...[This] month nine fellow recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa and the Dalai Lama, sent the president [Obama] a letter urging him to veto the construction of a huge pipeline that would bring crude oil to the United States from Canada...The Keystone XL pipeline [proposed by TransCanada] would bring crude oil extracted from the rock under Canadian forests to the Texas coast for refining, traversing some of the Midwest’s most important aquifers en route. Although the pipeline would give the United States a more plentiful and secure supply of oil, environmentalists say that it is a bad idea because the process of extracting oil from the rock creates a hefty dose of greenhouse gas emissions and could threaten precious ecosystems...[The] Obama administration has seemed to be dithering on whether to authorize the pipeline.