As the Nov. 6 deadline for the State Department's decision on the Keystone XL pipeline approaches, the politically charged debates surrounding the project have intensified.

James Hansen, who heads NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and is a top climate scientist, said the proposed pipeline is extremely dangerous.

"It is essentially game over," Hansen wrote in June.

Since then, pipeline opponents have protested the project and are threatening to turn Keystone into a campaign issue for President Obama.

Charles Ebinger, a senior fellow for energy at the Brookings Institution, said the issue has "become a test case for the Democrats," with two factions within the Obama camp asking the same question: "Is he with us or against us?"

Ebinger added: "I do think it has become a defining political issue. I don't think he's going to win any friends whichever way he goes."

Major Obama donors have threatened to withhold financial support unless the president kills the Keystone project, although Obama administration officials have said environmentalists are better off with Obama than without him, pointing to the president's environmental record compared with leading Republican candidates.

TransCanada Corp. applied for a permit for its Keystone pipeline in 2008, touting the line as a source of reliable fuel for the United States. At the time, only one environmental group, the Natural Resources Defense Council, had a campaign against oil sands production and approval for Keystone seemed sure.

Now, activists are targeting oil sands production as more energy-intensive than strip mining or oil drilling, said Kenny Bruno of the liberal advocacy group Corporate Ethics International. Keystone is the "infrastructure linchpin for the expansion of the tar sands," he said.

Lawmakers and U.S. EPA officials have questioned the environmental expertise of the State Department, which must grant approval for Keystone.

The review has been mired in controversies, including the release last month of a string of embarrassing emails between TransCanada lobbyist Paul Elliott and State Department officials and the discovery that the department retained Cardno Entrix, a consulting firm that represents TransCanada.

Kerri-Ann Jones, who heads the review, defended the department during an Oct. 7 news conference.

"We want to hear from every perspective, and we are on listening mode, and there has been impartiality," she said.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said last year the Keystone decision represents a hard choice between two evils.

"We're either going to be dependent on dirty oil from the Gulf or dirty oil from Canada," she said, adding that her department is "inclined" to grant the permit (Eilperin/Mufson, Washington Post, Oct. 16). -- PK