Oil is messy stuff; you'll get no arguments from me on the basics. There have been and will be leaks in pipelines all over the world (less when people aren't actively breaching them) so the environmental concerns are not to be dismissed. I do however have some sympathy for those who complain that the facts are being distorted by "celebrity protesters". To try to put this in perspective to facilitate a less fraught risk assessment, let's zoom way out and start from there:
We (and this includes the USA) need petroleum in many forms and we need lots of it. Even if/when we get to the point where we can stop burning it (I hope to live that long at least) we will still need it to make things, and it will need to be transported. Moving as much of the transportation and generation grid (big trucks, power plants etc.) over to natural gas will help to reduce the amount of oil which will be sloshing around the continent, and we have lots of NG so supply will be "merely" logistics. LNG likes to explode if you're careless with it, but it's not much of a spill risk unless it lands on you (really REALLY cold). Although not as completely pollution free as Hydrogen, it's far easier to work with. There remains the thermodynamically inescapable fact that petroleum products (gasoline, diesel, kerosene, etc.) have a much higher energy density than you can get from propane, methane et al, and there's the infrastructure cost of providing places for these vehicles to fuel, so oil is not going away just yet.
So the oil needs to come from somewhere, and the Oil Sands are close and friendly to the US. This is as opposed to (for example) Venezuela which is arguably closer, depending on the refinery, but not (presently) friendly and we're talking tankers. While I'm on the subject of tankers, they don't seem to be the menace you'd assume them to be, but they get a lot of press due to the impressive swath of oily mess they cause. Leaky pipelines are typically unspectacular, although your groundwater may feel differently. This brings us back to the NIMBY problem which brought this to you today, and the current US administration's hostility to "Drill, baby, drill!"
Countries have no permanent Friends and no permanent Enemies, only permanent Interests. I really don't want to think too much about what happens if Canada is no longer friends with the US (although the words Manifest Destiny pop into my head), but if their money has to go somewhere, at least they can be certain we're not financing terrorist groups with it. They need Oil, and we have oil, so it should work out. However if it doesn't, China ALSO needs oil; if the Americans get too wrapped around the axle about how "dirty" the oil is, I'll happily sell to whoever wants to buy.
Economics are a permanent Interest for all concerned. Well, not all; those protesters (especially the "celebrity" ones) have a very narrow focus and keeping the economy moving is not part of it. This is the crux of the issue, balance and Risk Assessment. In the "pro" column is security of supply. In the "con" there is cost and environmental risk. "Con" is here as objective as possible and takes ideology out of it as much as possible; in this day and age ignoring the environmental potential of something is not an option, but the number of variables that encompasses is a matter of ideology.
How this balances out depends (as always) on where you put the weight. Since I have no skin in the game I come down on the side of "build it", assuming that it is done properly. This is for simple geopolitical and economic reasons, both serviced by the "pro", and my caveats cover (to my satisfaction) the "con". I realize that you will feel differently if it's going through your fields or aquifer and I have no pat response to that, but Darryl Hanna and the rest of them still annoy me, mostly because it's another bandwagon for them.
Here's some more of my ideology at work: all of this is happening because nuclear energy has not been supported and developed. Tripling the output of conventional fission plants could provide all of the energy the US currently gets from coal, accomplishing Obama's goal of driving coal plants out of business and cutting way back on pollution. The current fetish of blaming CO2 for all that's wrong in the world would be satisfied by that, and if they got some thorium action going they could take fossil fuels out of the generation sector entirely while ensuring domestic control of reliable energy. There'd be a boom in construction as well.
Of course this does nothing about the need to move crude to refineries, but abundant and cheap electricity could (with improved battery tech) make electric vehicles more practical, reducing the need for petrol. All of this and no need for ugly noisy unreliable wind turbines cluttering the landscape; try that, H. Boone Pickens .
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