Today, Explained - Canceling Keystone XL

Episode Date: February 27, 2021

President Biden finally wants to put the Keystone XL pipeline to bed. But if the last 12 years of environmental fights are any indication, it won’t be easy. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. it's today explained i'm sean ramis from one of the first things president biden did when he got into office was he canceled the keystone xl pipeline permit we talked about it briefly on

the show but today we're going to talk about it a lot more because this isn't just some pipeline. This is two countries, three presidents, 12 years, and an entire environmental movement. Sean, this has been a soap opera. Soap opera. Halima Shah, say more. It's hard to count how many different factions have been fighting over this thing for the last 12 years. And throughout that controversy, Keystone XL kind of birthed the modern environmental movement.

Birthed it! Yeah, I mean, to give you a sense of just how pivotal this was, we have to go back in time a little bit. We're going back to the 2000s. The Black Eyed Peas were at the top of the charts. Kanye West had beef with Republicans after Hurricane Katrina. George Bush doesn't care about black people. And velour tracksuits were on display at the mall.

The juicy velour tracksuit became a wardrobe staple in the early 2000s, thanks to Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, and Kim Kardashian. Also, a movie called The Day After Tomorrow scared the living daylights out of Americans. What you're seeing are two actual tornadoes striking Los Angeles International Airport. Wait, wait, it looks like they joined in for one large tornado. For the first time, Americans at a mass scale got exposed to a film that was about climate change. It took a lot of artistic license with the science, no question about it.

But on the other hand, it did convey to Americans that this was a real problem. And moreover, it introduced people to the idea that there are tipping points. Anthony Leiserwitz is the director of Yale's program for climate change communication. So we study how do mass societies around the world respond to the issue of climate change. He says the U.S. started talking about climate change in a way that it hadn't before, especially in previous decades when scientists started agreeing it was a problem. The other thing that also happens in that critical time period is that the science gets ever stronger. And so you get a series of intergovernmental panel

on climate change reports. They were saying, yes, climate change is absolutely real. We're now very certain that it is. And in fact, not only is it human cause, but it's already having negative consequences on the planet. By the 2008 election, even Republicans were worried. The nominee for president of the United States by the Republican Party

was a conservative Republican named John McCain, who for years had been one of the primary champions of climate action in Congress. And I am convinced, where there's not a doubt in my mind, that climate change is real. And we have neglected our obligation again. And in fact, climate change didn't come up much on the campaign trail between he and Barack Obama because they basically agreed. Now's the time to develop every form of alternative energy, solar, wind, and biofuels. Well, long story short is that, of course, Obama wins that election and McCain loses. And one of

the critical things that happens at that moment, and our data shows this very clearly, is that the Republican Party goes into reaction mode. And basically it's the rise of the Tea Party and this strong rightward lurch. Children are now the number one target for global warming fear campaign. It appears the alarmists are failing to convince adults to

believe their increasingly shrill and scientifically unfounded rhetoric. So they have decided to go after the kids. Climate change is a hoax. That became a very common talking point. And that had a real impact on the lay public. And around the same time, the entire planet sort of gets distracted by another crisis. For Wall Street, it was another case of whiplash. The markets haven't been this volatile in almost 80 years. The financial crisis started because people like Darnell Horton, who bought a home near Atlanta, Georgia, could no longer afford to make payments on their subprime mortgage loans. Now it's official we are in a

recession. But the question now, when will it end? Unemployment shot up over 10 percent. The country was in full economic crisis mode. So in 2009, when Democrats try to pass a landmark climate bill, the Waxman-Markey bill, to put a price on carbon emissions, it's met with stiff opposition, even though it was initially a Republican idea. But by 2009, Republicans are worried that their own proposal would kill jobs. When it comes to energy, Washington Democrats, I think, are poised to make matters worse by imposing a job-killing energy tax, courtesy of Speaker Pelosi. The bill failed in the Senate before it could even reach the president's desk. They lost on the politics because there was not an effective, powerful outside game of

citizens demanding that their elected officials act. It was the final recognition for a lot of people that we'd been making a kind of mistake. Bill McKibben is an environmentalist and a founder of the group 350.org. We thought that we were having an argument about climate change and that by piling up all the evidence, eventually, you know, our leaders would do the rational and obvious thing and start to take action. Bill says 2009 was a wake-up call for the environmental movement. The fight wasn't about data. The fight was about what fights are always about, money and power. So we needed to assemble some power of our own. Just as Bill was having

this realization that environmentalists needed to take on the fossil fuel industry themselves, a massive border-crossing oil pipeline was proposed. Enter Keystone XL. It was a pipeline proposed by a company called TransCanada. It now goes by TC Energy. It lives up to its name. 1,200 miles and over 800,000 barrels of oil a day moving from Alberta, Canada, cutting through Montana and making its way to the Gulf Coast.

The pipeline's timing was perfect for the fossil fuel industry. Oil prices were high, Canada was hungry for the revenue, and the U.S. wanted to be less dependent on oil from the Middle East. But there was a problem. Unlike oil from the Middle East, the Canadian stuff is the dirtiest oil on the market. The oil basically has to be cooked out of tar sands in Alberta. And Indigenous people have lived in those tar sands for generations. People like Melina Miya Wapin Labukan Massimo. She's a member of the Lubicon Cree Nation in northern Alberta.

Many of us in the tar sands view pipelines as like a tentacle, an arm, a straw, or like a thing sucking the life out of the genesis of where we come from. If Melina's home province of Alberta were a country today, it would be the fifth largest oil-producing nation in the world. Which is to say, this wasn't just about Keystone XL, or KXL, as it's known around the way. So it was like a joke. Like, oh my God, so many pipelines.

It's a whack-a-mole kind of situation where it was like, KXL, Enbridge Pipeline, TMX, like Line 3, Energy East. And that all came from where I was born. And so for me, it was trying to deal with all of them at the same time. So with the KXL... Melina's strategy was simple. Tell people what it's like to have a pipeline in your backyard. The first Keystone Pipeline was already experiencing spills, you know, and so the KXL was like the additional pipeline that they wanted to build. That's for me when I started going to communities and talking to people and unions and U.S. Congress and just saying like, these are the impacts of spills. This is what it feels like. This is what I know can happen to you. But TC Energy tells a different story,

that its pipeline uses technology that detects and stops spills before they happen. Keystone XL will be made with specially designed high-strength steel and coated with corrosion resistant epoxy bonding to protect the pipeline once it is in service. Part of ensuring our pipelines are in safe operating condition involves regularly inspecting the state of our pipelines after they are installed underground. And a lot of people in Indigenous communities believe TC Energy. In fact, they don't just believe TC Energy, they want to work with them. Here's Chief Alvin Francis from the Nicanit First Nation in Saskatchewan, a little further down the pipeline's path. My economy, I have very little. I have a correctional facility, but my unemployment rate

is probably around 60 to 70 percent, depending on the time of the year. Chief Francis represents one of five Indigenous groups on the pipeline's path who were actually investing in the project. They were planning on owning a $1 billion stake in it. Oh, it would have been an enormous value. Because really, when you talk about a job on a pipeline, which is a union job, or there's also non-union jobs there too, but you're talking a minimum of probably $50 an hour. And that is a lot of money for us here. Because you're probably looking at probably

$2,000 a week. I don't even bring that to my community. I earn $2,100 every two weeks. Chief Francis says he'd like to see a greener economy in some distant tomorrow. But he doesn't think the Nicanit First Nation will get to participate in it if they pass up the fossil fuel jobs offered today. So you have to, you've got to wonder, do we still want to be part of the economic world? Of course we do. We can't go back to horse and buggy. I know that we are in the decline of oil and gas. I understand that. So that's why we are trying to participate to make sure that we can have a financial benefit, to make sure that we can invest into the future of whatever is out there,

to make sure that we can actually help green Mother Earth also in its energy, that we can participate in the modern economic world. This is a fine line for an environmentalist to walk. You've got to square good-paying jobs with nothing short of the future of the planet. The great NASA climate scientist Jim Hansen published a paper about how much carbon was up in those tar sands in Canada and said that if they could get all the economically recoverable oil out of those tar sands, that would be game over for the climate, he said. And this is why Keystone XL has such a big impact on the environmental movement in North America. Anthony Leiserwitz says it changed the message. Much of the conversation

up to that point had been about end use, cars, or changing your light bulbs, in other words, to decrease consumption at the end. But they were saying, let's push the conversation upstream to the production and the distribution and the movement of these fossil fuels. Which brings us to Washington, D.C., 2011. In the summer of 2011, everybody working together, we organized direct action, nonviolent civil disobedience in front of the White House. This is a movement. We are here on November 6th, one year from the election. You know, the very first day, 75 or 80 of us or so got arrested,

and they kept us in Central Cell Block in D.C., which is as much fun as it sounds like it might be, for three days, I guess. Obama, we don't want no pipeline drama. Hey, hey, Obama, we don't want no pipeline drama. The sort of news of our incarceration had spread around and attracted far more people than would ever have come in the first place. I think it was 11 or 12 days of just, like, people getting arrested day after day. Molina came down from Canada, too. Turned out there were a lot of people that were willing to come get arrested.

By the time two weeks were out, 1,200 and some people had gone to jail, which was the biggest civil disobedience actions in a long time in this country. It really had become a national landmark battle. The protests continued for months. At one point, demonstrators even carried a giant inflatable Keystone XL pipeline and circled the White House.

I'm here because I really want President Obama to clean up the environment and switch us over to cleaner sources of energy and to let him know by circling the White House that we're there to catch him if he falls in doing the right thing. And there was a very specific reason for concentrating their efforts on Keystone XL. President Obama had the power to single-handedly revoke the pipeline's permit without an act of Congress. Yes we can! Stop the pipeline! Yes we can! Stop the pipeline! In November of that year, Obama said that he would delay a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline

till after the 2012 election. He didn't cancel it. It wasn't the win environmentalists were hoping for. But it wasn't a failure either. All of a sudden, other pipeline projects were getting unprecedented media and political attention. On October 22nd, hundreds of people gathered at the dirt road leading to the construction site of the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline. Tonight near Cannonball, North Dakota, this is the tense face-off between an army of police and Native American protesters blocking Highway 1806,

trying to shut down construction of a controversial oil pipeline on private land. Officers in armored vehicles wearing riot gear are pouring in with air support. Battle lines drawn, now making arrests. A new environmental coalition had emerged. There was kind of blue-green alliances, if you want to call it that. So like alliances between environmental groups, Indigenous groups and unions, as well as, you know, the Cowboy and Indian alliances. The Cowboy and Indian alliance refers to white farmers and ranchers who joined forces with Indigenous communities to fight pipelines in rural areas.

For me, the KXL, the reason why it was successful in kind of building this type of environmental movement is because many people were involved. And then also Indigenous peoples were finally being heard and respected, in my opinion, and kind of at the forefront of it because they're the ones ultimately that are going to experience the burden of the impact. In 2015, seven years after Keystone XL was first proposed, President Obama had an announcement. This pipeline would neither be a silver bullet for the economy, as was promised by some, nor the express lane to climate disaster proclaimed by others. But he decided to officially reject the Keystone XL pipeline permit.

The State Department has decided that the Keystone XL pipeline would not serve the national interests of the United States. I agree with that decision. But then his successor just immediately reverses that decision. But then his successor just immediately reverses that decision. But then his successor just immediately reverses that decision. Is this just going to keep happening forever and ever and ever? Is this just like a presidential seesaw that we're going to be on? I mean, no one really knows how long the seesaw will keep going, but a lot of this pipeline has been built in Canada.

But not in America? Not so much. Got it. But the real question is, do you even need a pipeline to import Canadian oil in the first place? Support for today explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions

and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, r-a-m-p.com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC, terms and conditions apply. All right, Halima, the pipeline was on, then it was off, then it was on again, and then Biden came to office, and now it's off again. Yes, but that won't necessarily stop the tar sands from coming down from Canada. There is significant pipeline capacity that exists already. Sarah Hastings-Simon studies shifts in the energy industry at the Payne Institute for Public Policy.

And so, you know, revoking this presidential permit for Keystone doesn't change the existing capacity for exports. There is and there will still continue to be exports that go through existing pipelines. It's really about how much additional build out there is. And if they do want to send more tar sands oil to the U.S., they don't even need a pipeline. They can put it on a train. The most common alternative to pipelines is rail. And we did see growing interest in oil by rail in 2019, 2018, when the province was seeing pipeline constraints. So basically more oil was being produced in the province that could be exported through the existing pipeline infrastructure. But there are big downsides to this option.

For one thing, oil by rail has higher emissions, and it's basically a bomb on train tracks. Pipeline proponents often point to, you know, if you are going to move oil, then it is much better to do so via pipeline than rail. You know, shipping oil by rail, the same unit that you put into a pipeline, it is going to have larger impacts in terms of the energy that it takes to move it and also the potential risk of things like a, you know, catastrophic accident derailment. Okay, so trains bring their own set of challenges. It's not clear if TC Energy will pursue this option. They didn't respond to requests for comment.

But I asked Chief Francis what might happen next now that the Keystone XL's permit is revoked. We still haven't given up on Keystone XL. There's still another viable way. I mean, trains, trucks, that stuff is still going to go on on a daily basis. People are always going to want to make money in some way. A shareholder must be given a dividend. That's capitalist system. You're never going to stop it. But things have changed since the Keystone XL pipeline was first proposed over 12 years ago. Not just politically, economically. The price and demand for oil has dropped thanks to the U.S.'s fracking boom. Fracking for natural gas in Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale is turning farm towns into boom towns.

And electrification. It's a look at the road ahead as General Motors announces it's ditching the gas pump for good, planning to go all electric by 2035. All that is changing the calculus for whether or not to launch new tar sands projects. These are projects that are high upfront cost. They have a relatively long lifetime, though. So it's really a project that you're investing in to produce oil for decades. And I think there's starting to be a lot of questions around that really long-term demand for new projects within the Alberta oil sands. But there might be a way, at least in the short term, for Canada's tar sands industry to save itself. They could simply look for different buyers.

There is a second pipeline that is under development in Alberta called Trans Mountain, which is a pipeline that actually runs not to the U.S., but to the coast of Canada, to the West Coast. That oil can easily cross the Pacific and make its way to Asian markets. Back in America, Biden's decision to re-cancel Keystone XL has been met with opposition. Here's Ted Cruz before he went to Cancun. Straight out of the gate, President Biden announced that he was canceling the Keystone pipeline. That is a major infrastructure project. That is a project that right now today has 1,200 good-paying union jobs. And in 2021, the Keystone Pipeline was scheduled to have more than 11,000 jobs, including 8,000 union jobs. But reporting shows that Republicans might be overstating the economic cost. The Washington Post said that the almost 11,000 jobs that Senator Cruz mentioned would largely be temporary construction jobs. The permanent jobs cut by revoking the Keystone

Excel's permit would be closer to 50. When I think about climate change, the word I think of is jobs. Good paying, union jobs that have put Americans to work, making the air cleaner for our kids to breathe, restoring our crumbling roads and bridges and ports. President Biden wants to create jobs, but different kinds of energy jobs. Green energy jobs. The issue there, of course, is getting the votes. He needs to win the support of key moderates like West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin, who represents a lot of coal workers. I think we've talked very previously about this. People feel like they've been left behind. Or Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski, who represents a lot of oil workers. As we're talking about how you can come in and assure, whether it's the worker in Louisiana or in Mississippi or in West Virginia, that your job may change, I hope you appreciate and

understand the anxiety in families. Both President Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau are dealing with the same problem. They both want to forge ahead into a green economy without hurting the people working in fossil fuels. Sarah Hastings Simon says there's two ways to do that. Option one is basically following the last administration's example. Former President Trump, with the coal sector, you know, talked a lot about being very supportive of the coal industry, really even with some quite extreme measures of, you know, trying to lift environmental

protections and things like that, and ultimately failed to create jobs. Option two is the Biden and Trudeau administration's approach, which is basically to say, look, we know that for climate, we need to move to a net zero world. We also know that, you know, this is increasingly where the markets are going. And that as technologies that are lower carbon become increasingly competitive, not only is this a climate imperative, but this is actually just going to be the kind of preferred outcome that the market finds. As in, this is the direction the world is heading in, and we got to keep up. But that's a hard sell to fossil fuel workers whose jobs are already

disappearing. Not only is it, you know, challenging to actually do the hard work of job retraining and providing supports to people to enable a prosperous future for them. But at the same time, they're having to kind of fight this counter-narrative, which is, well, you know, if the government was just more supportive of this sector, then everybody would keep all the, you know, high-paid jobs they have in the resource sector, and we wouldn't have to change anything. And the funny thing about this transition away from fossil fuels is that it's not just concerning to the people who work in the industry. It's also concerning to people fighting the industry. Indigenous activists like Melina worry that

her community will also be left behind whenever the green new economy comes. What we've seen traditionally is places that predominantly are not communities of color receive the benefit of transition technologies like solar or transitioning to more renewable energy systems. We don't see that in communities of color. That's the next frontier of this fight for the environmental activists who managed to stop Keystone XL, making sure President Biden delivers on a just transition. That the people who, for hundreds of years, relied on fossil fuels for energy and employment

and also suffered the environmental and health consequences of those industries, also get power, jobs, and clean air and water in the green new economy. Halima Shah, she's a reporter and a producer here at Today Explained. The rest of the team includes Will Reed, Muj Zaydi, Cecilia Lay, Noam Hassenfeld, and our engineer, Afim Shapiro. Facts checked by Lulo Roscoe Perez. Music by Breakmasters Cylinder and Hassenfeld. Amina Alsadi is our supervising producer. Jillian Weinberger is the deputy. And Liz Kelly Nelson is Vox Media Podcast Network. Thank you.