Skip to content

U.S. environmentalists vow to continue fight against Keystone XL pipeline

WASHINGTON — American environmentalists admit TransCanada made a major concession by rerouting its proposed Keystone XL pipeline, but insist they’ll keep trying to prevent the controversial oilsands project from ever being built.

WASHINGTON — American environmentalists admit TransCanada made a major concession by rerouting its proposed Keystone XL pipeline, but insist they’ll keep trying to prevent the controversial oilsands project from ever being built.

After months of standing by the chosen route, Calgary-based TransCanada did a prompt about-face on Monday, offering to skirt the Sand Hills area of Nebraska — home of a massive aquifer that provides drinking water to millions on the Great Plains.

The move, coming just four days after the U.S. State Department said it was deferring a decision on the pipeline pending another look at alternate routes, has hardly shut down a makeshift coalition of American environmental groups that have come together in passionate opposition to the Canadian project.

“We’re very glad the Sand Hills are safe; now we just have the atmosphere of the entire planet to worry about,” said Bill McKibben, a leading U.S. climate change specialist and one of the masterminds behind the environmental movement’s opposition to Keystone.

For months, the American environmental movement held up the Ogallala aquifer as one of the primary reasons why U.S. President Barack Obama had to stop the $7-billion pipeline that aims to carry 700,000 barrels a day of oilsands crude through six American states to Gulf Coast refineries.

Obama himself raised concerns about the pipeline’s route in a recent interview with a Nebraska radio station.

And two U.S. senators who have been among the project’s most vocal critics — Republican Mike Johanns and Democrat Ben Nelson — quickly changed their tune Monday after TransCanada agreed to find a new route.

“It certainly appears to me common sense has prevailed,” Johanns said in a statement late Monday.

“I’m optimistic this could be a pathway to responsible completion of the pipeline so we can begin transporting more energy from a friendly ally and decrease our dependence on countries which may not share our values.”

Rather than pack up their protest signs and go home, however, environmentalists are vowing to press on in their battle against the project — and Alberta’s oilsands.

“The president should know that if this pipeline proposal somehow re-emerges from the review process, we will use every tool at our disposal to keep it from ever being built,” McKibben said last week in the aftermath of the State Department announcement.

Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, the international director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the aquifer was only one player in a vast cast of potential pipeline victims.

“It’s a major concession from TransCanada, and a pretty big victory for the people of Nebraska, but the Sand Hills is just one piece of a much larger story in this pipeline,” she said.

“There are all sorts of other areas at risk from Keystone XL. It crosses over 1,000 rivers along its path, including the Yellowstone River. So all of the very real concerns about the pipeline remain, along with the bigger question: do we really want tarsands in our mix in the United States, when we are trying to move towards clean energy?”

That broader query, indeed, has always been at the heart of the battle against Keystone.

Casey-Lefkowitz said the pipeline was singled out by design by environmentalists in the aftermath of failed federal climate change legislation last year. They looked at various controversial energy production methods, including so-called fracking to extract natural gas, strip mining and mountaintop removal to extract coal.

“We actually took on the fight against the tarsands as part of a bigger campaign against these new, dirtier sources of fuel,” she said.

“Energy companies weren’t going after these sources of fuel even 10 years ago because it was too expensive. But now it’s like a gold rush, and the people who are paying the price are the homeowners, farmers, ranchers, residents. And so we have to fight these very destructive types of energy production.”

But one observer said TransCanada may have painted the environmentalists into a corner.

Jon Entine, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, called TransCanada’s decision just the latest chess move in a game he said is overrun with “short-term-ism” and lacking in true visionaries on either side.

“TransCanada played it poorly in how they handled people of Nebraska for months, but they may have stumbled via their own incompetence into putting the environmental movement into a real bind,” said Entine, an expert on environmental and corporate responsibility issues.

Environmentalists originally tried to oppose Keystone XL by focusing on climate change and the carbon-intensive oilsands, he said. When that wasn’t broadly resonating, they joined forces with Nebraska ranchers and politicians, many of whom are pro-oil Republicans, including Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman.

Heineman, in fact, said he supports the pipeline and simply wants a new route.

It was an uneasy alliance to begin with, Entine said, one that’s likely gone up in smoke thanks to TransCanada’s about-face.

“The environmentalists have backed themselves into a corner by focusing so much on the routing. If the State Department follows protocol and judges this purely on the basis of the routing issue, it’s a checkmate for TransCanada,” he said.

Casey-Lefkowitz disagreed, predicting the pipeline is doomed regardless of a route change.

“This pipeline is going to fall from its own weight,” she said.

“It’s weighted down with a lot of risk to land and water, and a huge risk to our climate. It’s not the type of infrastructure that’s acceptable in this day and age, when we’re trying to move to a clean energy program.”

But even clean energy might be in trouble thanks to the Keystone XL battle, Entine said, pointing to the rise during the debate of so-called “nimbyism” — “NIMBY” is an acronym for “not in my back yard” — that could doom alternative energy projects just as surely as it will coal mines and pipelines.

“It’s going to come back to haunt them,” Entine predicted, pointing to how members of the Kennedy clan, supposed environmentalists, are still fighting a proposed wind turbine farm in Nantucket Sound because their famous compound overlooks the body of water.

“It’s going to kill solar projects and wind projects and all sorts of alternative energy projects. It’s not liberal or conservative, it’s pure nimbyism. And the success of Nebraska is going to result in huge protests against local alternative energy projects too.”