In October of 2011, the
National Journal ran
this headline about the Keystone XL pipeline debate: "Insiders: Obama Will Approve Keystone XL Pipeline This Year."
The article's lede noted that "virtually all" or "70 percent" of the publication's energy and environment "insiders" said President Obama would green light the 1,700-mile pipeline that would funnel Canada's tar-sands oil down to Gulf Coast refineries.
They were wrong. He didn't do it that year, or the next year or even the year after that. He still hasn't done it. In fact, this week the president used the first stroke of his veto pen during this Congress to kill legislation that would have forced construction of the pipeline. Just to be clear, Obama still hasn't outright rejected or approved the pipeline itself. That decision awaits.
But had this bill reached Obama's desk during the first two years of his presidency, it might well have been signed into law. Doing so would have provided a young White House that was initially all too hesitant on a host of progressive issues with an exit door on Keystone XL. And the fact that Obama didn't take that option this week is a testament to the growth of the progressive movement and, more specifically, the climate movement.
Many of the same pundits who predicted Obama's approval of the pipeline in 2011 have also questioned the wisdom of putting so much energy into blocking it. Just this week, the Washington Post editorial board blasted climate change activists for focusing on this "overblown issue."
The Keystone XL controversy has occupied a far larger share of the national debate than it deserves. Environmental activists turned what should have been a routine infrastructure question into an existential war, styling it as a test of Mr. Obama’s commitment to fighting climate change.
Exactly. Climate activists turned what would have normally been a "routine" approval into a fight over the planet's future. Only, that's not a bad thing—it was brilliant and it worked.
Please head below the fold for more about how this movement was built.
What the critics seem to miss is that before the California-based group 350.org zeroed in on the Keystone XL fight, the environmental movement was largely adrift. It generally seemed to lack energy and creativity, but that was mostly because it lacked focus. The League of Conservation Voters (and to some extent the Sierra Club), while seemingly well meaning, had done what most every establishment progressive group does—nestled themselves comfortably into the "don't make waves" wing of the Democratic party. Reversing "climate change" was this sort of nebulous goal that no one seemed to be able to wrap their minds or arms around.
When 350.org led by author and activist Bill McKibben took aim at Keystone, they homed in on something tangible—getting Obama to reject the pipeline—and built a movement around it.
You can't manufacture grassroots energy, but if it exists, you can find a way to channel it with the right cause. Through protest after protest, McKibben, 350, and organizations like BOLD Nebraska proved there was real grassroots energy around environmental issues if people were simply provided with a way to get involved and make a discernible difference.
To that end, McKibben had kept an eye on the LGBT movement. He studied the protest they held on the national mall in 2009, drawing around 200,000 protesters, along with the subsequent nonviolent protests they staged in front of the White House to pressure Obama to act on their issues. McKibben has written about this, and I also had the good fortune of sitting in a room with him and a handful of others as climate activists, nearing their first major protest of Keystone XL in 2011, picked the brains of LGBT activists.
That August 2011 protest spanned 10 days and drew more than a thousand protesters from states across the country to sit for arrest in front of the White House. Organizers very specifically called on President Obama to reject the pipeline because lending his signature to approve it was solely within his control—not that of Congress or the State Department. Just his.
At the time, McKibben called it "the largest civil disobedience protest certainly in the history of the climate movement."
"We shouldn't have to be here doing this, but tests—defining moments—just kind of sometimes appear and this is one of those times," he said.
In
video of preparations for that defining moment, one organizer bluntly asks a room full of regular folks who had flown in from places like Nebraska, North Carolina, and Texas, "Any last pressing concerns about getting arrested?"
One young woman stands up and says, "Oh my gosh, I'm scared out of my mind—that's how I'm feeling."
Despite some understandable jitters, the action was so successful that it led to another protest a couple months later in which an estimated 10,000 people encircled the White House with a human chain three-people deep. More protests followed in 2012 and eventually, in 2013, the Sierra Club ended its 120-year prohibition on civil disobedience so that it could join with other climate activists in their direct actions.
Four years later, the Obama administration is still studying the issue of Keystone XL. In the meantime, the Environmental Protection Agency has taken its strongest steps to date to reduce carbon emissions, and a climate movement that hadn't put together a sustained and cohesive rallying cry for perhaps decades, is on the upswing. It's a palpable energy that brought hundreds of thousands of marchers out across the nation for the People's Climate March last year and continues to be felt around the globe.
If Keystone XL was the wrong fight to pick, I'd like to know what the right one was.