Hillary Clinton Steers Clear of Keystone Pipeline in New Book

Fans and op­pon­ents wait­ing to hear Hil­lary Clin­ton’s po­s­i­tion on the con­tro­ver­sial Key­stone XL pipeline will have to keep bid­ing their time as her new book, des­pite stretch­ing to some 600 pages, doesn’t men­tion the pro­ject.

Key­stone is nowhere in the de­tailed in­dex of the book, Hard Choices, a mem­oir of her time as sec­ret­ary of State, which comes out Tues­day. And the pipeline goes un­men­tioned in a chapter de­voted to cli­mate change and second one on jobs and en­ergy, ac­cord­ing to sec­tions ob­tained by the Na­tion­al Journ­al.

Be­cause the pipeline, which would run from Al­berta, Canada to re­finer­ies on the Gulf Coast, crosses an in­ter­na­tion­al bor­der, Clin­ton’s State De­part­ment had pur­view over its ap­prov­al.

Her book’s 32-page-long in­dex, which con­tains hun­dreds of entries ran­ging from hot-but­ton top­ics like “Ber­g­dahl, Bowe” to ob­scure ones like the “My­it­sone Dam pro­ject” in Burma skips from “Key, John” to “Khal­ifa, Sheikh Khal­id bin Ahmed al” with no men­tion of Key­stone.

Chapter 21, titled “Cli­mate Change: We’re All in This To­geth­er,” de­tails Clin­ton’s com­mit­ment to ad­dress­ing glob­al warm­ing, which she writes is both a “sig­ni­fic­ant na­tion­al se­cur­ity threat and a ma­jor test of Amer­ic­an lead­er­ship.” In Chapter 22, called “Jobs and En­ergy: A Level Play­ing Field,” Clin­ton writes that the U.S. needs to be a glob­al lead­er in clean en­ergy. Neither chapter men­tions the con­tro­ver­sial pipeline.

Clin­ton’s spokes­per­son did not im­me­di­ately re­spond to a re­quest for com­ment.

Dur­ing a March speak­ing ap­pear­ance in Van­couver, former Ca­na­dian Am­bas­sad­or to the United States Frank McK­enna tried to ask Clin­ton about the pipeline. “No com­ment,” she replied, ex­plain­ing that it would be im­prop­er for her to com­ment on a de­cision still pending be­fore State.

As sec­ret­ary of State, Clin­ton mostly stayed quiet on the pro­ject while it was mak­ing its way through the form­al ap­prov­al pro­cess. But in Oc­to­ber 2010, just as en­vir­on­ment­al groups were step­ping up their fight against Key­stone, Clin­ton told the Com­mon­wealth Club of San Fran­cisco that State was “in­clined” to ap­prove the pipeline “for sev­er­al reas­ons.” Un­til the U.S. can scale up clean-en­ergy al­tern­at­ives, she ex­plained, “we’re either go­ing to be de­pend­ent on dirty oil from the Gulf or dirty oil from Canada.”

Clin­ton’s State De­part­ment urged against ap­prov­al in Janu­ary of 2012, but cited the short ap­prov­al time frame Con­gress im­posed on the de­part­ment rather than the un­der­ly­ing mer­its of the pro­ject. After nu­mer­ous delays, Clin­ton stepped down from State be­fore the pipeline was ap­proved, and it is still pending be­fore Sec­ret­ary of State John Kerry’s de­part­ment today.

Even be­fore her book came out, Clin­ton came un­der pres­sure from green groups to come out against the pipeline. A co­ali­tion of 30 groups fight­ing Key­stone, which they be­lieve would con­trib­ute to cli­mate change, wrote an open let­ter last month ask­ing the former sec­ret­ary of State to join their ef­forts. “Giv­en your long-stand­ing ad­vocacy for the en­vir­on­ment and the im­port­ance of bat­tling the cli­mate crisis, your in­volve­ment would lend an im­port­ant voice to the struggle against this dan­ger­ous pipeline.”