Keystone: The Fight Continues

OF ALL THE unlikely battles still to be raging, the fight over the Keystone XL pipeline has to be about the unlikeliest.

It was a long shot in the summer of 2011, when the national fight really began. Though a hardy corps of ranchers in Nebraska were already battling, and though Indigenous activists in Canada had been spreading the word about its source in the tar sands, it was all but unknown on a national basis.

Combine that with the fact that the oil industry had never lost a fight over some infrastructure it wished to build, and it was reasonable to conclude opponents had no chance. Indeed, more than 90 percent of the “energy insiders” polled that summer by D.C.’s trade paper, National Journal, said TransCanada would soon have its permit. There was a bipartisan consensus in favor of such projects: The secretary of state (that would be Hillary) had said she was “inclined” to grant the border-crossing approval, and President Barack Obama had already allowed the first-generation Keystone pipeline to be built.

But more people went to jail about XL than about any political issue in a long time, and then for years people kept up a steady drumbeat—loud enough that, eventually, after four years of hemming and hawing, Obama caved and blocked the project.

THAT VICTORY, of course, disappeared with the election of Donald Trump, who made approving Keystone one of his first priorities. But as he scrawled his name, he asked the head of TransCanada, there for the ceremony, when construction would begin.

Well, said the oilman, that kind of depends on Nebraska. You see, it turns out that along with the federal permit, the company also needs the Cornhusker State to approve a route—and that means they have to go through the seasoned and unflappable activists at Bold Nebraska, whose leader, Jane Kleeb, is among the toughest organizers in the country. And it’s not just Nebraska—in South Dakota, Indigenous groups are girding for the fight, just as at Standing Rock.

And people are bringing a new tactic to the fight, too. All along the route, people are building solar arrays and wind turbines and other renewable energy technology, which TransCanada would have to tear down to build its pipe. It’s a way of reminding everyone how much the world has changed over the six years of this battle: The price of solar power has fallen 70 percent, among other things.

In a rational world, that would make anyone wary of building a pipeline designed to be used (and paid off) over half a century. No one can seriously think it will seem like a good idea in 2070 to still be pumping filthy tar sands oil to be refined on the Gulf Coast and then stuck in the gas tank of someone’s car—long before 2070 those cars are going to be running on electrons. I’ve just come back from a sojourn in Africa watching the rapid expansion of solar energy—one would think that if it is possible in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire, it is possible in Nebraska and South Dakota as well.

Even if Trump and TransCanada succeed and KXL gets built, the fight has been well worth it—it helped launch an era of opposition to every fossil-fuel infrastructure project, and many of those battles have already been won. But Keystone isn’t built yet: The fight, improbable from the start, improbably continues.