job.”

The inspector general said the State Department also failed to fully consider alternative routes for the pipeline that would avoid the crucial Ogallala aquifer in Nebraska. The state is now surveying possible new routes.

The Keystone permitting process has dragged on since 2008 in part because of criticisms of the State Department’s environmental impact statement.

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WASHINGTON — The State Department’s inspector general has found no conflict of interest or improper political influence in the agency’s review of the disputed Keystone XL pipeline project.

But in a report released on Thursday, the official said the department had not adequately weighed concerns about the route of the 1,700-mile pipeline and should strengthen its oversight of contractors performing environmental impact statements for major projects.

The proposed Keystone pipeline, which is to carry heavy oil from formations in Alberta to refineries on the Gulf Coast, has become a partisan football in Congress and a debating point in the presidential campaign. President Obama scratched the project last month after being forced by Republicans in Congress to make an up-or-down decision on it. He said that there was not sufficient time to devise an alternate route that would avoid environmentally sensitive areas in Nebraska but that the builder was free to apply for a new permit.

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WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Not everyone in Canada supports the proposed oil pipeline from Alberta to the U.S. and to the British Columbia coast.

Claude Gravelle, vice chair of the Canadian Parliament’s Natural Resources Committee and a member of the official opposition party in Canada, the left-leaning New Democratic Party, spoke to MarketWatch about how the exporting of Canadian oil could translate into oil spills, environmental costs and lost Canadian jobs.

Gravelle, a member of parliament from the Nickel Belt riding in Ontario, talked about his controversial meetings with U.S. lawmakers, problems with China’s human rights record and his dispute with Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s take on how to bring financial security to Canadians.

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Bernie Sanders used to be Congressman-at-large from Vermont. Now he’s Vermont’s junior Senator. In so many ways, however, he’s the nation’s Senator-at-large, showing the way when so many others in Congress have lost theirs.

While a good chunk of Congress, including a majority of the freshman class in the House, are climate-change deniers, Sanders has no illusions about where we need to be headed. That’s why he introduced the 10 Million Solar Rooftops bill last June. That bill, now with seven co-sponsors, was approved for a vote by the full Senate in December. It’s also why he introduced legislation to end oil and coal subsidies last year. That bill got just 35 votes in the Senate. But he vowed Tuesday not to give up.

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Sen. Bernie Sanders has a new bill out to kill fossil fuel subsidies that come in the form of tax breaks for the oil and gas industry. Instead, Sanders would redirect those funds to generate 10 million solar roofs in America, which would create installation jobs and significantly reduce fossil fuel consumption.

“We’ve got to end all of the tax breaks for the oil companies and coal companies and I’m going to introduce legislation to do just that,” Sanders told demonstrators clad in black-and-white striped referee shirts who rallied to “blow the whistle” on members of Congress and Big Oil.

Ending tax breaks and subsidies for oil and gas companies would reduce the deficit by more than $40 billion over the next 10 years. Sanders’ legislation will end those tax breaks and tens of billions of dollars in other special subsidies for the fossil fuel industry.

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U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (Independent-Vt.)  pledged Tuesday to introduce legislation to repeal federal tax breaks and subsidies to the profitable fossil fuel industry, declaring at a Capitol Hill rally that “the most profitable corporations in the world do not need subsidies from the American people.”