Alarming new report on TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline: legal threats to farmers, planned manipulation of midwest gas prices, safety skimping and absurdly inflated estimates of pipeline jobs

Friends of the Earth has issued a scary new report about TransCanada and its Keystone XL pipeline. You can find it here. Included is TransCanada's modus operandi of landowner intimidation.

Meet David Daniel, a carpenter from the small East Texas town of Winsboro. Daniel first learned that his home was in the path of the pipeline when he discovered stakes that had been hammered into his land by a TransCanada survey team. No one from the company had asked his permission—or even notified him after the fact. When he denied the company further access to his land, their Houston law firm threatened to take his property through eminent domain.
     Daniel later learned that TransCanada did not even have all the permits it needed to build the pipeline. When he eventually agreed to let them on his property if they gave him advance notice, company officials repeatedly violated that agreement.
     And when TransCanada decided to negotiate for an easement that would allow it to build through Daniel’s land, the company tried to lowball him and avoid paying for the trees that they would cut down on his land. They have also refused to provide him with any information about the risks of the tar sands oil that would be carried across his land, or to explain how they would respond in the event of a spill.

A detailed explanation of why what TransCanada is building on top of America's greatest underground aquifer is much more dangerous than any normal pipeline:

1,000,000-gallon tar sands oil spill:
Kalamazoo River, Marshall, Michigan

TransCanada has consistently claimed that Keystone XL is the “safest pipeline ever built,” yet the company has dodged the questions of landowners along the pipeline’s proposed route and sought a safety waiver for the pipeline. It has done all of this despite recent research that has shown tar sands oil pipelines are far more likely to break than conventional crude pipelines.

On July 6, 2010, a tar sands oil pipeline in Marshall, Michigan spilled about a million gallons of tar sands oil into the Kalamazoo River. Nearly a year later, the river is still closed to the public. Photo credit: AP Photo/Paul Sancya.