The Activist's Handbook. Randy Shaw
every aspect of Browner’s original Clean Air Act proposal. Ironically, while the president was making his announcement at a fundraising dinner, three members of the PIRG’s Nashville canvass were outside wearing gorilla suits and holding signs saying “See the smog,” “Hear the EPA,” and “Speak up for Clean Air.” When the organizers learned that Clinton had used the Nashville event to announce support for the standards, they changed their messages and were shown on television with a sign reading “Thank you, Mr. President.” Calling Clinton’s action “one of the most important environmental decisions of the decade,” the New York Times reported that the administration credited the intervention of Al Gore, “after lobbying by environmental groups,” for resolving the “fierce behind-the-scenes battle” over the standards. Environmentalists’ aggressive targeting of the vice president had clearly paid off, and it was no coincidence that Gore was present for the president’s announcement and that it occurred in the presidential aspirant’s home state.14
OBAMA AND THE KEYSTONE XL PIPELINE
The Clean Air Act campaign’s grassroots mobilizing strategy provided a road map for the movement’s future. After eight years of the anti-environmentalist presidency of George W. Bush, environmentalists’ next chance to hold a president they politically supported accountable occurred when Barack Obama took office in 2009.
Unlike Bill Clinton, Obama got off to a good start with environmentalists. During 2009–10, when Obama enjoyed large Democratic majorities in Congress, he increased fuel efficiency standards twice and made significant investments in clean energy. His EPA took hundreds of administrative actions that got little media attention but made a big difference to the environment. Some criticized Obama for failing to enact a broad climate change bill during these years, but getting such sweeping new regulations through the Senate during a recession was likely beyond even the most aggressive president’s ability. It was not until 2011 that environmentalists saw Obama as clearly backtracking on his green agenda, and it would be the Keystone XL pipeline that would test their ability to challenge the president with a fear-and-loathing approach.
Little known to most Americans prior to 2011, TransCanada’s proposed seventeen-hundred-mile Keystone Pipeline XL extensions would transport synthetic crude oil and diluted bitumen from the Athabasca Oil Sands in northeastern Alberta, Canada, to multiple destinations in the United States, including Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. A report by the Natural Resources Defense Council in March 2011 concluded that it would bring “dirty fuel at high cost, lock the United States into a dependence on hard-toextract oil and generate a massive expansion of the destructive tar sands oil operations in Canada.” The extension also “threatens to pollute freshwater supplies in America’s agricultural heartland and increase emissions in already-polluted communities of the Gulf Coast.” Bill McKibben, a longtime environmental activist who founded 350.org to focus on climate change, spearheaded what became a worldwide campaign to pressure Obama to deny the Keystone XL pipeline permit. McKibben and the entire environmental community saw the Keystone project as undermining the positive impact of nearly all of the Obama administration’s new environmental protections.15
To call public attention to Keystone, McKibben and 350.org began civil disobedience in front of the White House on August 26, 2011. McKibben drew publicity by being among the first to be arrested. The crowd of protesters grew from 300 in the first week to well over 1,000, with 1,254 people committed enough get arrested. By the following week hundreds of thousands of people had sent in petitions opposing Keystone to the White House and the State Department. Participants in the protests included such “unusual suspects” as ranchers, members of indigenous groups, and even many representatives of labor unions. Wisely making sure that everyone knew that it was the president who should be targeted over Keystone, McKibben announced, “President Obama can stop this climate killing disaster with the stroke of a pen,” and vowed: “We will be outside the White House hoping we can inspire the president to live up to the promises that so inspired us in his 2008 campaign. And without Congress in the way, this is the clearest test he’ll ever have.”16
As pressure on Obama over Keystone was building, the president made the shocking and unexpected announcement on September 2, 2011, that he was reversing the EPA’s proposed new restrictions on smog. As seen in the account of the 1997 Clean Air Act struggle, reducing smog is a top priority for many national and local environmental groups. All were outraged by Obama’s action. In March the EPA’s independent panel of scientific advisers had unanimously recommended strengthening the smog standards. The panel had concluded that the evidence was “sufficiently certain” that the range proposed in January 2010 under Obama’s EPA would benefit public health. Now Obama was citing the regulation’s alleged negative impact on jobs to justify ignoring the scientific experts whose assessments he had long pledged to follow.
“The Obama administration is caving to big polluters at the expense of protecting the air we breathe,” said Kate Geller, press spokesperson of the League of Conservation Voters. “This is a huge win for corporate polluters and huge loss for public health.” Even Al Gore, who had rarely publicly criticized the president up to that time, wrote on his blog, “Instead of relying on science, President Obama appears to have bowed to pressure from polluters who did not want to bear the cost of implementing new restrictions on their harmful pollution—even though economists have shown that the US economy would benefit from the job creating investments associated with implementing the new technology. The result of the White House’s action will be increased medical bills for seniors with lung disease, more children developing asthma, and the continued degradation of our air quality.” The green reaction was echoed by broader progressive organizations like MoveOn.org, whose executive director, Justin Ruben, said, “Many MoveOn members are wondering today how they can ever work for President Obama’s re-election, or make the case for him to their neighbors, when he does something like this.”17
Among those quoted in the New York Times story on Obama’s reversal was Bill McKibben, who found the president’s move “flabbergasting,” adding, “Somehow we need to get back the president we thought we elected in 2008.” McKibben’s words were clearly aimed at influencing Obama’s decision on Keystone. National environmental groups did not mobilize against Obama’s reversal on the smog regulations, because his action was entirely unexpected. But after the president disregarded the scientific experts on smog, the environmental movement went into high gear to prevent him from backing a project that would bring 3 million barrels of tar sand oil into the United States each year; this hardly comported with Obama’s promoting a national shift from oil to renewable resources.
Jobs versus the Environment
Keystone backers portrayed the pipeline as a jobs creator. But estimates of how many permanent jobs would actually be created varied widely. An expert on Fox Business News estimated the project could create “one million high paying jobs.” And conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh told listeners that the pipeline would create 200,000 jobs when completed. But an independent study by Cornell University researchers found that only 2,000 to 3,000 jobs would be created, and that they would be temporary construction jobs. When asked by CNN about the contrasting job estimates, TransCanada vice president Robert Jones denied that thousands of permanent jobs would be created and instead placed the number in the hundreds. Despite the inflated job claims, the endless repetition of false jobs projections created a stiff challenge for environmentalists in persuading a president running for reelection on a jobs platform to deny the pipeline permit. Obama had used the jobs issue to justify reversing smog regulations, and many feared he would apply the same reasoning to back Keystone.18
McKibben recognized organized labor’s need for jobs, but told labor leaders in early September 2011 that, for environmentalists, the Keystone pipeline was “our Wisconsin.” He was referring to labor’s recent occupation of the Wisconsin Statehouse to prevent legislation ending collective bargaining for public employees; just as unions saw the Wisconsin fight as a life-or-death struggle, they should understand the depth of green feeling about the pipeline. The AFL-CIO ultimately stayed neutral on the pipeline, as opposition from the nation’s two largest public transit unions balanced strong support from the Building Trades Council. On November 6, more than 12,000 people encircled the White House to demand that President Obama stop the