Oil Pipeline: Nebraskans vs. the State Department.

Forget the tree huggers. Even many red-blooded red-staters don't trust that the Keystone XL pipeline would be safe and leak-free.

Nati Harnik/Associated Press Residents of Atkinson, Neb., at a hearing on the Keystone XL pipeline project.

Husker football fans booed a TransCanada-sponsored video at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Memorial Stadium on Sept. 10, spurring the school's athletic department to drop a sponsorship deal. Nebraska's Republican governor, Dave Heineman, is calling on the Obama administration to deny a permit for the project; the state's senators, one Republican and one Democrat, oppose it, too. And in a State Department hearing in Lincoln, Neb., on Sept. 27, about 80 percent of the 1,000-plus citizens in attendance were opposed to the pipeline -- despite the fact that pipeline boosters bused in sympathetic crowds from other states.

A big worry is that the pipeline's proposed route through Nebraska would cross about 250 miles of the Ogallala Aquifer, the nation's largest underground source for drinking water and crop irrigation. Nebraskans don't buy the assurances from TransCanada and the U.S. State Department that the pipeline poses no serious risks to their water, land and livelihoods; farmers and ranchers in other Great Plains states don't either.

Just look at TransCanada's Keystone I, a smaller pipeline from Alberta to Illinois that began operation in June 2010. In just over a year, this pipeline has leaked at least 14 times, including a spill of about 21,000 gallons in North Dakota -- even though TransCanada predicted that spills of 2,100 gallons or more should be expected to happen only once every seven years.

The tar sands bitumen that Keystone XL would carry is thick, corrosive, unstable and hard to clean up. Plains Justice, a nonprofit organization, has documented how ill-equipped the sparsely populated northern Plains states are to respond to an oil spill. The Keystone XL could even be a terrorist target.

Too risky? Absolutely -- and that's even before you get into the grave threat that tar sands oil poses to our global climate.

Join Opinion on Facebook and follow updates on twitter.com/roomfordebate.