USA faces a law suit - for protecting the environment against fossil fuel greed

The company behind the rejected Keystone XL pipeline fired off two legal challenges on Wednesday, accusing Barack Obama of overstepping his authority and violating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). TransCanada Corporation said it was looking to recover an estimated $15bn it spent over many years trying to win approval for the pipeline before Obama rejected the project last November. “TransCanada asserts the US administration’s decision to deny a presidential permit for the Keystone XL pipeline was arbitrary and unjustified,” the company said in a press release. SumofUS added that the news that TransCanada was  filing a NAFTA lawsuit demanding $15 billion in compensation for the rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline showed "corporate power taken to the extreme" but rather sensibly pointed out that as governments surrender power to corporations under so called free trade treaties, these kinds of lawsuits will become even more common if the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) go into effect. SumofUs say:A private corporation proposed a project that violated a sovereign nation's environmental protections. And now they want FIFTEEN BILLION DOLLARS in "damages" because a democratically elected government didn't just give in. This is the reason so many environmental and consumer groups opposed NAFTA back in the 1990s, and why it's so important that we stop the TPP and TTIP now. A corporation should have no right to file a lawsuit on taxpayers after a government took seven years to make its environmental and economic decision about the Keystone XL pipeline.That's why we need your support right now to take on TransCanada -- and get them to drop their suit. We also need to scale up our work opposing dangerous trade deals like the TPP and TTIP.We can all trust the fossil fuel companies - can't we?  Oh - the single biggest contributor to climate change in California is a blown-out natural gas well more than 8,700ft underground, state authorities and campaign groups said Monday. The broken well at the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage site has released more than 77,000 metric tons of the powerful climate pollutant methane since the rupture was first detected on 23 October, according to a counter created by the Environmental Defense Fund.