[The story behind that victory illustrates a lot about where we
stand in the push for a fair and working planet.]
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JOE BIDEN'S CANCELLATION OF THE KEYSTONE PIPELINE IS A LANDMARK IN
THE CLIMATE FIGHT  
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Bill McKibben
January 20, 2021
The New Yorker
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_ The story behind that victory illustrates a lot about where we
stand in the push for a fair and working planet. _

Demonstrators gather in front of the White House to protest the
proposed Keystone XL pipeline, in the summer of 2011., Photograph by
Melissa Golden / Redux

 

In his first hours in office, Joe Biden
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certainly, once and for all—one of the greatest environmental
battles this country has seen. He has cancelled the permit allowing
the Keystone XL pipeline to cross the border from Canada into the
United States, and the story behind that victory illustrates a lot
about where we stand in the push for a fair and working planet.

To review: Keystone XL, a project of the TransCanada Corporation (now
TC Energy), was slated to carry oil from Alberta’s tar sands across
the country to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. President George W.
Bush approved the original Keystone pipeline, and it went into
service, early in the Obama years, without any real fuss. A new XL
version, announced in 2008, was larger and took a different course
across the heartland. And, this time, there was opposition. It came
first from indigenous people in Canada, who had watched tar-sand mines
lay waste to a vast landscape. First Nations leaders, such as Melina
Laboucan-Massimo and Clayton Thomas-Muller, along with Native-American
leaders on this side of the border—including Tom and Dallas
Goldtooth, of the Indigenous Environmental Network—put up strong
resistance and joined forces with ranchers whose lands would be
bisected by the pipeline. Organizers such as Jane Kleeb, in Nebraska,
found small pockets of support within some of the “big green”
environmental groups, much of it coördinated by the veteran
campaigner Kenny Bruno. In the spring of 2011, the _nasa_ climate
scientist James Hansen helped orient the pipeline as a climate-related
fight, pointing to the massive amounts of carbon contained in the
Canadian tar-sand deposits and making the case that, if they were
fully exploited, it would be “game over” for the climate. That
brought the climate movement into the picture; a letter (full
disclosure: I drafted it) went out in the summer of 2011, asking
people to engage in civil disobedience outside the White House.

At first, it wasn’t clear how many would do so, in part because
President Barack Obama was popular with environmentalists. But
people—many of them wearing Obama buttons—began arriving in
serious numbers. Before two weeks of protest, starting in late August,
were over, 1,254 people had been arrested
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nonviolent direct actions in recent years. A few months later, many
times that number circled the White House perimeter, standing shoulder
to shoulder, five deep. The big environmental groups quickly joined
the fight. Even so, the experts said that there was no chance to stop
the pipeline. (The _National Journal_ polled its “energy
insiders,” and ninety-one per cent said
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TransCanada would soon have its permit.) But, in fact, the battle was
over by mid-November, when Obama announced a delay, in order to
consider the question more closely. As he consolidated support for his
reëlection bid, he had apparently concluded that “Keystone” and
“climate” were too closely linked, though it took him several
years to officially reject the permits. Ever since that initial pause,
it’s been a matter of holding on to that victory—in close votes in
Congress, during the Obama years, in endless wrangling with
financiers, and with brilliant maneuvering in the courts,
after Donald Trump
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during his first days in office. I’m very grateful for Biden’s
action, but I had no doubt he would take it—even today, Keystone is
far too closely identified with climate carelessness for a Democratic
President to be able to waver.

The success in 2011 was, to some degree, a matter of timing. There was
already growing concern about global warming, and Keystone proved to
be the catalyst for the rapid expansion of the climate movement, which
was soon fighting for such things as fossil-fuel divestment
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renewable portfolio standards for solar power. The events of 2011 also
showed that the fossil-fuel industry was not unbeatable, and it
encouraged people to oppose the construction of just about every new
fracking well and coal port and liquid-natural-gas terminal.
Environmentalists have won many of these infrastructure battles, and
they’ve added delay and cost to projects. (Who knows how many bad
things were never even proposed in the wake of Keystone XL?) The wins
continue: last fall, after an inspired decade-long campaign led by
Michigan environmentalists, Governor Gretchen Whitmer announced that
the state would close down a tar-sands pipeline through the Straits of
Mackinac, in the heart of the Great Lakes. But there have been plenty
of losses, too, and Biden will get to help decide the fates of two
other critical projects that resemble KXL in many ways.

One is the Dakota Access Pipeline, the debate over which came to a
boil with the protests at Standing Rock
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during the final months of the Obama Administration; the other is Line
3, another tar-sands pipeline, whose expansion is planned to cross
from Canada into Minnesota and which was recently approved by Governor
Tim Walz. The most important outcome of the Keystone XL fight was that
Obama imposed a de-facto “climate test” on all new large-scale
infrastructure projects that require federal approval—and, if you
apply the most basic version of that challenge to either of these
projects, they fail instantly. Pressure is already building on Biden
to do something about them; a letter
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week from seventy-five indigenous women leaders demanded the
cancellation of all three pipelines. His response to the Dakota Access
and Line 3 pipelines will likely depend on the shifting balance of
power between environmentalists, indigenous groups, and organized
labor.

This surprises many people, who are used to thinking of the
fossil-fuel industry as the main pressure group. But that industry is
at its strongest during Republican Administrations. With Democrats in
power, an equally important constituency is the building-trades unions
of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., because they get the well-paid jobs involved in
constructing these mega-projects; the unions were staunch proponents
of Keystone XL from the start. (Jason Kenney, the premier of Alberta,
has said repeatedly in recent months that he was counting on the
unions to help TransCanada prevail in the endgame of the Keystone
fight, not understanding American politics well enough to know that
that particular ship had already sailed; it was as realistic as the
company’s _Onion_-esque last-minute pledge
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power the operation of the pipeline with renewable energy.) Line 3,
for instance, is proceeding under Governor Walz, a Democrat, likely
because it brings a lot of union jobs
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“I got a lot of people who said that it’s been nearly a whole year
since they went to work,” Royce Schulz, a union steward working on
the project in Carlton County, told
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Minneapolis _Star Tribune,_ in December. “It couldn’t have hit
at a better time, to get people back on their feet and making money
again.”

A construction worker earning ninety thousand dollars is, correctly, a
more sympathetic figure than an oil executive earning ten times that
much. And labor is a key part of the progressive coalition. So,
environmental activists (with rare exceptions, such as
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always forthright Naomi Klein) have been reluctant to call out the
building-trades unions, even when they offered Donald Trump their
fulsome support in an effort to get projects like these approved. The
A.F.L.-C.I.O. came out in favor
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the Dakota Access pipeline in September of 2016, even after security
guards used dogs against protesters. In response
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the Labor Coalition for Community Action, which includes minority
unionists, joined the Communication Workers of America, the nurses
union, and other labor heavyweights to stand against the pipeline. The
outcome of this fight within labor, and the wider progressive
movement, will determine in large measure how aggressive Biden will be
on climate-busting projects. If he allows the Dakota Access and Line 3
pipelines to proceed, he will dismay many core supporters, not to
mention allow infrastructure that will be spewing carbon into the air
for many decades to come. But perhaps this son of Scranton is uniquely
positioned to solve this conundrum. What’s needed is a grand
bargain, which replaces fossil-fuel-infrastructure jobs with jobs
building solar panels, wind turbines, water pipes that don’t carry
lead, and so on. These jobs need to be comparable in terms of pay;
there has to be necessary retraining for workers; and someone has to
figure out how to allocate this new work to existing unions, so that
no one gets left out and that all kinds of Americans share in those
jobs. It is, in other words, the messy work of a “just transition”
that, in this moment of economic and climatic peril, can’t be dodged
any longer.

 

There are instructive and hopeful lessons from the past. For many
years, the combined power of unions and auto companies insulated
Detroit from federal action on automobile mileage. Barack Obama
managed to break that deadlock shortly after taking office when, in
return for federal bailouts, he forced the industry to agree to much
higher fuel-efficiency standards. One of the people who cut that deal
was a young aide
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the national economic adviser named Brian Deese; he is now himself the
national economic adviser. The rest of Biden’s climate team has
solid labor credentials, too—for example, Gina McCarthy, the new
domestic climate czar, was the head of the Environmental Protection
Agency under Obama, where she helped implement the mileage
regulations. As the legislative director of the United Auto
Workers explained
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Congress, “The continuing recovery of the automobile industry in the
United States has as its foundation the regulatory certainty of these
tailpipe-emission standards, which is driving innovation in every
company and in every vehicle segment.” A few days before Biden’s
Inauguration, the team sat down with labor leaders for a formal
“listening session.” The official readout was anodyne, but the
effort itself was promising—if Biden sticks to his stance that all
policy is climate policy, then much can be done. Even Joe Manchin, the
conservative Democrat from West Virginia, who now may be the most
powerful man in the Senate, given its fifty-fifty split, can perhaps
be enticed with a series of proposals to cushion the irrevocable
demise of the coal industry. Bernie Sanders now runs the Senate Budget
Committee, which will have to look at any of these transition
projects, and in the Senate he’s been both organized labor’s
biggest booster and the most outspoken opponent of new fossil-fuel
infrastructure.

Biden’s action on Keystone XL couldn’t be more welcome, but it’s
cold comfort to the Native Americans camped out
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the upper Mississippi trying to block Line 3. That battle looks hard
right now, especially because the coronavirus pandemic
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joining them in large numbers. But the Keystone battle looked
impossible at the start. When enough people demand action, vested
interest and political convenience have to accommodate them. That’s
how change works.

_Bill McKibben
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of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org and a contributing writer
to The New Yorker. He writes The Climate Crisis
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The New Yorker's newsletter on the environment._

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