WASHINGTON — With the U.S. State Department expected to release within days its final environmental analysis of TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline, environmentalists are cranking up their protest efforts by employing Hollywood star power while descending upon Washington to stage White House sit-ins.
Mark Ruffalo, the Oscar-nominated actor, is the latest Hollywood figure to get involved in organized opposition to Alberta’s oilsands, asking people to participate in the sit-ins that begin on Saturday and continue to Sept. 3.
Organizers say some 1,500 people have signed up to participate in the protests.
Ruffalo won’t be at the White House on Saturday, but “is likely to join some time in the following two weeks,” a spokesman for Tar Sands Action, the environmental group behind the protests, said Friday.
In a YouTube clip posted earlier this week, Ruffalo calls on Americans to “put your principles into action.”
“Up north where the tarsands are located, native people’s homelands have already been wrecked,” says Ruffalo, who has also opposed “fracking,” a controversial process for extracting natural gas, in upper New York state, where he has a home.
Bill McKibben, a journalist and environmentalist who writes about climate change, is among those who will risk arrest on Saturday. He described the next two weeks as “the biggest organized civil disobedience protests of the climate change movement.”
“We’ve got people coming to get arrested from all 50 states,” McKibben said in an interview Friday.
That includes Margot Kidder, the Canadian-born actress who’s now an American citizen living in Montana. Kidder will travel to D.C. with three other Montana women, all of whom describe themselves as concerned grandmothers, early next week.
In an interview, Kidder didn’t have much good to say about Canada’s environmental record, alleging there are few regulatory standards.
“There is basically no governmental control, environmentally, in Canada over the oil and gas industry, far less than there is here,” Kidder said in an interview this week with the Livingston Weekly, an alternative Montana newspaper.
“The tar sands is the biggest carbon emitter on the planet . . . it’s using up something like 20 per cent of Canada’s allowed emissions alone.”
Alberta Environment spokesman Mark Cooper disputed Kidder’s claim, citing the coal industry as a far dirtier culprit. In 2009, a single coal plant in China produced roughly the same greenhouse gas emissions as the entire oilsands industry, he said.
“The most recent Environment Canada National Inventory Report shows the oilsands are responsible for 6.5 per cent of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions . . . and they represent approximately one-tenth of one per cent of global emissions,” Cooper said.
“The claim that they are the largest emitter in the world is even more ridiculous. The U.S. coal industry emits some 60 times as much.”
Ruffalo and Kidder aren’t the first to lend their celebrity to the movement. Danny Glover will also participate in the protests, while Avatar director James Cameron even visited Alberta last year to tour oilsands facilities and nearby communities.
The goal of the sit-ins is to convince the Obama administration to snuff out TransCanada Corp.’s $7-billion proposal to build a pipeline that would carry millions of barrels of oilsands crude weekly through the American heartland and to a Gulf Coast refinery in Texas.
The U.S. State Department is tasked with making a decision on the pipeline because it crosses an international border. After it produces its assessment, President Barack Obama will have 90 days to determine whether approving the pipeline is in the national interest.
“Here is a decision that gives Obama complete independence from Congress — he can do this all on his own, he can stop the pipeline without any congressional interference,” McKibben said. “So hopes are high among his base of supporters.”
But with a presidential election just 15 months away, politics is entering the equation like never before. Obama’s liberal base is opposed to the pipeline, whereas his most bitter foes in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives — the people he’ll be campaigning against — are passionate supporters of the project.
Late last month, the House passed a bill that demanded the Obama administration make a decision on the pipeline by Nov. 1. The State Department has said it will rule on the pipeline by the end of the year.
There have already been some ominous signs for TransCanada.
Delays in the approval process resulted when the Environmental Protection Agency successfully urged the State Department to conduct the environmental assessment. State’s decision to hold hearings in a half-dozen states in the path of the proposed pipeline also made its proponents nervous.
And in recent talks in Washington between Hillary Clinton and Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, the secretary of state was exceedingly cautious when discussing the pipeline, a source familiar with the discussion said Friday.
Canadian embassy officials have been devoting long hours to lobbying efforts. One lobbyist says cooler heads are prevailing for the moment, but that full-fledged panic will set in among pipeline proponents if there are any further delays in the process.
The oilsands lobbyists have adopted a relatively new tactic — they’re suggesting the pipeline will create thousands of jobs as the Obama administration struggles to bring down the country’s stubborn nine per cent unemployment rate. TransCanada has pegged the figure at 20,000 jobs.
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, one of the largest and most influential unions in the U.S., backs the project, saying it will create 1,500 jobs for its members. But on Friday two other major unions -- the Transport Workers Union and the Amalgamated Transit Union -- said they’re opposed because of environmental concerns.