Definition: In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
Input: The State Department followed its proper conflict-of-interest guidelines, when it selected the contractor responsible for conducting its environmental review of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, the agency's watchdog said on Wednesday. 
  
  
  
 The Office of Inspector General report found the State Department "substantially" followed "prescribed guidance" when selecting the private contractor Environmental Resources Management (ERM). 
  
 The firm took the lead on State's environmental analysis of the $5.4 billion Keystone project, which will carry crude oil from Alberta to refineries in the Gulf Coast region. ERM has previously done work with TransCanada, the company behind Keystone. 
  
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 The inspector general also found that the process State "used to assess organizational conflicts of interest was effective," adding further fuel to pipeline advocates' arguments that the path is clear for State to finish it's 90-day national determination test. That's the final piece before Secretary of State John Kerry sends his recommendations on Keystone to President Obama.While the reports says State's determination that ERM was objective in the environmental review of Keystone XL is a reasonable conclusion, the inspector general found areas in which State can "improve" its process for selecting contractors and its conflict of interest review when doing so.The watchdog also said State's public disclosures on the conflict of interest review need tidying. 
  
 The lack of "effective documentation" hurt State's ability to "reduce potential misperceptions" on transparency, the watchdog said. It cited State's failure to fully document its process of choosing a contractor and its conflict of interest review of ERM. 
  
 Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) criticized the report, arguing it didn’t dive into the deeper concerns that ERM's previous work for oil companies like Exxon, and ties to industry groups swayed the outcome of the environmental review dropped earlier this year. 
  
 “The inspector general was only asked to examine whether the State Department followed its own flawed process for selecting a third party contractor," Grijalva said in a statement. 
  
 "The fact that the answer is ‘yes’ doesn’t address any outstanding concerns about the integrity of ERM’s work, the State Department’s in-house ability to evaluate its quality, or whether the process itself needs to be reformed,” he said. “This report isn’t evidence that there’s no problem here. This is evidence of the problem.” 
  
 Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.), an outspoken supporter of the pipeline said the report "clears" the way for State to finish its process. 
  
 "Today’s Inspector General report makes clear that the Department of State did not violate its conflict of interest procedures in selecting ERM to conduct its environmental review of the Keystone XL pipeline project," Hoeven said in a statement. 
  
 "After more than five years, and five exhaustive environmental reviews, the Keystone XL pipeline project is perhaps the most thoroughly studied and long-delayed project of its kind in U.S. history." ||||| WASHINGTON — WHEN I was elected to Congress in 2002, George W. Bush was president and big business wrote environmental policy. We all remember Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force — a who’s who of mining and oil interests — and the administration’s constant questioning of climate science. 
  
 President Obama won the White House by running as an agent of change: change from Mr. Bush’s way of doing business with business, and change from Washington’s habitual corporate favoritism. 
  
 I was an enthusiastic supporter of the president then and I still am — I consider his environmental record a tremendous improvement over his predecessor’s. 
  
 But that record is still being written, and it is heading in the wrong direction. If the president approves the Keystone XL pipeline on the basis of the lobbying and bad science that has been offered to support it, much of his good work will be undone and a business-as-usual atmosphere will settle back on Washington like a heavy cloud. It would be a bad end to what could still be a very strong environmental legacy. 
  
 The pipeline has drawn more critical attention than its corporate sponsors seemed to expect, and it is important to understand why that happened. Keystone is a bad deal for the American taxpayer on the merits, but that’s not the only reason. More important, environmentalists have decided that enough is enough. 
  
 We saw plenty of important decisions made during the Bush era in the name of “streamlining,” “cutting red tape” or “using sound science” — that is, science funded by an industry that wanted less oversight. In November 2008, millions of Americans breathed a sigh of relief and told themselves those days were over. Keystone has rallied the entire environmental community because it is a visible and sometimes painful reminder of the way things were done under Mr. Bush. 
  
 The administration’s approach to the pipeline is a throwback to the time when endangered species were defenseless in the face of corporate moneymaking. It is a reminder that even though our environmental laws use science, not profits, as the basis of our environmental decisions, any company with bottomless pockets used to be able to game the system and get away with it. 
  
 That’s why Keystone is about more than one pipeline. It is about establishing once and for all whether we have moved on from the disastrous Bush-Cheney view of environmental policy. President Obama’s own Environmental Protection Agency has said in no uncertain terms that the pipeline will contribute significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. That should be the end of the conversation. The fact that it isn’t — that we’re left hanging and hoping — is more than disappointing. It is a very troubling sign for the future. 
  
 As the news media has reported widely, the contractor chosen by the State Department to assess the pipeline’s environmental impacts violated federal conflict-of-interest rules to get the job, and nothing has been done about it. That company, Environmental Resources Management, did work for TransCanada, Keystone’s parent company, in the recent past and told the State Department the exact opposite on disclosure forms that anyone in the world can now read for herself. A report on Wednesday from the State Department inspector general, which many outlets covered as though it exonerated the department and E.R.M. of wrongdoing, is actually an important example of the problem. The I.G. only looked at whether the department followed its existing process for choosing a contractor. It should have looked at whether that process produces reliable outcomes. 
  
 If E.R.M.’s decision that Keystone does not pose any environmental risks is allowed to stand, it will not just move Keystone closer to an unjustified approval; it will re-establish the Bush-era habit of tipping the scales in favor of corporations that want special treatment. 
  
 Anyone who believes it is unfair to make Keystone a litmus test of Mr. Obama’s environmental record is looking at recent history backward. The environmental community did not make any of this happen. If E.R.M. had come clean, we wouldn’t be in this position. But it didn’t, and we are. At some point we have to decide that it won’t happen again. 
  
 Depending on the outcome, I worry that the American public won’t just lose faith in Keystone. It will lose faith in the government’s ability to fund, carry out, understand and implement scientifically based environmental policy. President Obama doesn’t want that to be his legacy. Neither do I. And I am hardly alone. |||||
Output:
President Obama's environmental record is a "tremendous improvement" from the Bush-Cheney days, but he's on the verge of destroying it with the Keystone XL oil pipeline, writes Democratic congressman Raul Grijalva in the New York Times. The proposed pipeline is a perfect example of how such projects came to be in the bad old days, when politicians trotted out phrases like "streamlining" and the industry could "game the system" with huge infusions of money, writes the Arizona lawmaker. Take the obvious conflict of interest with the contractor that concluded the pipeline posed no environmental risks—Environmental Resources Management previously worked for pipeline parent TransCanada. The recent report by the State Department's inspector general on ERM's selection should not be interpreted as an exoneration but as an "important example of the problem," argues Grijalva. This is about more than a proposed pipeline, he writes. If ERM's decision stands, "it will re-establish the Bush-era habit of tipping the scales in favor of corporations that want special treatment." And it will ruin Obama's environmental legacy. Click for his full column.