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[box type=”bio”] Obama takes center stage, burnishing his environmental creds, but are the causes for the defeat of the idiotic XL pipeline project the work of dedicated activists and the president’s belated but principled stand? Or are we simply witnessing the “invisible hand” of the market, once again working its dark magic on the political stage? If so, can this ghoul return? Below, two reports, as seen and interpreted by mainstream media observers. Note that these are liberal interpretations of this event. They see the system as flawed, but overall, they think—and would like us to think—that it can be reformed, that it can be made to work. [/box]
FIRST TAKE: ESQUIRE
The Keystone Pipeline and the Defeat of Faceless Corporate Power
“It’s like watching the biggest bully on the school grounds getting his nose bloodied. It’s very gratifying.”
By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire
Nov 6, 2015
News & Politics Politics With Charles P. Pierce
(Getty —Spencer Platt)
For the historical moment, it appears, there will be no continent-spanning death funnel bringing the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel from the environmental hellspout of northern Alberta down through the most arable farmland in the world to the refineries of the Gulf Coast, thence to the world. The president has decided this will not be the case.
President Obama’s denial of the proposed 1,179-mile pipeline, which would have carried 800,000 barrels a day of carbon-heavy petroleum from the Canadian oil sands to the Gulf Coast, comes as he is seeking to build an ambitious legacy on climate change. A major United Nations summit meeting on climate change will be held in Paris in December, where Mr. Obama hopes to help broker a historic agreement committing the world’s nations to enacting new policies to counter global warming. While the rejection of the pipeline would be largely symbolic, Mr. Obama has sought to telegraph to other world leaders that the United States is serious about acting on climate change.
Our old friend, the Keystone XL pipeline, continent-spanning death funnel and Republican fetish object, is off the twig. It’s kicked the bucket, rung down the curtain, and joined the bleeding choir invisi-bule. This is a dead parrot.
You could see it coming over the last month—when Canadian elections went against the death funnel’s primary political supporters, both nationally and in Alberta. You could see it when TransCanada, the multinational corporation seeking to build the death funnel, begged the State Department for a reprieve that would have pushed the decision to approve the tunnel past the end of the current president’s term. You could see it this week, when the State Department refused to honor that request. But the real story of what happened on Friday begins years ago, and it begins with ordinary people, and it is a remarkable story of actual populism in action.
The real story involves an alliance between liberal environmentalists and conservative farmers, between Native Americans and white people, between Democrats and Republicans. The real story involves a grassroots victory for a lot of people you’ve never heard of who pushed and yelled the national government into reversing a project that seemed almost unstoppable five years ago. The real story involves a defeat for faceless corporate power, and for the money that is poisoning our politics at all levels, and for the corrupt alliance between corporate power and poisoned politics that is so much of our national life these days.The president moved because people moved him. The president moved because landowners in Nebraska bridled at the bullying of a foreign corporation, against the misuse of eminent domain by an unaccountable Canadian corporation. The president moved because people moved him. The president moved because people like Bill McKibben turned the pipeline – and the planet-killing goop it was designed to carry – into a symbol for the ongoing and worsening climate crisis, and they did such a good job of it that the president now sees a vigorous response to the crisis as an essential part of his legacy. This is a victory that began in farmhouse kitchens and local coffee shops. This is a victory that began on reservations and in small local law offices. This is a victory that began with a thousand conversations about how things just didn’t feel right, and about what people thought they could do about it.
“I feel proud,” said Jane Fleming Kleeb, the woman who bulldogged the ground-level effort against the death-funnel in Nebraska. “All I can think of is all the political operatives who called me and told me to give it up, that we never could beat this company, that we should take the little victories we won and call it a day.”
I don’t expect the No Labels crowd to applaud what happened today. (They’re too busy finding soft words to explain the evisceration of Social Security.) But this is the way it’s supposed to work, a truly bipartisan populist project that, through sheer indomitability, beat the power of a multinational behemoth and turned an entire administration around, and on an issue that ultimately affects us all. In the early days of the administration, the president’s people were fond of telling progressives about the possibly apocryphal quote attributed to Franklin Roosevelt when A. Philip Randolph approached him on civil rights: “Now make me do it.” This is how that works.
First, we get the both-sides-do-it hooey so you don’t notice how many white flags are fluttering on various parapets today.
“Now, for years, the Keystone pipeline has occupied what I frankly consider an overinflated role in our political discourse. It became a symbol, too often used as a campaign cudgel by both parties, rather than a serious policy matter. All of this obscured the fact that this pipeline would neither be a silver bullet for the economy, as was promised by some, nor the express lane to climate disaster that was proclaimed by others.”
This was followed by some boilerplate about the magnificent performance of his administration on fuel efficiency, clean energy, and environmental progress. But the real terms of surrender – courteously delivered by the president of the United States on behalf of the extraction industries and their fans in our politics – came later:
America’s now a global leader when it comes to taking serious action to fight climate change. And, frankly, approving this project would have undercut that global leadership. And that’s the biggest risk we face – not acting. Today, we’re continuing to lead by example because ultimately, if we’re going to prevent large parts of this planet from becoming not only inhospitable, but uninhabitable, in our lifetimes, we’re going to have to leave some fossil fuels in the ground rather than burn them.”
Shortly after the president spoke, I got a call from my friend Randy Thompson, whose lovely farm in Humphrey, Nebraska, was targeted by TransCanada as part of the death-funnel’s route, and who worked harder than anyone against the pipeline simply because he was fed up with being pushed around.
“It’s unbelievable that we were able to do this,” Thompson said. “It’s like watching the biggest bully on the school grounds getting his nose bloodied. It’s very gratifying.”
They did this for all of us. Sometimes, the system works. Nobody should forget that.
Obama rejects Keystone XL pipeline
The long-awaited decision is a huge loss for the oil industry, the Canadian government and Republicans in Congress.
By ELANA SCHOR / POLITICO
11/06/15
President Barack Obama rejected a permit for the Keystone XL oil pipeline on Friday, handing a major victory to green activists in the defining environmental controversy of his tenure, arguing that approving the project would undercut the United States’ status as a leader in fighting climate change.
The pipeline “would not make a meaningful contribution to our economy,” Obama said, dismissing claims that the pipeline would boost job creation. If Congress is serious about creating jobs, lawmakers should pass a bipartisan infrastructure plan “that in the short term could create more than 30 times as many jobs per year as the pipeline would,” Obama said.
Obama also said Keystone would not lower gas prices for American consumers, since the average price of gas has fallen about 77 cents over a year ago, or ensure future energy supplies.
“Shipping dirtier crude oil into our country would not increase America’s energy security,” Obama said. “What has increased America’s energy security is our strategy over the past several years to reduce our reliance on dirty fossil fuels from unstable parts of the world.”
“America is now a global leader when it comes to taking serious action to fight climate change,” Obama said. “And frankly, approving this project would have undercut that global leadership.”
The long-awaited decision is a huge loss for the oil industry, the Canadian government and Republicans in Congress, although GOP lawmakers have vowed to continue trying to force approval of Keystone using must-pass legislation. Obama acted just days after his administration rejected developer TransCanada’s request for a pause in its review of the project, a move that could have pushed the decision into the next presidency.
Empty-brained liberal Justin Trudeau, already talking like a corporate liberal. So much for the recent talk of a “leftist” victory. Trudeau, as we said, is a Canadian Obama, or worse, another Tsipras based in Ottawa.
In a statement, newly elected Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said his government was disappointed by the rejection, though he played down the dispute that had soured the cross-border relationship under his predecessor, Stephen Harper.
“The Canada-U.S. relationship is much bigger than any one project and I look forward to a fresh start with President Obama to strengthen our remarkable ties in a spirit of friendship and co-operation,” he said.
Obama’s decision promises to put new pressure on Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton. Her long-delayed declaration just two months ago that she too opposes the $8 billion, 1,179-mile project has inspired her more left-leaning primary opponents to accuse her of flip-flopping.
The Republican presidential candidates quickly pounced on Obama’s announcement. Sen. Marco Rubio denounced it at a “huge mistake,” while former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush described it as a ”self-inflicted attack on the U.S. economy and jobs.” Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal accused Obama of “bowing to radical environmentalists and snubbing thousands of high quality, high paying energy sector jobs,” and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said the president “has lost his mind.”
Whether Keystone remains a political albatross on Capitol Hill depends partly on factors outside Obama’s control, including the historic plunge in global oil prices that has diminished the U.S. oil industry’s appetite for Canadian crude. The seven-plus years it has taken for the administration to weigh the fate of the project succeeded in shunting the pipeline’s day of reckoning past a series of political landmines, including Obama’s reelection, last fall’s midterms and last month’s electoral defeat of Canada’s Harper.
Still, the verdict from Obama puts to rest years of tea-leaf-reading and dropped hints about the president’s leanings on the Canada-to-Texas pipeline. It arrived nine months after Obama vetoed a GOP-backed bill that would have approved the pipeline by congressional fiat, and followed repeated comments in which he scoffed at supporters’ predictions that the pipeline would be a major job-creator.
Even the timing of the administration’s verdict remained a mystery this summer and fall as the State Department became consumed by a historic nuclear pact with Iran. That deal’s sensitivity suggested to Keystone’s friends and foes alike that Obama would wait to decide on the pipeline until later in the year, when Clinton’s White House run would be in full swing.
Both sides in the prolonged pipeline battle have vowed to press their case in court if they fell short, but the legal jockeying over the Keystone decision may prove short-lived. The 2004 executive order that gives the White House ultimate sway over cross-border energy projects like Keystone allows Obama significant discretion to determine whether any project is in the “national interest,” a test that includes the pipeline’s economic and geopolitical ramifications as well as environmental effects.
Yet it is Keystone’s climate impact that propelled the once-obscure pipeline to international prominence as environmental activists turned the Canadian oil sands into an emblem of “dirty” energy unfit for a president determined to craft a global deal on global warming this December.
The nuances of Keystone’s climate symbolism have put every Democrat involved into a political bind at one point or another — from Obama to Kerry to Clinton to billionaire donor Tom Steyer, who opposes the pipeline but has sometimes steered money to Democratic candidates who refused to take a stand.
Steyer praised Obama’s move, telling POLITICO that he thought “the president, always, in his heart was here.”
And Bill McKibben, the 350.org co-founder who led climate activists’ fight against the pipeline, said the Keystone rejection gives Obama “new stature as an environmental leader.”
Greens are “well aware that the next president could undo all this, but this is a day of celebration,” he added in a statement.
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