This morning, we’re a little irritated. Remember that story about those disturbing piles of petroleum coke, a byproduct of the dilbit refining process, that we reported on a couple of months ago? Well, the New York Times ran a piece by reporter Ian Austen on the story just this week– and it’s getting a lot of play. It’s all over the web and social media. And of course, we think this is a very good thing. In fact, the more attention this gets the better. The last thing we want is to have that gunk spilling into the Detroit River. And a national discussion about the costs of using this filthy byproduct– what one expert in the article calls “the dirtiest residue from the dirtiest oil on earth”– is long overdue. So, three cheers for Ian Austen and the New York Times. Well, make that two cheers.

Why are we irritated? Two reasons:

First, because the main reason the story seems to be getting so much play– and perhaps a major reason why the Times picked it up in the first place (two months after the story broke here in Michigan)– is because the petcoke can now be linked to the Koch brothers, those wealthy conservative super-villains (to people on the left). Linking this story to the Kochs makes for some good outrage. Here’s how Austen frames his piece:

Detroit’s ever-growing black mountain is the unloved, unwanted and long overlooked byproduct of Canada’s oil sands boom.

And no one knows quite what to do about it, except Koch Carbon, which owns it.

The company is controlled by Charles and David Koch, wealthy industrialists who back a number of conservative and libertarian causes including activist groups that challenge the science behind climate change. The company sells the high-sulfur, high-carbon waste, usually overseas, where it is burned as fuel.

The coke comes from a refinery alongside the river owned by Marathon Petroleum, which has been there since 1930. But it began refining exports from the Canadian oil sands — and producing the waste that is sold to Koch — only in November.

But in our view, it really shouldn’t matter; it shouldn’t make it any more concerning to know that the Koch brothers own that stuff. We’d find those piles of black dust on the shores of the river alarming if they were owned by our own brothers. The fact that this story has to be shoe-horned into a familiar ideological narrative in order to get it on the national radar is, we confess, bothersome– irritating.

The second reason we’re irritated is because the Times piece never says how that stuff– or the stuff that makes that stuff– got to Detroit in the first place. Instead, it says only this:

An initial refining process known as coking, which releases the oil from the tarlike bitumen in the oil sands, also leaves the petroleum coke, of which Canada has 79.8 million tons stockpiled. Some is dumped in open-pit oil sands mines and tailing ponds in Alberta. Much is just piled up there.

Detroit’s pile will not be the only one. Canada’s efforts to sell more products derived from oil sands to the United States, which include transporting it through the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, have pulled more coking south to American refineries, creating more waste product here.

Marathon Petroleum’s plant in Detroit processes 28,000 barrels a day of the oil sands bitumen.

See what happened there? The Times went and pulled a Stabenow on its readers (if we may coin a phrase). That is, just at the moment when one might expect an explanation of how Enbridge’s Line 6B– the line that ruptured in Marshall in the worst inland oil spill in U.S. history– feeds diluted bitumen to that Marathon refinery, at that very moment, instead of rehearsing a bit of Enbridge history in Michigan and beyond, Austen turns to a discussion of… Keystone XL! Never mind that Enbridge, as we’ve said before, is quietly building its own KXL. Never mind that Marathon’s plant is about to increase production by more than half because of the” replacement” of Line 6B (thereby producing even more petroleum coke). To the Times, it’s as if Enbridge and Line 6B don’t exist. Once again, as with Senator Stabenow’s staff, Keystone appears to be the only game in town.

And we’re sure that’s just how Enbridge likes it.