2015: The Year the Environmental Movement Knocked Out Keystone XL
In 2008, TransCanada applied for a U.S. presidential permit to build a segment of pipeline that would connect Alberta's landlocked oil with refineries in the Gulf of Mexico, and give tar sands access to world markets. On its path to Texas, Keystone XL also would cross the Ogallala Aquifer, which supplies about 30 percent of the groundwater pumped for irrigation in the entire U.S. and the drinking water for nearly 2 million Americans. Anti-tar sands activists knew they had found their target.
The campaign's prospects were dim. TransCanada’s first wholly owned U.S. oil pipeline, simply called Keystone, had already secured U.S. government approval to cross the Canadian border and carry up to 590,000 barrels a day of a tar sands oil from Alberta to Illinois. Keystone XL too seemed a shoo-in for approval. Any fight against the pipeline meant rallying concern in states along the route, many of them Republican strongholds with little political regard for climate change.
For the next few years, local environmental activists worked alongside the Natural Resources Defense Council and a few other national green groups to educate federal agencies involved in the permitting process about how much the tar sands could exacerbate climate change.
The effort got its biggest rallying point when BP’s Deepwater Horizon well exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010. The ensuing environmental disaster played out the dangers of oil drilling on people’s television screens for three months. Nearly five million gallons of oil gushed into the water as BP tried futilely to cap the well.
Meanwhile, a group called Bold Nebraska, led by grassroots organizer Jane Kleeb, started rallying ranchers, residents and indigenous leaders along the proposed Nebraska stretch of the Keystone XL in 2010. Regardless of political affiliation, they saw the dangers of a pipeline through their beloved countryside—connecting the dots between BP's disaster and the Keystone XL.
..more...
2015: The Year the Environmental Movement Knocked Out Keystone XL | InsideClimate News
In 2008, TransCanada applied for a U.S. presidential permit to build a segment of pipeline that would connect Alberta's landlocked oil with refineries in the Gulf of Mexico, and give tar sands access to world markets. On its path to Texas, Keystone XL also would cross the Ogallala Aquifer, which supplies about 30 percent of the groundwater pumped for irrigation in the entire U.S. and the drinking water for nearly 2 million Americans. Anti-tar sands activists knew they had found their target.
The campaign's prospects were dim. TransCanada’s first wholly owned U.S. oil pipeline, simply called Keystone, had already secured U.S. government approval to cross the Canadian border and carry up to 590,000 barrels a day of a tar sands oil from Alberta to Illinois. Keystone XL too seemed a shoo-in for approval. Any fight against the pipeline meant rallying concern in states along the route, many of them Republican strongholds with little political regard for climate change.
For the next few years, local environmental activists worked alongside the Natural Resources Defense Council and a few other national green groups to educate federal agencies involved in the permitting process about how much the tar sands could exacerbate climate change.
The effort got its biggest rallying point when BP’s Deepwater Horizon well exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010. The ensuing environmental disaster played out the dangers of oil drilling on people’s television screens for three months. Nearly five million gallons of oil gushed into the water as BP tried futilely to cap the well.
Meanwhile, a group called Bold Nebraska, led by grassroots organizer Jane Kleeb, started rallying ranchers, residents and indigenous leaders along the proposed Nebraska stretch of the Keystone XL in 2010. Regardless of political affiliation, they saw the dangers of a pipeline through their beloved countryside—connecting the dots between BP's disaster and the Keystone XL.
..more...
2015: The Year the Environmental Movement Knocked Out Keystone XL | InsideClimate News
