Keystone XL, the contentious TransCanada pipeline that would deliver tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada to Texas for refining and shipment, has met another challenge: the pipeline may actually increase gas prices rather than drive costs down. The reason? According to NRDC, Keystone XL is likely to “decrease the amount of gasoline produced in U.S. refineries for domestic markets, and increase the cost of producing it, leading to even higher prices at the pump.”

This is unwelcome news for proponents of the pipeline who apparently will stop at nothing to get the pipeline built. However, it’s very welcome news for environmental groups and concerned citizens alike who are fearful of the short and longterm ramifications of the pipeline. Groups like ForestEthics, 350.org, Tar Sands Action and Bold Nebraska have played key roles in the fight against the pipeline, citing environmental devastation and health concerns, but it’s still an uphill battle.

Last summer, in an effort to cease construction and draw national attention, Bill McKibben rallied more than 1,000 activists to sit in front of the White House in peaceful protest against the pipeline. Many attest this protest is the reason why President Obama continues to delay a final decision, but even though the President has pushed off any potential construction (now until 2013) until a more thorough environmental impact assessment can be made, construction of the southern portion of the pipeline, running from Cushing, Okla., to Port Arthur, Texas, has curiously already begun.

Whether or not Keystone XL is fully operational in the near future, however, will determine, on many levels, if we will live on a habitable planet. It’s been said that building the Keystone XL is equivalent to “game over” for our climate given tar sands oil is some of the most dirty and carbon-intense on the planet. Bitumen, a thick and sticky form of crude oil that’s found in the tar sands, is so viscous and difficult to work with that it must be heated with hydrocarbons in order to flow. This heating process only adds to the level of carbon that’s already being emitted into the atmosphere by the tar sands alone.

To make matters worse, the Boreal Forest, the region of Alberta where tar sands oil extraction currently takes place, is home to some of the most pristine and diverse land in the world. The Boreal Forest also acts as a significant global carbon sink. Clear-cutting trees and bulldozing tens of thousands of acres of land for oil underneath then makes little sense, particularly when the extraction process is one of the most damaging and costly that exists today.

In the end, the $7 billion, 1,700 mile pipeline would transport oil slated for export to Europe, China and Latin America — the United States would barely see a drop. This on top of a project that would carry “as much as 900,000 barrels of oil each day — oil with a carbon output 20% higher than conventional oil supplies.” The chance of an oil spill along the pipeline is enough to warrant immediate brakes on the project, but when you factor in climate change, there really is no question: tar sands oil needs to stay in the ground.

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More than 8 million of the 47 million U.S. adult cigarette smokers have a serious illness caused by smoking, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Tobacco also costs the economy $96 billion a year for medical care. To counter the bad press, the tobacco industry has created new “light” tobacco products they claim are less harmful. In order to make that claim, a quirk in the law requires the products to be tested on thousands of animals.

Two years ago, Congress passed a law that requires tobacco companies to prove that any of its products labeled “light” or “mild” significantly reduce the risk of tobacco-related disease to smokers and benefit the health of the population. The Food and Drug Administration was placed in charge of regulating the law. They drafted guidelines that required animal testing to be part of the process.

The National Cancer Institute, Institute for Medicine, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and PETA have all called for an end to the animal testing clause.

The National Cancer Institute doesn’t believe the light cigarettes are less harmful to a person’s health. In a recent report they stated, “There is no convincing evidence that changes in cigarette design… have resulted in an important decrease in the disease burden caused by cigarette use.”

Bingxuan Wang, a toxicology researcher with the nonprofit Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine is very concerned about the number of animals that will needlessly die during these tests.

“The bottom line is, tobacco – light or not – poses serious risks to the user’s health and to the health of others. Wasting countless more animal lives to prove the safety of an inherently harmful product, especially when such tests in the past have been misleading, would be grossly counterproductive for human health,” said Wang.

The Institute of Medicine said, “It is not possible to make laboratory animals use tobacco products the way humans do, and there are inherent interspecies differences that prevent meaningful extrapolation of human effects.” Experiments conducted on animals 50 years ago found that tobacco did not cause lung cancer, but that information was obviously incorrect in humans.

PETA said, “In some of the horrendous tobacco tests that could be conducted, rats would be forced to breathe tobacco smoke for as long as six hours a day for months at a time by jamming the animals into tiny canisters and pumping concentrated cigarette smoke directly into their noses. The animals would then be killed and their bodies dissected.”

Belgium, Germany and the U.K. have banned animal testing for tobacco products and Canada uses non-animal methods.

Take Action: Stop Testing Nicotine On Animals

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