The glee is palpable among fossil fools over Donald Trump’s actions favoring the Keystone XL pipeline and trashing several Obama-era climate-related initiatives. But it’s premature. Environmental activists say they are determined to fight. Indeed, every anti-environment move Trump makes seems to energize people whose political activism has been dormant or who have since the Nov. 8 election joined protests and other grassroots actions for the first time.
Says Stephen Kretzmann, executive director of Oil Change International:
“Keystone XL has been seen as inevitable before, but nevertheless, we persisted. This isn’t game over, it’s game on. Now we have a President who is deeply beholden to the oil industry and will do anything they ask, so this approval is no surprise. This is a pipeline that was designed for an oil market that no longer exists, that will go through lands where people have never wanted it.
“Donald Trump likes to talk a big game when it comes to laying pipe, but landowners, Native nations, and climate activists aren’t going to let him get away with groping America. Put your tiny hands in the air, Trump, and back away from the climate.“
Many people in Trump’s dwindling camp of supporters, including a few members of the pr*sident’s own cabinet, don’t buy the long-established science behind the greenhouse effect, flat out rejecting the chemistry and physics behind it.
For instance, Environmental Protection Agency-hating EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt says carbon dioxide isn’t a primary contributor to climate change. It’s hard to know how many truly believe this and related nonsense out of pure ignorance, and how many take such a backward public stance because it meshes with their own financial and ideological interests even though science speaks loudly of the necessity to curb greenhouse gases.
Whatever the motives among these numbskulls—greedy or ignorant—there is a widespread view among them, based on official statements or on casual commentary at right-wing media outlets, that Trump’s recent environmentally unsound decisions mark the end of Obama’s policies designed to spur the spread of clean energy and meet America’s international pledges to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.
In addition to Trump’s approval last Friday of a permit for TransCanada to build the rest of the Keystone XL pipeline (reversing President Obama’s rejection of the permit in November 2015), the pr*sident has retreated on vehicle fuel efficiency, eliminated a mandate for methane measurement at oil and gas drill sites on public land, and reversed a series of other Obama-issued climate-related initiatives, including a dismantling of the Clean Power Plan established to reduce greenhouse gases by up to 28 percent by 2025.
But while Trump’s deep bow to the interests of the fossil fuel industry is deeply disturbing to environmental advocates and happy news to climate science deniers, there is a long way to go before his executive orders are fulfilled. Standing in the way is an array of green activist groups ready to take the regime to court and, if necessary, to engage in civil disobedience.
Marianne Lavelle at InsideClimate News reports:
"Whenever Congress or TransCanada or its lobbyists have tried to create shortcuts to expedite approval, it tended to backfire and cause the process to be longer," said Anthony Swift, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Canada project. "We're seeing that again with the [administration] making a decision on the basis of an incredibly outdated environmental review." [...]
Environmentalists will argue that under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the change in oil economics and new scientific analysis are the kind of "significant new circumstances" that require a supplemental environmental analysis. Under NEPA the public comment process takes at least 75 days and often takes months or years.
"It's very, very difficult to imagine a legally defensible decision on the basis of this review" by the Trump administration, Swift said. "And if we see a legally indefensible approval, we will challenge that."
Here’s Bill McKibben:
“This project is going to be fought at every turn,” said Bill McKibben, a co-founder of the climate-activism group 350.org and one of the first organizers of anti-Keystone protests. “There’s nothing static about this project. In the six or seven years since we started fighting it, the price of a solar panel has fallen 75 percent.” [...]
McKibben and other leaders outlined an all-out assault on every aspect of the pipeline’s completion. The fight has taken on higher stakes. During the early 2010s, global oil price were high. It’s expensive to drill in the Albertan tar sands, but the overall cost of oil would have made it feasible even if no pipeline was built. But as the price of crude has fallen around the world, the Albertan tar sands will likely only now get drilled if there’s a cheap way to transport their haul—like an extra-large pipeline, for instance.
Sara Shor, a campaign manager with 350.org, said the organization and its allies will "raise hell at the national level" and recruit millions of people to fight the pipeline. Some of the results of that recruiting are likely to be obvious at next month’s town hall meetings when Congress leaves Washington for their home turf during the spring recess. "We’re going to continue to make Keystone XL a political issue and push every elected official to come out against this project."
The most immediate hurdle for Keystone XL’s builder, TransCanada, is Nebraska. The company was forced to change its original 271-mile route in the state away from the fragile sand hills. Authorities there are now considering whether the new route should be approved. When informed of this, Trump said Nebraska “will be good,” and that he would call up Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts about it. But it’s not the governor who makes the decision about pipeline routes, it’s the Public Service Commission. The PSC may not get around to deciding until September.
If the members favor the pipeline, it still won’t be the end of Keystone XL’s obstacles in the Cornhusker state.
Says Jane Kleeb, president of Bold Alliance of Nebraska, which has been battling the pipeline for years:
“Families along the proposed route and our drinking water are Trump’s political football. No announcement from the White House can distract from Trump’s constant lying. Keystone XL will use foreign steel, to transport foreign oil, to the foreign export market all while using eminent domain to take land away from farmers and ranchers. Keystone XL is and always will be all risk and no reward. Kind of like Pres. Trump.”
Tom Goldtooth, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, says:
“Today, the fight to kill the Keystone XL Pipeline begins anew – and Donald Trump should expect far greater resistance than ever before. Indigenous people are rising up and fighting like our lives, sovereignty, and climate depend on it – because they do. Over and over again, we’ve seen Trump choose the profits of his billionaire friends over our sovereign, treaty and human rights. It shows a clear disregard of our tribal rights to consent and self-determination, and it is unacceptable in this day and age.
Developing tar sands is expensive and requires a consistent output over many years to produce a reasonable return on investment. At nearly $100 a barrel, there is a lot of room to make big profits. But with oil prices now hovering just below the $50 mark, some tar sands deposits just aren’t worth the effort although companies with the easiest-to-extract reserves can get by at around $35 a barrel.
Consequently, as activists plan their strategy for keeping Alberta’s petroleum in the ground, some of the world’s largest oil companies are pulling out of their tar sands investments. Royal Dutch Shell recently took a $2 billion write-down and abandoned its 80,000 barrel-a-day operation in Carmon Creek. And ExxonMobil Corp. and Conoco Phillips have between them abandoned a combined total of 5 billion barrels of tar sands reserves, knocking $250 billion valuation off their books.
Trump’s pro-fossil fuel actions have brought dismay to environmental advocates, but all those recent strokes of his pen aren’t the end of the fight. They just mark a new beginning.