It's a "final" environmental impact statement that is anything but final.

Although the agency expanded its analysis of the TransCanada project's climate change and economic impacts, it reached essentially the same conclusion it staked out a year ago in a draft analysis: Canada's tar sands development, more carbon-intensive than conventional crude drilling, will happen with or without Keystone XL.

The 11-volume analysis touches off an even more intensive process of lobbying over a project that supporters paint as a lifeline to energy security and jobs and that opponents portray as the linchpin to one of the planet's most environmentally destructive enterprises.  (See related: "Scraping Bottom: The Canadian Oil Boom.")

That process could move slowly.

Eight additional U.S. agencies are expected to weigh in