Nebraska Sort of Approves the Keystone Pipeline

This article originally appeared on this site.

In the summer of 2011, National Journal polled a group of “energy and environment insiders” in Washington, D.C., to ask if the Keystone XL pipeline would be approved. “Virtually all” of them said yes; by a landslide, they predicted that TransCanada Corporation would have the permits in hand by the end of that year. They didn’t reckon, however, with an outpouring of opposition, including from a group I helped found, 350.org.

Six years later, the company may finally have the permits it needs. Or not—the Nebraska Public Service Commission voted in truly confusing fashion, this morning, to permit the pipeline to cross the state on its journey from the Alberta tar sands to the Gulf Coast, but on an alternative route from the one that the company wanted. That means that the company still needs to get approval from landowners, and the decision appears, at the very least, to give more time for opponents to organize and appeal. Even as the decision was coming down, indigenous groups in the upper Midwest were formalizing a pact to battle the pipeline, and thousands of people have already signed up to come to the region when construction season begins, next spring, using civil disobedience to block construction if necessary. It was one more strange moment in the tortured, twisted KXL saga, which has seen half a dozen times when the pipeline almost got approved.

In those six years, much else has happened. We’ve seen the four hottest years on record for the planet. Some of the windiest storms ever measured have done stunning damage to coasts and islands. The steadily rising ocean, the mass death of coral, the enormous migration of people fleeing from drought. Six years ago, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was three hundred and ninety parts per million; now it’s well past the four-hundred-parts-per-million mark, amid signs that forests and oceans have begun to lose their capacity to absorb carbon.

So, was the fight worth it? Does it make sense to keep it up, perhaps still against the odds? The answer, I think, lies in the other things that have happened over those years. On the back of the Keystone fight, an entire new front in the climate fight has emerged, the battle to “keep it in the ground.” The NASA scientist James Hansen’s original calculations about the Canadian tar sands—that if you burned all the economically recoverable oil in those formations you would take the atmospheric concentration of CO2 to five hundred and forty parts per million—helped make the tar sands, already synonymous with land-scarring destruction, synonymous with wrecking the climate, too. And the logic was soon applied to every other big fossil-fuel-extraction plan, turning local battles into worldwide ones. One bank after another has pulled away from financing tar sands and coal mines; just last week, Norway’s sovereign-wealth fund, among the largest pools of investment capital on the planet, announced a proposal to divest from fossil fuels. KXL itself was originally needed, its proponents said, because they planned to triple production from Alberta’s tar sands—but the financing has dropped away as opposition has risen and oil prices have fallen, and now that spectacular rise in production won’t happen. Activists have managed to quash at least two other huge pipelines leading out of the tar sands across Canadian soil, and only the election of Donald Trump salvaged any hope for KXL. The notion that most carbon must stay underground has now become commonplace: everyone from the World Bank on down uses the same rhetoric that Keystone protesters started employing.

Even more important, the success of those protesters in standing up to Big Oil seemed to spur similar fights across the planet: in subsequent years, everything from Arctic oil drilling to fracking to new coal mines has seen pitched battles. The head of one of the fossil-fuel industry’s biggest lobbies paid the campaign its ultimate tribute, complaining in a speech to industry peers that some way had to be found to stop the “Keystone-ization” of every project they tried to build. As Keith Schneider pointed out in National Geographic today, mega-projects have begun to fail regularly around the globe. And, even when they succeed, the costs are much higher. Imagine the carrying costs for Keystone alone in six years of delay; we’ll never know how many projects never even got proposed.

Six years ago, TransCanada was so confident of success that it had mowed the right of way for its pipeline, ready to commence work. For years pipe has been sitting in Midwestern fields, slowly rusting. And for years all that carbon has been sitting safely underground. If it eventually gets pumped to the surface, it will change the world for the worse. But the fight against it is changing the world for the better.

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