This is a long awaited victory. The National Wildlife Federation and many of our members, affiliates, and partners have been in the Keystone XL pipeline fight from the very beginning. NWF has had a presence in Nebraska, bringing attention to migratory birds and the Ogallala Aquifer; in Washington DC, urging congress and the President to reject the harmful pipeline; and everywhere in between, protecting the many species that stood to be impacted by such a pipeline.
So along with our celebration on a hard-fought win for wildlife, clean air, clean water, and safe communities, we want to honor some of NWF’s many heroes that have played a significant role in this issue. Below are just a few of the heroes that deserve recognition for this victory:
Tom Poor Bear
Tom Poor Bear is the Vice President of the Ogallala Sioux Tribe. Tom has been a tireless advocate against the development of tar sands and the KXL pipeline. With an unparalleled passion, Tom fought the pipeline, which he called a “snake that is spitting black venom into our water.”
Through his passionate advocacy, tribal members have rallied against the pipeline from the fields of South Dakota to the pavement of Washington, D.C.
With his leadership, the Ogllala Sioux Tribal Council passed a resolution opposing the pipeline because it violates tribal treaty rights and threatens water resources.
Pat Spears
Simultaneously, Pat helped lead grassroots tribal opposition to dirty energy projects, including the KXL pipeline. Pat carried a deep respect for Lakota spirituality, and conversed with princes, senators and cabinet ministers. He voiced the dreams, values and aspirations of the Ikce Wicasa or “Common Man”.
His own spirit ran as wide as his beloved Missouri River and as deep as the verdant prairie grasses. He humbly greeted every dawn in gratitude with an understanding of the threats of human-induced climate change and that mankind could be the swing vote in making a difference. Sadly Pat has since passed away, though his spirit abounds in the ongoing work.
Duane Hovorka
NEWF was the first conservation group in Nebraska to raise concerns over the KXL pipeline and attended the US State Department’s first public meetings about the pipeline in Nebraska in 2010.
The route of the pipeline was proposed to cut through the fragile Nebraska Sand hills and Ogallala Aquifer, putting both migrating cranes and the drinking water of thousands of people at risk. Hovorka continued the fight against the pipeline when testifying against it at a State Department hearing in Grand Island, Nebraska in 2013 and NEWF has since continued to work with a network of farm, faith, conservation, and civic groups to oppose construction of the pipeline.
Jane Kleeb
Well before Keystone XL become a nationally known issue, the National Wildlife Federation teamed up with organizer and activist Jane Kleeb of Hastings, Nebraska.
Jane took concerns about KXL to Nebraskans, founding a local group called Bold Nebraska and organizing ranchers, landowners, and Nebraskans of all stripes to protect Nebraska from the harms of tar sands. Jane has worked tirelessly to stop KXL, appearing frequently on national television and giving a voice to the people who would have been most directly impacted by the pipeline.
Thank President Obama for saying ‘No’ to the pipeline and ‘Yes’ to Wildlife!
Opponents of the proposed pipeline argued that allowing Keystone to pass through the U.S. would be assuming a large amount of risk, with little pay off. The majority of this dirty tar sands oil would be exported, but not before passing through America’s heartland. Denying this pipeline would send a clear message that the U.S. does not want dirty tar sands oil passing through our communities. Here are some of the best quotes from today’s hearing!
Top 10 quotes from the Keystone XL hearing:
1. “We’re screwing our children, grandchildren, all future generations if we think we can use those unconventional fossil fuels.”– Dr. James Hansen
2. “If we don’t approve KXL, much of Canada’s tar sands won’t be developed.”– Dr. James Hansen
Proponents of the Keystone pipeline like to argue that this tar sands oil will be developed regardless. But the truth is that Canada has been exploring other options and is hitting significant opposition. For example, native tribes in western Canada have made it clear that they will not allow a pipeline through their native lands.
3. “The choice is not whether to accepted increased risk by rail or pipeline, but whether to take the oil out of the ground”– Michael Brune
4. “It’s not about the pipeline. It’s really about tar sands oil. It’s carbon that’s the issue” – Senator Tim Kaine
Senator Tim Kaine gets it, this is not about the pipeline, it is about dirty tar sands oil that should remain in the ground.
5. “People say that the Keystone pipeline is a no-brainer. I’m sorry; I guess my brain works differently.”– Senator Barbara Boxer
Senator Boxer gave a strong testimony, citing the vast health impacts as one of the primary reasons to reject the pipeline. Accompanied by nurses from across the U.S., she talked about the health impacts of living near refineries. Often these places will have much higher rates of cancers and asthma, especially in children.
6. “If you are in support of the environment, you are in support of the pipeline.”– Chamber of Commerce’s Karen Harbert
Really?? I think the large majority of environmentalists are going to have to disagree with Ms. Harbert on that point.
7. To which Senator Barbara Boxer responded: “When you said ‘If you are an environmentalist you are in support of this pipeline’, let me just say that is ludicrous on its face, please don’t speak for me, and please don’t speak for lots of folks who don’t see it that way.”
8. “The world is looking at us. you’ve gotta be lowering your greenhouse gas emissions, not increasing.” – Senator Ed Markey
Tar sands is one of the most carbon intensive fuel sources. As we try to limit our overall carbon impact, it is important that we focus on reducing the most carbon intensive fuel sources.
10. “We’re all on the same boat. We will either sink together or find a way to sail together”– Dr. James Hansen
What KXL means for wildlife
We are all in the same boat, no matter your party (or your species!) you will be affected by climate change and dirty fuels projects. Keystone XL pipeline will cut through America’s agricultural heartland, the Missouri, Platte, and Niobrara Rivers, the Ogallala aquifer, habitat for sage grouse and sandhill cranes, walleye fisheries and much more. Migratory birds are especially at risk as many of their migration paths follow the proposed Keystone pipeline route. Habitat disruption in these areas would negatively impact these migrating species as well as the communities in the surrounding areas.
Take action now! Speak up for wildlife species and communities that would be impacted by Keystone XL and dirty tar sands projects.
That’s right, over two million people have submitted comments to the U.S. State Department urging a denial of the Keystone XL pipeline.
Last Friday, over 150 people rallied at the State Department to deliver the comments that have been collected across a diverse coalition of organizations.
Thank you to everyone who took action and asked President Obama and Secretary Kerry to reject Keystone XL. Stay tuned for more opportunities to speak up on KXL in the coming weeks.
Need a quick refresher why Keystone is not in the national interest? Check out this graphic NWF put together. Share the real facts on the Keystone XL pipeline with your friends:
Say No to Keystone XL
Join us in calling on President Obama and Secretary Kerry to reject Keystone XL. The decision is in their hands—this pipeline will harm wildlife and exacerbate climate change. Tell them to say no to the Keystone XL pipeline!
This year could be a make or break year in the fight to combat climate change. Murmurs are flying around DC that President Obama is set to make an announcement in the coming weeks addressing our energy future and how that will affect our climate. One thing that weighs heavily on the minds of many Americans is what this could mean for the future of the Keystone XL pipeline project.
The pending proclamation is an apropos one for the President to draw the line on KXL. President Obama ran on the platform of change—change that meant many things for politics and the environment. To the dismay of many of his greatest supporters the promise to take action for the environment has thus far gone unrequited. With TransCanada breathing down America’s neck (and preemptively tearing up its land) to get approval for their tar sands-transporting pipeline, the time for making good on his promise is now.
A recent press conference held by billionaire environmental activist Tom Steyer brought together a slew of advocates calling on the Obama Administration to bring those campaign commitments to fruition. Roughly a dozen speakers and activists stood up to tell the President to take a stand against TransCanada.
Steyer has kicked off his own digital campaign called We Love Our Land aimed at mobilizing Americans around the message that Keystone XL is wrong for our future and would be a major step backward in the fight against climate change. The reasoning given in support of KXL is riddled with misinformation and outright deceit. In Steyer’s words, the argument for the pipeline being built is “a house of cards that cannot stand.”
Included among the fallacious reasons TransCanada is putting forth in favor of the project are the promise of more jobs, price reductions at the pump, a worry-free pipeline that is 100% safe and environmentally friendly, and a greater direct benefit to the U.S. and its energy supply. The truth of the matter is less rosy.
The Nitty-Gritty
Not only will the pipeline bring a mere 35 permanent jobs, it will not lower prices, it will not secure a more independent energy future for the U.S., it will not guarantee that any of the tar sands will actually go to or benefit the U.S.
The pipeline is a not a means of getting tar sands to America, it’s little more than a bypass to getting it to the Gulf of Mexico to be shipped to foreign countries like China.
As we have already seen with the recent tar sands spill in Arkansas, it is an invitation to bring dangerous, undocumented (not even the EPA is made aware of the chemical slurry that goes into making thick tar sands viscous enough to be pumped down a pipe) sticky, chemical toxins through neighborhoods, farms, waterways, and wildlife habitats. Putting our land, wildlife and health on the line for a foreign company to reap in profits at very minimal benefit to us all while exacerbating the climate crisis shouldn’t even be considered, let alone a possibility.
Gambling with the planet on this level is asking for too much risk with too little reward.
McNulty and others’ first-hand account of the fallout of what was a relatively minor episode detailed a community left in the dark about what had ruined their land, embedded in their soil, contaminated their water and sickened their health. Simply put by McNulty, “We cannot afford the risk.”
With a momentous declaration looming, the time to speak up is now. Farms and homesteads are already under the bulldozer despite residents’ litigation to stop them. Habitats are already being destroyed and no matter what TransCanada would have you believe, this is not in our best interest to agree to—it’s not in our interest at all.
Additionally, claims by the company of its complete safety are not only wholly untrue, but also rather insulting to our collective intelligence—nothing is foolproof and those that are familiar with TransCanada are fully aware of their far from stellar track record. When just one crack could mean utter catastrophe the choice is clear—the Keystone pipeline must be rejected.
To round-out the ode to Oasis–maybe, he’s going to be the one to save future generations from the worst of climate change.
Protect caribou by telling the Obama administration to address Keystone XL’s impacts on wildlife, habitat and climate change.
Growing Momentum Against Keystone XL
While Rep. Terry’s measure (H.R. 3, the “Northern Route Approval Act”) passed as expected, this vote was yet another sign that momentum is growing to reject dirty tar sands, protect our communities from disastrous spills, and turn towards cleaner, renewable energy choices. And despite all the theatrics in Congress, the ball remains in President Obama’s court—where it belongs. Both the facts and the political winds support doing the right thing by saying NO to an unneeded tar sands export pipeline that would put our heartland at risk for spills and send us in the wrong direction on curbing carbon pollution.
Just last month, more than 1 million comments from Americans requested that the State Department reject Keystone XL. Given the anti-environmental makeup of this Congress, the Terry bill was expected to pass by a wide margin, but numbers like these obviously made lawmakers take note. As NWF president and CEO Larry Schweiger said about the KXL pipeline:
It’s the wrong approach to put a foreign energy company ahead of more than 1 million Americans who have expressed concern for our nation’s wildlife, energy security and public health.
Indeed it is. The risks of Keystone XL are huge; the reward is 35 permanent jobs in exchange for higher gas prices, oiled wildlife and communities, and another step towards climate calamity.
The Tar Sands Industry’s Plans for Your Backyard
The Great Plains aren’t the only region threatened by reckless tar sands pipeline expansion:
- In 2010, an Enbridge, Inc. pipeline ruptured in Michigan, spilling a million gallons of tar sands oil into the Kalamazoo River. Three years and close to $1 billion later, the cleanup continues. Enbridge is laying the groundwork for pipeline expansions that would dwarf Keystone XL and put the Great Lakes watershed in danger of another spill. We need to say no to this proposal as well.
- Exxon’s Pegasus pipeline, reversed to carry tar sands oil, spilled into an Arkansas neighborhood in March, forcing dozens from their homes and oiling hundreds of animals including birds and turtles.
- Now, Exxon and Enbridge want to reverse a pipeline through Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine to carry tar sands oil to the international market. The entire New England delegation voted against Rep. Terry’s Big Oil giveaway bill, and the message from New England is clear: it wants a clean energy future, not oil spills.
And this doesn’t even begin to get at the Florida-sized area in Alberta being mined and leveled to extract this dirty fuel. Habitat for iconic wildlife—like Woodland Caribou, Gray Wolves, Black Bears, and 190 migratory bird species including the endangered Whooping Crane—is being destroyed, putting these species in peril, polluting rivers, and endangering the health of indigenous communities.
The message that tar sands is a bad deal is getting through.
More and more Americans are coming around to the fact that Keystone XL, while a great deal for foreign oil companies, is bad news for the rest of us. As Elizabeth Kolbert put it in an important new article in The New Yorker:
Once Keystone is built, there will be no putting the tar back in the sands. The pipeline isn’t inevitable, and it shouldn’t be treated as such. It’s just another step on the march to disaster.
It’s past time for Pres. Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry to look at the facts. We don’t need tar sands oil. We don’t need more spills. And we can’t afford to doom our children to the carbon pollution from increased tar sands expansion. People are starting to get it. It’s time for the President to match his words on climate with deeds. Saying no to Keystone XL is a good place to start, and the time to start is now.
Fortunately for Viking residents and the area’s wildlife, it appears that this accident was contained before it became a full-blown disaster like the one in Arkansas: even so, around 600 gallons of oil are estimated to have contaminated the area. The line that burst goes by the boring-by-design name “Line 2,” but the adjoining “Alberta Clipper” pipeline is also a crucial element of this story. DeSmogBlog has more:
The Viking pump station also receives oil from the Alberta Clipper (aka Line 67 pipeline) that carries heavy crude oil and tar sands bitumen from the Alberta tar sands region south from Hardisty to Superior, Wisconsin and refineries in the midwestern United States. It is unclear whether the product that spilled was tar sands-derived diluted bitumen.
The Alberta Clipper is already enormous — carrying nearly 20 million gallons daily to Midwest refineries — but it’s currently under review for a truly giant expansion that would double its capacity and make it the biggest tar sands pipeline in the United States. That’s right — bigger than Keystone 1, Keystone XL, or the Northeast pipeline, capable of pumping 37 million gallons of tar sands oil every day through the Great Lakes region.
You may be asking yourself, “Enbridge, huh? Why is that name so familiar?” Let’s just say this isn’t the company’s first brush with fame: while producing our report Importing Disaster, we discovered that Enbridge was responsible for more than 800 spills in the US and Canada between 1999 and 2010, totaling almost seven million gallons of oil. The biggest of these, of course, was the Kalamazoo River disaster in 2010, when a pipeline linked to the Alberta Clipper burst and sent over a million gallons of tar sands coursing through the community of Marshall, Michigan. That cleanup effort has taken almost three years and nearly a billion dollars, but the Environmental Protection Agency says that it’s still not finished and recently told Enbridge to get back to work to dredge more oil out of the river.
As NWF’s Beth Wallace has detailed, Enbridge isn’t particularly interested in improving its safety record:
Rather than focus on safety and cleanup, Enbridge is recklessly moving ahead with plans to expand their pipeline network in the Great Lakes region and the Northeast, and to double down on high carbon fuel that is proving nearly impossible to clean from Michigan’s waters.
With this latest leak on their resume, it’s fair to ask what more the company can do to earn anything but a slap on the wrist. A good first step would be for the US State Department (the agency in charge of the Alberta Clipper permit) to broaden their study to Enbridge’s entire Great Lakes pipeline system, because expanding Alberta Clipper means that whole system will be exposed to a massive increase in oil volumes — and with it, an even higher chance of disaster.
Learn more about the Enbridge pipeline boom at NWF.org.
fails to reflect the full environmental impacts of the proposed pipeline. We strongly encourage the State Department to reevaluate the SEIS and its assessment of the proposed pipeline’s impacts on climate change, our natural resources, our economy, and low-income and minority communities.
This is no surprise to anyone who follows this blog (I know you’re out there) and it echoes official comments from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), released yesterday, that cast serious doubt on the State Department’s analysis and the future of the project. EPA concluded that State had failed to meaningfully consider multiple factors, foremost among them the climate impacts and spill risks posed by the 1,700 mile tar sands pipeline.
>>>Read the full letter from Congress here
A Million Voices Against KXL
It’s not just agencies and members of Congress who think the tar sands pipeline is a bad idea. Capping off the outpouring of opposition, National Wildlife Federation and other groups just delivered over a million comments from the public, telling the Obama Administration “reject the pipeline!” NWF’s Robyn Carmichael has more — and as she puts it, the comments “came from Americans from all across the country and all walks of life, but they carried one common message: that this risky and unnecessary project puts our wildlife, water, land, and communities in jeopardy.”
Thank you to the tens of thousands of NWF members (and many others) who have spoken up for people and wildlife during this rollercoaster campaign. The public comment period for the environmental review is over, but there will be more opportunities to help so stay tuned!
To learn more about Keystone XL and how you can help, visit NWF.org/tarsands
Coming on Earth Day, it’s welcome news that the agency is trying to protect Americans and wildlife from a huge mistake.
This isn’t a new position for EPA — at several key points during the Keystone XL saga, officials have made it clear that their colleagues at the State Department need to go back to the drawing board. Partly, this is due to the fact that State isn’t used to leading big environmental studies; it’s only a quirk of the system that put them in charge of Keystone. But with a decision this important, with so much riding on a thorough analysis, we can’t afford growing pains.
Americans speak out
In addition to the environmental review, the government is also conducting something called a “National Interest Determination,” which will help decide whether or not Keystone is a good idea, based not just on environmental factors but also on things like diplomacy, energy security, and jobs (or lack thereof). Americans are already letting the White House know what they think: on Tuesday, a coalition of conservation groups, indigenous peoples, public health advocates and landowners along the pipeline route will deliver over a million comments from the public opposing construction of this risky project.
As NWF’s Jim Murphy put it in the Los Angeles Times:
“The Environmental Protection Agency’s letter shows that despite multiple tries, the State Department is incapable of doing a proper analysis of the climate, wildlife, clean water, safety and other impacts of this disastrous and unneeded project. President Obama has more than enough information to determine the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline is not in America’s national interest and he should reject it.”
President Obama gets to make the ultimate decision, but John Kerry (the U.S. Secretary of State) is a long-time champion against climate change, and could still sway his agency’s ultimate recognition. A million anti-Keystone comments, plus a timely assist from EPA, could tilt the balance in our favor.
To learn more about Keystone XL and how you can help, visit NWF.org/tarsands
National Wildlife Federation board member David Carruth, an Arkansas resident who has spent the last few weeks assisting in the response to the disastrous Pegasus pipeline spill, will be speaking at a press conference to highlight the dangers of tar sands for wildlife and public health. And David, along with Nebraska Wildlife Federation president Duane Hovorka, will testify at the hearing. adding their voices to the hundreds of attendees telling the State Department to deny the pipeline.
You can watch a live stream of the event here, and I’ll be back with a recap of the hearing later this week so stay tuned. If you haven’t already sent a message to the White House, NOW IS THE TIME! The public comment period closes on Monday, April 22 so tell the President and Secretary Kerry “NO KXL!”