How not to stop a pipeline: why are environmentalists coddling Obama?

• Author: Nader, Ralph

It was the most extraordinary citizen organizing feat in recent White House history. Over 1200 Americans from 50 states came to Washington and were arrested in front of the White House to demonstrate their opposition to a forthcoming Obama approval of the Keystone XL dirty oil pipeline from Alberta, Canada down to the Gulf Coast.

Anyone who has tried to mobilize people in open nonviolent civil disobedience knows how hard it is to have that many people pay their way to Washington to join a select group of civic champions. The first round of arrestees--about 100 of them--were brought to a jail and kept on cement floors for 52 hours--presumably, said one guard, on orders from above to discourage those who were slated to follow this first wave in the two weeks ending September 3, 2011.

The Keystone XL pipeline project--owned by a consortium of oil companies--is a many-faceted abomination. It will, if constructed, take its raw, tar sands carbon down through the agricultural heartland of the United States--through the Missouri and Niobrara Rivers, the great Ogallala aquifer, fragile natural habitats and Native American lands. Major breaks and accidents on pipelines--four of them with loss of human life--have occurred just in the past year from California to Pennsylvania, including a recent, major Exxon/Mobil pipeline rupture which resulted in many gallons of oil spilling into the Yellowstone River.

The Office of Pipeline Safety in the Department of Transportation has been a pitiful rubber-stamp patsy for the pipeline industry for 40 years. There are larger objections--a huge contribution to greenhouse gases and further expansion of the destruction of northern Albertan terrain, forests and water--expected to cover an area the size of Florida.

Furthermore, as the Energy Department report on Keystone XL pointed out, decreasing demand for petroleum through advances in fuel efficiency is the major way to reduce reliance on imported oil with or without the pipeline. There is no assurance whatsoever that the refined tar sands oil in Gulf Coast refineries will even get to the motorists here. They can be exported more profitably to Europe and South America.

In ads on Washington, D.C.'s WTOP news station, the industry is claiming that the project will create more than 100,000 jobs. They cannot substantiate this figure. It is vastly exaggerated. TransCanada's permit application for Keystone XL to the U.S. State Department estimated a "peak workforce of...