Climate movement defeats Keystone XL pipeline

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VOL. 33, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2015 WWW.SOCIALISTACTION.ORG U.S. / CANADA $1 On Nov. 6, U.S. President Barack Obama formally denied TransCanada’s application for approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline.

The 1200-mile-long pipeline would have carried heavy crude oil (called bitumen) from tar-sands mines in northern Alberta, Canada, across the U.S. Great Plains states to oil refineries on the Gulf Coast. Tar-sands oil is the most carbon-intensive energy source ever exploited, and its full development has been called “game over for the climate” by NASA cli­ mate scientist James Hansen.

Obama’s decision to nix the pipeline a month before the Paris climate summit is a momentous victory for the growing mass movement against climate change. National organizations such as 350.org, CREDO, Ris­ ing Tide, and the Sierra Club have worked to focus in­ ternational media attention on the Keystone pipeline over the past five years.

Obama himself said in his statement on the decision that the pipeline occupied “an overinflated role in our political discourse”—a role that only came to pass after the mass movement forced it into the national spotlight through protests, blockades, and mass ar­ rests at the White House that challenged what was originally widely considered a done deal.

“Just a few years ago, insiders and experts wrote us off and assured the world Keystone XL would be built by the end of 2011. Together, ranchers, tribal nations and everyday people beat this project back, remind­ ing the world that Big Oil isn’t invincible—and that hope is a renewable resource,” says a statement by 350.org Executive Director May Boeve on the group’s website.

The resistance to Keystone was spearheaded by lo­ cal and regional coalitions like Bold Nebraska and the Cowboy Indian Alliance, which overcame animosity between white ranchers and Native American tribes in the Great Plains and blockaded parts of the project. Once they took notice, national organizations pro­ vided networking and publicity to build local protests around the country and mass civil disobedience in Washington, D.C. Much of the energy for the move­ ment came from young people looking for ways to op­ pose the ecocidal actions of fossil-fuel companies and nonsensical U.S. climate policy.

These protests culminated in the massive People’s Climate March in September 2014, which drew over 400,000 activists to New York City in the largest U.S. protest against climate change to date. That march would have been even more powerful had it made ex­ plicit demands on the country’s political rulers for a swift transition away from fossil fuels. Nonetheless, it put the government on notice that a do-nothing stance on climate change is no longer tolerable to a growing proportion of the population. It demon­ strated the possibility of a powerful mass movement around climate change taking shape.

Environmental journalist Bill McKibben, 350.org’s founder, gave a realistic assessment of the Keystone victory in an op-ed in The Guardian: “Given a realistic chance to affect the future, people are ready to take action. … Today was a good goal scored, but we’re still way behind. … There’s no guarantee that we can beat climate change, but there’s every guarantee we’re go­ ing to give it a hell of a fight.”

Until now, unfortunately, the strategies of national groups like 350.org and the Sierra Club have resulted in their being slow to tackle some pipeline projects that are worse than Keystone XL. A 2013 Open Let­ ter to the Anti-Tar Sands Movement from the Michi­ gan Coalition Against Tar Sands, which is fighting En­ bridge Energy tar sands pipelines in that state, reads in part, “The constant focus of the tar sands narrative around the President as the ultimate decision maker is … disempowering to communities bearing the bur­ den of existing infrastructure. … While kxl is a large part of the problem, it is time for the mainstream (continued on page 5, in “New England climate justice movement plans actions”)

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