The controversial Keystone pipeline to Little and $1,000 to Risch. The company’s contributions to Little include a $2,000 donation made on Aug. 31, around the time that it was ramping up its lobbying of Idaho officials.
“Did you connect with the Governor’s office or anyone else in the delegation?” Neumeyer asked Oehler in a Sept. 20 email after Oehler sent along TC Energy’s draft letter.
Advertisement
“We’re still working on the Gov and delegation. (We’ve had some scheduling issues),” Oehler responded. “We have briefed the [attorney general], however.”
Oehler emailed again the following day to inform Neumeyer that TC Energy representatives had met with the governor’s chief of staff and other top administration officials. “I was told they are inclined to consider weighing in with FERC,” Oehler wrote.
TC Energy did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
Audrey Leonard, a staff attorney with Columbia Riverkeeper, a Hood River, Oregon-based nonprofit that opposes the GTN XPress project, was not surprised to learn of TC Energy’s behind-the-scenes lobbying and letter-writing effort in Idaho.
“It’s clear how desperate TC Energy is to move this project forward, and makes it even more important for our climate champions in office to step up and authentically oppose the expansion,” she said.
Columbia Riverkeeper was among more than two dozen organizations, mostly from the Pacific Northwest, that sent a letter in October urging the Democratic governors of Washington, Oregon and California to publicly oppose TC Energy’s project. The groups called the project “inconsistent with Washington, Oregon, and California’s efforts to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions” and said greenlighting it would lock the region into another three decades of fossil fuel reliance.
Advertisement
Leonard said she can’t ignore TC Energy’s record of mishaps, in particular last week’s Keystone pipeline oil spill in Kansas. A report last year from the U.S. Government Accountability Office concluded that “Keystone’s accident history has been similar to other crude oil pipelines since 2010, but the severity of spills has worsened in recent years.”
“The spill came after TC Energy increased the flow capacity of the Keystone pipeline, like they’re asking to do here,” Leonard s said. “Oil and gas pipeline infrastructure is different, but this shows that TC Energy cannot be trusted to build and maintain pipelines. The Keystone pipeline was built in 2011 and is much newer compared to the 60-plus year old GTN pipeline.”
