Climate Change Disappears From Keystone XL Pipeline Debate

Mining and using tar sands oil creates more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil. But that's rarely mentioned anymore. 




By Lisa Song, originally published at InsideClimate News

When President Obama traveled to Cushing, Okla. last week to declare his support for building the southern half of the Keystone XL pipeline, he stressed that the pipeline and other oil infrastructure projects would be done "in a way that protects the health and safety of the American people."

But missing from the speech—and from most recent discussions of the controversial project—was any mention of climate change or the greenhouse gas emissions associated with mining Canadian tar sands.
Climate change was once front and center in the pipeline debate, with federal agencies as well as environmentalists weighing in with their concerns.

In 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency noted in its analysis of the State Department's draft environmental review of the Keystone XL that a comprehensive evaluation would have to consider the tar sands industry's greenhouse gas emissions, which the EPA calculated on a well-to-tank basis to be 82 percent greater than conventional crude oil.

"Alongside the national security benefits of importing crude oil from a stable trading partner, we believe the national security implications of expanding the nation's long-term commitment to a relatively high carbon source of oil should also be considered," the EPA wrote.

A year later, the EPA wrote in comments on the State Department's second draft that it was "concerned about levels of GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions associated with the proposed project, and whether appropriate mitigation measures to reduce these emissions are being considered."

The EPA asked the State Department "to identify practicable mitigation measures" for the "entire suite" of greenhouse gases associated with operation of the Keystone XL.

In a statement issued in November, the State Department said that any decision on whether the pipeline is in the national interest should consider "all of the relevant issues," such as "environmental concerns (including climate change), energy security, economic impacts, and foreign policy."

Over the past year, the pipeline's opponents have focused their campaign on protecting the fragile Nebraska Sandhills, and climate change has taken a back seat in the debate. But environmentalists have long warned that the pipeline would lock in the United States to a particularly dirty form of oil that would further exacerbate global warming.

One of the most-quoted lines has come from climate scientist James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who calls the tar sands a "fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet."
Bill McKibben, founder of the climate action group 350.org, said the Keystone protest has always been driven by "the fear that the tar sands will help destabilize the climate."

"Our colleagues in Nebraska did a great job of highlighting their concerns about the Ogallala aquifer and the Sandhills, but for those of us in the other 49 states, global warming was the single biggest reason for this fight," McKibben told InsideClimate News in an email on Friday. "Which is why it would have been nice for the president to say something about it [in Cushing], considering he was standing in the state that just went through the warmest summer any American state has ever recorded."

President Obama gave his speech against a backdrop of steel pipes at the Stillwater Pipe Yard, which is owned by TransCanada, the Alberta-based company that wants to build the pipeline. The president's stop in Cushing was part of a nationwide tour to publicize his administration's "all of the above" energy strategy.

Republished with permission of InsideClimate News, a non-profit, non-partisan news organization that covers energy and climate change—plus the territory in between where law, policy and public opinion are shaped.

Republican Gasbags

Rising gasoline prices are being viewed with glee by Republicans who see it as a vehicle to undermine the President's economic agenda, energy policies and political prospects.

Laura Clawson lays out the Republican perspective:   

First off, prices should be rock bottom at all times, because it is the God-given right of Americans to use the maximum possible quantity of fossil fuels, the retail cost of which should therefore not reflect their true costs. Second, the way to keep prices at rock bottom is through the aforementioned "drill, baby, drill" strategy. Third, President Obama is a wild-eyed environmentalist-socialist who is coming between Americans and their God-given right to more oil, and therefore everything is his fault.

Accordingly, Republicans plan to use the fear of rising gas and oil prices to support for their push for increased domestic production and to challenge Obama's blocking of construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.

 Clawson points out that Republicans are conveniently ignoring that we have been "drilling, baby, drilling," with domestic crude production on the rise since 2009.  Indeed, "the number of rigs in U.S. oil fields has more than quad­rupled in the past three years."

And, as Robert Reich helpfully explains, rising gas prices have nothing to do with offshore drilling or the Keystone XL.  There are three causes of the increase.  First, "on the supply side, is Iran’s decision to cut oil exports to Britain and France in retaliation for sanctions put in place by the EU and United States." Second, "on the demand side, is rising hopes for a global economic recovery – which would mean increased oil consumption."

But, as Reich explains, neither of these would matter much if it weren't for the third cause:  "overwhelming bets of hedge funds and other money managers that oil prices will rise on the basis of the first two reasons."  

How come Republicans aren't railing against speculators.  Reich suggests it might have something to do with the fact that "hedge funds and money managers are bankrolling the GOP as never before."  

Could be.

Unity Matters: Senate Flooded With Petitions Opposing Keystone XL

As Senate Republicans tried to revive the Keystone XL pipeline by adding it to the transportation bill, a petition drive was launched on Monday by every major environmental group, with the expressed goal of sending a half-million messages to the Senate within 24 hours which stated:  " Don't allow 'game over' for the climate.  Block any efforts to revive the dangerous Keystone XL tar sands pipeline."

The 500,000th signature opposing the pipeline was obtained within 7 hours, and a total of 800,000 flooded the Senate by day's end.  As 350.org founder Bill McKibben said:

The last 24 hours were the most concentrated blitz of environmental organizing since the start of the digital age. Over 800,000 Americans made it clear that Keystone XL is the environmental litmus test for Senators and every other politician in the country. It's the one issue where people have come out in large numbers to put their bodies on the line, and online too: the largest civil disobedience action on any issue in 30 years, and now the most concentrated burst of environmental advocacy perhaps since the battles over flooding the Grand Canyon back in the glory days.

In an article for Huffington Post, McKibben noted that this was the third event to raise the Keystone XL controversy to the central environmental issue in the country.  The first was last August, "when the largest civil disobedience action in 30 years saw 1,253 people arrested outside the White House."  The second action took place in November, with "over 12,000 surrounded the president's house five deep, leading the president to slow down the permitting process."  And now this.

McKibben relates the essential lesson from this latest experience:

Unity matters -- how wonderful to see the leaders of every environmental group on the same page, and progressive communities like MoveOn.org Political Action and CREDO Mobile joining in to help. And more important, a big swath of the American people remain deeply committed to a world that works. Right now Keystone is the battle that defines that hope -- we'll do our best to see that our "leaders" don't quash it.

Why The GOP Loves Keystone XL

By Mike Ludwig, cross-posted from Truthout

Senate Republicans announced a bill on Monday that would allow Canadian oil company TransCanada to begin construction of its proposed $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline that would run 1,700 miles from Canada to Texas.

The bill's top sponsors - Sens. Richard Lugar (R-Indiana), John Hoeven (R-North Dakota), David Vitter (R-Louisiana) - are the same lawmakers who authored a provision in the payroll tax cut extension in December that required President Obama to approve or deny the pipeline within 60 days.

Blaming the deadline, President Obama rejected a permit for the project earlier this month because the State Department had recently decided to push back its final decision another year to allow officials in Nebraska time to explore alternative pipeline routes that avoid environmentally sensitive areas and a large freshwater aquifer.

Lugar's bill would allow TransCanada to begin construction in other states while Nebraska works to find an alternate route.

Obama said the rejection was not based on "merits" of the project, and in the past week, the president unveiled plans  to expand domestic oil and gas production that include leasing 38 million underwater acres in the Gulf of Mexico.

On Sunday, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) told ABC news that the House would attach similar pipeline approval legislation to an infrastructure and jobs bill that will be introduced next week.

The GOP's Pipeline Politics

The Republican obsession with the Keystone pipeline is exacerbating a political headache for Obama and fellow Democrats, whose voter base is split on the issue, with environmental groups and climate activists opposed to the pipeline and some labor unions supporting it.

Putting a bill on Obama's desk that would approve the pipeline could force the president to take a position on the controversial project during an election year. A veto would give the GOP more ammo to call Obama a job killer, who canceled a infrastructure project during tough economic times, but signing the bill would enrage the environmental movement that brought thousands to the White House to protest the pipeline last year.

When asked about the pipeline approval bill, White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters on Monday that he had no opinion on legislation that "may or may not come to pass" and took the opportunity to blame Republicans for politicizing the project and creating a deadline that forced Obama to reject it.

Neil Brown, a spokesperson for Senator Lugar, said the Keystone XL pipeline is worth supporting regardless of the surrounding politics.

"If you look at the numbers, it speaks for itself," said Brown, who pointed out that it's better to get oil from Canada than from politically unstable oil producing countries.

The pipeline would transport 830,000 barrels of oil a day, most of it heavy crude extracted from the Alberta tar sands, a process climate activists and environmentalists also oppose.

Lugar and his colleagues continue to claim the project would create 20,000 jobs, a number under heavy debate in the media. Independent researchers at Cornell University estimated the pipeline would directly create about 2,500 to 6,000 temporary construction jobs.

Big Oil's Deep Pockets

Here's some other numbers to consider: the oil and gas industry is the top contributor to the campaign committees of Lugar's top co-sponsors, with Senator Vitter receiving $523,850 and Senator Hoeven receiving $263,289 since 2007.

At a protest at Boehner's district office in Ohio last week, environmentalists pointed out that the House speaker, who has hammered Obama for rejecting the pipeline, has received $1.2 million in contributions from "dirty" energy firms connected to coal, oil and gas production. According to Boehner's 2010 financial disclosure forms, filed last year, the speaker had $10,000 to $50,000 in investments in several energy firms involved in Alberta tar sands extraction, including Exxon Mobile and Canadian Natural Resources.

"It's quite amazing to watch how Capitol Hill works - to realize that many of these guys are less public servants and more employees of the oil industry," said author and 350.org founder Bill McKibben, who organized protests against the pipeline. "Two weeks ago the head of the American Petroleum Institute promised 'huge political consequences' if Obama didn't do what they wanted, and now they're trying to make good on the threat."

The bill that would approve the pipeline has 44 co-sponsors. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia is currently the only Democrat on the list.

The Future Of The Keystone XL Pipeline

By Mike Ludwig and Alissa Bohling, cross-posted from Truthout

The fight over the Keystone XL pipeline is far from over. Environmentalists are celebrating a victory this week after President Obama rejected a permit for the transcontinental project on Wednesday, but pipeline developer TransCanada plans to reapply for a permit and have the pipeline running by 2014.

Republicans in Congress who adopted the pipeline as their jobs and development issue du jour have pledged to do whatever it takes to keep the project on track.

"It's clear that TransCanada has invested a lot of financial and political capital, and they are not going to back down lightly," said Carroll Muffett, a spokesperson for the Center for International Environmental Law.

Environmentalists, labor leaders and Republicans in Congress have also spent a lot of time and political energy on the pipeline, and depending on whom you talk to, Obama's decision makes him either a climate hero or a job killer.

"Make no mistake - this is a brave decision," said Bill McKibben, an author and anti-pipeline protest organizer, in a statement to supporters.

"If we don't work with Canada on this, then China will," said an "outraged" Rep. Fred Upton (R-Michigan), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

House Republicans to Push Keystone Forward

Upton's committee invited Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to explain the decision before Congress after the three-year review officially came to a close. Clinton declined, and Kerri-Ann Jones, assistant secretary of state for oceans and international environment and scientific affairs, will testify next week instead.

Upton and his GOP allies plan on pushing a bill crafted by Republican Rep. Lee Terry of Nebraska, one of the western states along the proposed pipeline route where the pipeline became a hot-button issue for locals. Lee's bill seeks to expedite the next permitting process by putting it in the hands of the industry-friendly and quasi-independent Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). The State Department ran the recent permitting process because the pipeline crosses an international border.

Spokespeople for Representative Terry and the energy committee did not respond to inquiries from Truthout.

Republicans on the committee continue to echo TransCanada's questionable claim that construction of the $7 billion, 1,700 mile pipeline would directly create 20,000 jobs, but recent reports, including the State Department's own findings, put the actual number between 2,500 and 6,000 temporary construction positions.

In the face of all this rhetoric, President Obama has said he has yet to take a side, and told the press and Canada's disappointed Prime Minister Stephen Harper that the decision had nothing to do with the actual "merits" of the project. Obama seems to have politically straddled the issue and managed to appease environmentalists in his voter base while blaming the rejection decision on Republicans in Congress.

House Republicans attached a provision on the controversial payroll tax cut extension bill, which passed last minute in December, requiring Obama to decide on the pipeline permit within 60 days. The Obama administration had already said it needed another year to evaluate the potential impacts of the pipeline, a decision made after climate activists organized sit-ins and a massive protest at the White House, so Obama simply blamed the rejection on the GOP's "arbitrary" deadline.

"I'm disappointed that Republicans in Congress forced this decision, but it does not change my administration's commitment to American-made energy that creates jobs and reduces our dependence on oil," Obama said in a statement.

Obama, of course, has not been unfriendly to the oil industry. In his statement on the decision, Obama said his administration is looking at another proposed pipeline in the Midwest. Last month, his administration made available 21 million acres - an area about the size of South Carolina - of offshore drilling sites in the Gulf of Mexico, according to the Interior Department. The lease auction attracted more than $337 million in high bids from oil companies.

So where does Obama actually stand? It appears his position has remained unchanged: concerns raised about potential impacts of the pipeline demanded the review be extended until 2013, but pesky Republicans forced him to act early.

Obama's decision to effectively delay the decision on the pipeline until 2013 is seen by some observers as a strategic move in the lead up to his re-election campaign, where some believe the issue could divide his voter base. Several labor groups do support the pipeline, while young protesters at anti-pipeline rallies told Truthout that the president could not count on the same youth vote he got in 2008 if he approved the project.

But some pipeline opponents don't think the move was pure politics.

Ask a Nebraskan

"Republicans made this a political issue when they attached it to the payroll tax credit, so accusing the president of making this a political issue is incredibly ironic to say the least," said Malinda Frevert, news director for Bold Nebraska, an advocacy group that has aggressively opposed the pipeline and helped organize citizen activists.

"This was not a political decision," said Frevert. "This was a smart decision to stand up to Big Oil and Republicans who put an arbitrary deadline on this issue."

Whatever the reason for the administration's denial of TransCanada's permit application, the energy giant's statement that it will re-apply - issued swiftly on the heels of the State Department announcement - raises questions about how opponents will wage the next stage of their fight.

The pipeline debate touches on related but frequently politically polarizing issues - environment, jobs and energy security - but Frevert thinks they are overly entangled in the heated national dialogue.

"Nebraskans have been watching this issue for the last two years, but at a national level, this is fairly new, so trying to get all this information out is difficult," she said.

Frevert speculated that an effective opposition campaign this time around might have a stronger educational component. While TransCanada's claims of the project's job creation potential have been widely challenged as inflated, Frevert went further and said the pipeline's impact "could be a net loss of jobs."

"There's a huge potential for Nebraskan jobs to be lost if there's a leak," said Frevert, who stressed that the state's agriculture-based economy could suffer if farm- or ranchland was contaminated.

The State Department's original environmental statement on the project details 14 oil spills that have occurred on the existing Keystone pipeline system since 2010, including a 21,000-gallon spill that occurred after a fitting failed at a pump station in Ludden, North Dakota. Most of the oil was contained in the station area, but 210 gallons spilled across adjacent land.

Bold Nebraska's executive director, Jane Kleeb, is optimistic that the next environmental impact assessment will be "very transparent."

"The bad apples are gone," said Kleeb, noting that both the consulting firm and State Department officials whose involvement in the first environmental assessment posed a conflict of interest will not have a role in the next decision.

The original review was marred by controversy and scandal, prompting the State Department's inspector general to begin investigating potential conflicts of interest. Last year, a Freedom of Information Act request by environmental groups revealed that a former Hillary Clinton campaign aide was working as a lobbyist for TransCanada. Cardno Entrix, a massive contracting firm and TransCanada client, was hired to prepare much of the original environmental assessment.

Kleeb said Bold Nebraska will actively oppose the pipeline regardless of where the new route is sited. The state-level group's involvement with a hot-button national issue may be part of what the director of a global energy consulting firm told a Canadian news outlet is a shifting dynamic in US energy policy: "The big take-away message for me from this whole experience is the importance of the states in the energy policy debate. Whether it's the Nebraska Keystone XL issues or the fracking (hydraulic fracturing) issue, the states are really driving a lot of energy policy these days ... I think that the Obama administration - absent the problems in Nebraska - might have played this very differently."

Unless TransCanada drops the project or lawmakers take the review out of the State Department's hands, the Obama administration could take another stab at reviewing the pipeline permit. If the current drama is any indicator, the Keystone XL pipeline will continue to be a political headache for the Obama administration.

Armed With Naïvete

Time to Stop Being Cynical About Corporate Money in Politics and Start Being Angry

By Bill McKibben, cross-posted from Tom Dispatch

My resolution for 2012 is to be naïve -- dangerously naïve.

I’m aware that the usual recipe for political effectiveness is just the opposite: to be cynical, calculating, an insider. But if you think, as I do, that we need deep change in this country, then cynicism is a sucker’s bet. Try as hard as you can, you’re never going to be as cynical as the corporations and the harem of politicians they pay for.  It’s like trying to outchant a Buddhist monastery.

Here’s my case in point, one of a thousand stories people working for social change could tell: All last fall, most of the environmental movement, including 350.org, the group I helped found, waged a fight against the planned Keystone XL pipeline that would bring some of the dirtiest energy on the planet from Canada through the U.S. to the Gulf Coast. We waged our struggle against building it out in the open, presenting scientific argument, holding demonstrations, and attending hearings.  We sent 1,253 people to jail in the largest civil disobedience action in a generation.  Meanwhile, more than half a million Americans offered public comments against the pipeline, the most on any energy project in the nation’s history.

And what do you know? We won a small victory in November, when President Obama agreed that, before he could give the project a thumbs-up or -down, it needed another year of careful review.  (The previous version of that review, as overseen by the State Department, had been little short of a crony capitalist farce.)  Given that James Hansen, the government’s premier climate scientist, had said that tapping Canada’s tar sands for that pipeline would, in the end, essentially mean “game over for the climate,” that seemed an eminently reasonable course to follow, even if it was also eminently political.

A few weeks later, however, Congress decided it wanted to take up the question. In the process, the issue went from out in the open to behind closed doors in money-filled rooms.  Within days, and after only a couple of hours of hearings that barely mentioned the key scientific questions or the dangers involved, the House of Representatives voted 234-194 to force a quicker review of the pipeline.  Later, the House attached its demand to the must-pass payroll tax cut.

That was an obvious pre-election year attempt to put the president on the spot. Environmentalists are at least hopeful that the White House will now reject the permit.  After all, its communications director said that the rider, by hurrying the decision, “virtually guarantees that the pipeline will not be approved.”

As important as the vote total in the House, however, was another number: within minutes of the vote, Oil Change International had calculated that the 234 Congressional representatives who voted aye had received $42 million in campaign contributions from the fossil-fuel industry; the 193 nays, $8 million.

Buying Congress

I know that cynics -- call them realists, if you prefer -- will be completely unsurprised by that. Which is precisely the problem.

We’ve reached the point where we’re unfazed by things that should shake us to the core. So, just for a moment, be naïve and consider what really happened in that vote: the people’s representatives who happen to have taken the bulk of the money from those energy companies promptly voted on behalf of their interests.

They weren’t weighing science or the national interest; they weren’t balancing present benefits against future costs.  Instead of doing the work of legislators, that is, they were acting like employees. Forget the idea that they’re public servants; the truth is that, in every way that matters, they work for Exxon and its kin. They should, by rights, wear logos on their lapels like NASCAR drivers.
If you find this too harsh, think about how obligated you feel when someone gives you something. Did you get a Christmas present last month from someone you hadn’t remembered to buy one for? Are you going to send them an extra-special one next year?

And that’s for a pair of socks. Speaker of the House John Boehner, who insisted that the Keystone approval decision be speeded up, has gotten $1,111,080 from the fossil-fuel industry during his tenure. His Senate counterpart Mitch McConnell, who shepherded the bill through his chamber, has raked in $1,277,208 in the course of his tenure in Washington.

If someone had helped your career to the tune of a million dollars, wouldn’t you feel in their debt? I would. I get somewhat less than that from my employer, Middlebury College, and yet I bleed Panther blue.  Don’t ask me to compare my school with, say, Dartmouth unless you want a biased answer, because that’s what you’ll get.  Which is fine -- I am an employee.

But you’d be a fool to let me referee the homecoming football game. In fact, in any other walk of life we wouldn’t think twice before concluding that paying off the referees is wrong. If the Patriots make the Super Bowl, everyone in America would be outraged to see owner Robert Kraft trot out to midfield before the game and hand a $1,000 bill to each of the linesmen and field judges.

If he did it secretly, the newspaper reporter who uncovered the scandal would win a Pulitzer. But a political reporter who bothered to point out Boehner’s and McConnell’s payoffs would be upbraided by her editor for simpleminded journalism.  That’s how the game is played and we’ve all bought into it, even if only to sputter in hopeless outrage.

Far from showing any shame, the big players boast about it: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, front outfit for a consortium of corporations, has bragged on its website about outspending everyone in Washington, which is easy to do when Chevron, Goldman Sachs, and News Corp are writing you seven-figure checks. This really matters.  The Chamber of Commerce spent more money on the 2010 elections than the Republican and Democratic National Committees combined, and 94% of those dollars went to climate-change deniers.  That helps explain why the House voted last year to say that global warming isn’t real.

It also explains why “our” representatives vote, year in and year out, for billions of dollars worth of subsidies for fossil-fuel companies. If there was ever an industry that didn’t need subsidies, it would be this one: they make more money each year than any enterprise in the history of money. Not only that, but we’ve known how to burn coal for 300 years and oil for 200.

Those subsidies are simply payoffs. Companies give small gifts to legislators, and in return get large ones back, and we’re the ones who are actually paying.

Whose Money?  Whose Washington?

I don’t want to be hopelessly naïve. I want to be hopefully naïve. It would be relatively easy to change this: you could provide public financing for campaigns instead of letting corporations pay. It’s the equivalent of having the National Football League hire referees instead of asking the teams to provide them.

Public financing of campaigns would cost a little money, but endlessly less than paying for the presents these guys give their masters. And it would let you watch what was happening in Washington without feeling as disgusted.  Even legislators, once they got the hang of it, might enjoy neither raising money nor having to pretend it doesn’t affect them.

To make this happen, however, we may have to change the Constitution, as we’ve done 27 times before. This time, we’d need to specify that corporations aren’t people, that money isn’t speech, and that it doesn’t abridge the First Amendment to tell people they can’t spend whatever they want getting elected. Winning a change like that would require hard political organizing, since big banks and big oil companies and big drug-makers will surely rally to protect their privilege.

Still, there’s a chance.  The Occupy movement opened the door to this sort of change by reminding us all that the system is rigged, that its outcomes are unfair, that there’s reason to think people from across the political spectrum are tired of what we’ve got, and that getting angry and acting on that anger in the political arena is what being a citizen is all about.

It’s fertile ground for action.  After all, Congress’s approval rating is now at 9%, which is another way of saying that everyone who’s not a lobbyist hates them and what they’re doing. The big boys are, of course, counting on us simmering down; they’re counting on us being cynical, on figuring there’s no hope or benefit in fighting city hall. But if we’re naïve enough to demand a country more like the one we were promised in high school civics class, then we have a shot.

A good time to take an initial stand comes later this month, when rallies outside every federal courthouse will mark the second anniversary of the Citizens United decision. That’s the one where the Supreme Court ruled that corporations had the right to spend whatever they wanted on campaigns.

To me, that decision was, in essence, corporate America saying, “We’re not going to bother pretending any more. This country belongs to us.”

We need to say, loud and clear: “Sorry. Time to give it back.”

Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, founder of the global climate campaign 350.org, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. 

What Has Occupy Accomplished

By Fuzzyone

A friend with whom I have been debating the merits of the Occupy movement asked me what I thought about this New Yorker Talk of the Town piece by Jane Mayer.  In it she discusses the campaign that led to the delay, and one hopes eventual abandonment, of the Keystone XL pipeline.  At the end of the piece she has a condecending reference to the Occupy Movement:

Yet the Occupy movement could do worse than to learn from the pipeline protest. The difference between the focussed, agenda-driven campaign fought by the environmentalists and the free-form, leaderless one waged by the Occupiers, the historian Michael Kazin says, is that the environmentalists grasped the famous point made by Dr. King’s political forebear, Frederick Douglass: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

But Mayer, of whom I am generally a fan, misses a fundamental point. She notes that on November 6 12,000 people encircled the White House to protest the pipeline.  The turn out exceeded expectations and was far more than participated in earlier protests at the end of August.  Mayer does not explain the difference and while she rightly lauds Bill McKibben for organizing the anti-Keystone actions, she neglects to mention this: before the November protest McKibben sought the support of the Occupy Movement and that the very environmentalists leading the protest were also aligned with Occupy.  (A McKibben piece on the issues appeared right here back in October.)

This is, in part, the impact of the Occupy Movement.  It has awakened, energized and empowered people who are frustrated by the way in which big money has shut them out of decision making in this country and that awakening has the potential to revitalize activism in this country.  Energy may need direction to have its fullest effect, but first you have to create it.

Tar Sands Action To Give White House Group Hug And Demand He Reject The Keystone XL Pipeline

Denying the permit for a brutally stupid, money-grab like the Keystone XL pipeline is a no-brainer,  right Mr President?” -- Julia Louis-Dreyfus

This Sunday, November 6, thousands of people will join hands and encircle the White House to urge President Obama to reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.  This will demonstrate the powerful support to reject the pipeline – and the serious consequences for his re-election if he doesn’t.

Of course, the consequences for the planet would be far more dire.  As explained by the Tar Sands Action campaign:

The proposed Keystone XL pipeline would carry tar sands oil, some of the dirtiest fuel on the planet, over 1,700 miles from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. The pipeline risks a BP-style oil spill over one of America’s largest sources of fresh drinking water, the Ogallala Aquifer. The nation’s top climate scientist, NASA’s Dr. James Hansen, says that fully exploiting the tar sands could mean “game over” for the climate.

Tar Sands Action campaign released this video of Julia Louis-Dreyfus laying out he challenge to the President to "make the right call."

Will Obama’s Enviro Betrayals Cost Him in 2012?

By Mark Hertsgaard, cross-posted from his website

[Mark ghostwrote this editorial for The Nation]

“If he didn’t mean it, he shouldn’t have said it.”  Referring to President Obama, environmental activist Bill McKibben was saying this a lot during the sit-ins he recently led outside the White House to urge Obama to block a climate-killing tar sands pipeline to run from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.  Two weeks of protest resulted in 1,253 arrests, making it the largest act of civil disobedience in the history of US environmentalism.  It concluded September 3, one day after Obama made one of the most fateful—and shameful—decisions of his presidency: ordering the EPA to delay new regulations on ozone emissions because the rules pose undue “burdens” on corporate polluters.

McKibben was urging Obama to live up to his 2008 pledge that in his presidency the rise of the oceans would begin to slow and the planet begin to heal.  Of course, some might claim the standard to which McKibben is holding Obama is politically naïve.  Candidates for president routinely make promises they don’t keep.  But voters aren’t stupid.  What matters is why a candidate breaks a promise: is it because he won’t deliver, or he can’t?  If a president falls short because of circumstances beyond his control or insurmountable opposition, voters can understand and even forgive—if the president puts up a fight.  But if a president fails because of mistakes or weakness—if he is not seen as a strong leader—it leaves voters confused, demoralized and open to alternatives.

Obama has thirteen months to persuade voters that they should blame not him but the GOP for his presidency’s shortcomings.  He has much less time to convince the thousands of activists nationwide—who do the grunt work of getting out the vote—that he’s worth their sweat and sacrifices one more time.

It’s no secret that Obama is far from closing either deal, and the tar sands pipeline and ozone regulations demonstrate why.  Yes, the president has done some good things on the environment; the fuel efficiency standards he pushed through this year, for example, will significantly lower air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.  But he has done bad things as well, including opening vast tracts of the West to coal mining and providing much more funding to nuclear and fossil fuel than to green alternatives.

Obama’s ozone decision, however, has provoked particular outrage, for four reasons.  First, by ordering the EPA to delay the promised ozone regulations, the president repudiated science; the independent panel of experts advising the EPA were unanimous in recommending the tougher regulations, which would reduce incidence of child asthma and avoid 12,000 deaths a year.  Second, Obama’s order was possibly illegal. The Clean Air Act expressly forbids the government to consider the economic impacts of its regulations; public health is the sole criterion (a stipulation upheld in 2001 by the Supreme Court, with none other than archconservative Justice Antonin Scalia writing the opinion). EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, who has described the existing regulations as “not legally defensible,” has now been undercut by her boss, raising questions about whether she—the administration’s strongest environmental voice—will resign. Third, in making his announcement, Obama channeled the antigovernment mantra of the Chamber of Commerce, citing “the importance of reducing regulatory…uncertainty,” thus buttressing the discredited argument that regulation costs jobs. Fourth, Obama blatantly double-crossed environmentalists, who were suing the EPA over these regulations when Obama took office. His aides persuaded them to drop the suit because Obama’s EPA would soon strengthen the regulations.

Overriding the EPA in this manner sets an ominous precedent for the tar sands decision, which Obama is scheduled to make by year’s end. Bear in mind, as the president likes to say, that both decisions are his alone; he can’t blame Congress for tying his hands. The EPA has twice lambasted reports by the State Department that absurdly claim that the Keystone XL pipeline—projected to transport the dirtiest fossil fuel on earth across 1,700 miles of North America, including the crucial Ogallala aquifer—would have “no significant environmental impact.” Citing the EPA’s estimate that the tar sands in Alberta, if burned, would emit 82 percent more greenhouse gases than conventional fossil fuels, McKibben has called the pipeline “a fuse to the second-largest pool of carbon on the planet,” behind Saudi Arabia. The claim that the tar sands will reduce US dependence on petro-dictators is just as dubious. One of the refineries the pipeline will supply in Texas is half-owned by Saudi Arabia’s state oil company.

Mainstream voices tell progressives unhappy with Obama to grow up: your whining threatens to elect a Republican in 2012, who would be much worse. But they are the ones who aren’t savvy. Fear of the dark side will cause most of the Democratic base to give Obama their votes, but it will not be enough to persuade them to give up their evenings and weekends to get out the vote for him, to sway independent and undecided voters. It’s a normal reaction. If Obama approves the pipeline, explains Courtney Hight, his Florida youth-vote director in 2008 who was arrested in the protest outside the White House, “it is just human nature that the resulting disappointment will sap the enthusiasm that drove us to work so hard last time.”

Obama still has time to bring his message into line with the stirring vision he conveyed in 2008. Perhaps, however, he thinks he can win without a strongly motivated base, relying instead on the powers of incumbency, not least the enormous amounts of money he is raising. If he chooses that course and it fails, spare us any prattle about unsophisticated progressives being at fault. A defeated Obama will have no one to blame but himself.

Occupy The White House: Stop The Keystone XL

Bill McKibben writes that while an energized left may have brought Obama to the party in 2008, once he got there he didn't want to dance with us, "he wanted to dance with Larry Summers."  

Tom Engelhardt explains that "there is already a kind of “occupy” movement forming, in particular to protest the proposed 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline that is to bring the dirtiest “tough oil” from Canadian tar sands to the Gulf of Mexico."  McKibben has been at "the forefront of the environmental “occupy” movement" and reports on it from the front lines.

By Bill McKibben, cross-posted from Tom Dispatch

For connoisseurs, Barack Obama’s fundraising emails for the 2012 election campaign seem just a tad forlorn -- slightly limp reminders of the last time ‘round.

Four years ago at this time, the early adopters among us were just starting to get used to the regular flow of email from the Obama campaign. The missives were actually exciting to get, because they seemed less like appeals for money than a chance to join a movement.

Sometimes they came with inspirational videos from Camp Obama, especially the volunteer training sessions staged by organizing guru Marshall Ganz. Here’s a favorite of mine, where a woman invokes Bobby Kennedy and Cesar Chavez and says that, as the weekend went on, she “felt her heart softening,” her cynicism “melting,” her determination building. I remember that feeling, and I remember clicking time and again to send another $50 off to fund that people-powered mission. (And I recall knocking on a lot of New Hampshire doors, too, with my 14-year-old daughter.

It’s no wonder, then, that I’m still on the email list. But I haven’t been clicking through this time. Not even when Barack Obama himself asked me to “donate $75 or more today to be automatically entered for a chance to join me for dinner.” Not even when campaign manager Jim Messina pointed out that, though “the president has very little time to spend on anything related to the campaign… this is how he chooses to spend it -- having real, substantive conversations with people like you” over the dinner you might just win. (And if you do win, you’ll be put on a plane to “Washington, or Chicago, or wherever he might be that day.”)

Not even when deputy campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon offered to let me “take ownership of this campaign” by donating to it and, as an “added bonus,” possibly find myself “across the table from the president.” Not even when Michelle lowered the entry price from $75 to $25 and offered this bit of reassurance: “Just relax. Barack wants this dinner to be fun, and he really loves getting to know supporters like you.” Not even when, hours before an end-of-September fundraising “deadline,” Barack himself dropped the asking price to three dollars. God, have a little self-respect man!  Three dollars?

Here’s the thing I’m starting to think Obama never understood: yes, for most of us the 2008 campaign was partly about him, but it was more about the campaign itself -- about the sudden feeling of power that gripped a web-enabled populace, who felt themselves able to really, truly hope. Hope that maybe they’d found a candidate who would escape the tried-and-true money corruption of Washington.


None of us gave $50 hoping for a favor. Quite the opposite. You gave $50 hoping that, for the first time in a long while in American politics, no one would get a favor. And the candidate, it must be said, led us on. His rhetorical flights were dazzling -- to environmentalists like me, he promised to “free this nation from the tyranny of oil once and for all,” and pledged that his administration would mark the moment when “the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

Once in office, it was inevitable that he’d disappoint us to some degree.  In fact, we knew the disappointment would come and braced ourselves for it. After all, our movement was up against the staggering power of vested corporate and financial interests. It’s hard to beat big money. Still, we didn’t mind thinking: Yes, we can. We’ll work hard. We’ve got your back. Let’s go!

What we completely missed was that Obama didn’t want us at his back -- that the minute the campaign was over he would cut us adrift, jettison the movement that had brought him to power. Instead of using all those millions of people to force through ambitious health-care proposals or serious climate legislation or [fill in the blank yourself here], he governed as the opposite of a movement candidate.

He clearly had not the slightest interest in keeping that network activated and engaged. Though we had brought him to the party, it was as if he didn’t really want to dance with us. Instead -- however painful the image may be -- he wanted to dance with Larry Summers. (Fundraising idea: I’d pay $75 to be assured I never had to have dinner with Summers.)

As the months of his administration rolled into years, he only seemed to grow less interested in movements of any sort. Before long, people like Tom Donahue, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, were topping the list of the most frequent visitors to the White House.  And that was before this winter when -- after they’d been the biggest contributors to GOP congressional candidates -- Obama went on bended knee to Chamber headquarters, apologizing that he hadn’t brought a fruitcake along as a gift. (What is it with this guy and food?  At any rate, he soon gave them a far better present, hiring former Chamber insider Bill Daley as his chief of staff.)

Now, his popularity tanking, Obama and his advisors talk about “tacking left” for the election. A nice thought, but maybe just a little late.

Increasingly, it seems to me, those of us who were ready to move with him four years ago are deciding to leave normal channels and find new forms of action. Here's an example: by year's end the president has said he will make a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry crude oil from the tar sands of northern Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico. The nation's top climate scientists sent the administration a letter indicating that such a development would be disastrous for the climate.  NASA's James Hansen, the government's top climate researcher, said heavily tapping tar-sands oil, a particularly “dirty” form of fossil fuel, would mean “game over for the climate.” Ten of the president's fellow recent Nobel Peace Prize laureates pointed out in a letter that blocking the prospective pipeline would offer him a real leadership moment, a “tremendous opportunity to begin transition away from our dependence on oil, coal, and gas.”

But every indication from this administration suggests that it is prepared to grant the necessary permission for a project that has the enthusiastic backing of the Chamber of Commerce, and in which the Koch Brothers have a “direct and substantial interest.”  And not just backing.  To use the words of a recent New York Times story, they are willing to "flout the intent of federal law" to get it done.  Check this out as well: the State Department, at the recommendation of Keystone XL pipeline builder TransCanada, hired a second company to carry out the environmental review.  That company already considered itself a "major client" of TransCanada.  This is simply corrupt, potentially the biggest scandal of the Obama years.  And here's the thing: it's a crime still in progress.  Watching the president do nothing to stop it is endlessly depressing.

For many of us, it’s been an overdue wake-up call, a sharp reminder of just who the president was really listening to. In mid-summer, several leaders of the environmental movement, myself included, put out a call for nonviolent civil disobedience at the White House over the upcoming Keystone pipeline decision. And more people -- 1,253 in total -- showed up to be arrested than at anytime in the last 40 years. (One reason Obama’s emails stink this time around: the guy who used to write many of them, Elijah Zarlin, not only isn’t working for the campaign any more, but got hauled off in a paddy wagon.)


Obama had mojo when he knew it wasn’t about him, that it was about change. But when you promise change, you have to deliver. His last best opportunity may come with that Keystone Pipeline decision, which he can make entirely by himself, without our inane Congress being able to get in the way. So on November 6th, exactly one year before the election, we’re planning to circle the White House with people. And the signs we’ll be carrying will simply be quotes from his last campaign -- all that stuff about the tyranny of big oil and the healing of the planet.

Our message will be simple: If you didn’t mean it, you shouldn’t have said it. If you did, here’s the chance to prove it.  Nix the pipeline.

We don’t want dinner. We want action.

Bill McKibben is an organizer at tarsandsaction.org, a TomDispatch regular, and Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College. His most recent book is Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.