Texan Takes

Fight Against Tar Sands Pipeline to New York City

At Citigroup’s

Annual Meeting, Landowner Asks CEO Not to Finance TransCanada Project

NEW YORK, April 20— David Daniel is traveling 1,500 miles

from the Piney Woods of East Texas to midtown Manhattan this week with

a message for the nation’s third-largest bank: Don’t help a Canadian

oil pipeline company endanger my community.

Daniel is one of the landowners

in five heartland states whose property lies in the path of the proposed

Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry dirty, toxic and corrosive tar

sands oil miles from northern Alberta to Gulf Coast refineries.

The bank is Citigroup, a major

financier to TransCanada Corp. of Calgary, which is seeking State Department

approval to build the 1,980-mile pipeline. Citigroup has raised more

than $5.8 billion for TransCanada and its related companies since 2007.

At Citigroup’s annual stockholders meeting Thursday, April 21, Daniel

will ask CEO Vikram Pandit to stop financing TransCanada.

The $7 billion pipeline project

would double the export of Canadian tar sands to the United States.

It would carry tar sands oil across Montana,

South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas—mostly across private property owned

by farmers and ranchers. The route also runs through the Ogallala Aquifer,

putting one-third of the groundwater used in American agriculture at

risk of contamination from diluted bitumen, a more corrosive product

than conventional crude oil.

“As a landowner in the path

of Keystone XL, my family, just as so many others, have experienced

trespassing, broken agreements, lies pertaining to payment for damages,

lies about permitting, eminent domain abuse, and a complete disregard

for our personal safety,” said Daniel, who lives outside of Winnsboro,

Tex., about 100 miles east of Dallas. “I have no reason to trust TransCanada

with the lives of my family. Mr. Pandit needs to hear about the human

consequences of financing this dangerous project." 

In September 2010, Citigroup

managed a $1 billion bond for TransCanada, purchasing $295 million of

notes issued.

Canada is the United States’ 

number one source of foreign oil, and the tar sands comprise about half

of Canadian oil exports. Tar sands extraction uses huge amount of water

which ends up in massive toxic waste ponds that have never been successfully

reclaimed.

“Our message to Citigroup

is simple: STOP financing TransCanada! Citigroup has a responsibility

to the American people to not help fund a foreign company that takes

land without having all the necessary permits and that aims to put our

livelihoods in danger by piping a corrosive, acidic material four feet

underground at high heat and a high pressure,” says Brittany Dawn

McAllister, coordinator of Stop Tarsands Oil Pipelines.

Daniel, a former stuntman,

is founder of Stop

Tarsands Oil Pipelines,

a group active in informing and organizing Texas landowners and citizens

against the project. If the project is approved, he says he’ll build

a platform in one of the century-old elms on his land and stand his

ground. "If I am in it, they can't cut the tree down."

The Keystone XL pipeline is

a proposed project of foreign company TransCanada that would carry tar

sands oil from Canada, through America’s heartland, to the Texas Gulf

Coast. In Texas, the pipeline would cross through Fannin, Lamar, Delta,

Hopkins, Franklin, Wood, Upshur, Smith, Cherokee, Rusk, Nacogdoches,

Angelina, Polk, Liberty, Harris, Hardin, Chambers, and Jefferson counties.