It looks more and more likely that the Obama administration will approve construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, despite concerns over its safety and the devastating impact of tar sands oil on climate and the environment (not to mention more than 1,200 people getting arrested in protest of it). U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu hinted as much last week in an interview with EnergyNow! Chu acknowledges that there are problems with the extraction of tar sands oil, but he says that, ultimately, diversifying the current supply of oil is a good thing.

Personally, I can't help but shake my head at the cynicism of these politics. Secretary Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and long-time champion of clean energy, certainly knows better. That he is using these false claims of "energy security" to support the administration's likely approval of the Keystone XL pipeline is particularly disheartening. In the short clip, Chu doesn't speak to the potential impact of the pipeline itself, just the extraction process. As I wrote recently, the State Department's environmental impact statement for Keystone XL stopped well short of actually analyzing, well, the real environmental impacts of the pipeline.

But that doesn't mean that others should ignore the potential for disaster, and they're not. Heather Libby of TckTckTck and Emma Pullman of DeSmogBlog worked together to create this incredibly informative infographic about TransCanada's Keystone pipelines. Keystone XL, which would run from Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast, is just the final chunk of a much bigger tar sands pipeline system. The track record thus far doesn't yield much optimism about the safety of TransCanada's lines. Let's just say that the longest pipeline already in place, the Keystone I, had a pretty tough first year.

Click on the graphic or click here for a larger version.